All posts tagged: North Carolina

The Con Artist

By GLENN BERTRAM

 

In April, Simon went down to Murray Park to eat hamburgers with the Methodists. It was his monthly tradition. The Methodists’ burgers were charred and rubbery, but the Methodists themselves made ideal marks. They were upstanding citizens with steady jobs at regional banks and local power stations. They’d known neither poverty nor wealth. And they weren’t teetotalers like the Baptists, so you could ply them with craft beer and get them yapping about golf and gambling and everything their marriages lacked. They assumed good faith in the people around them. Simon loved the Methodists. Despite his taste, he chose to find them charming: a matter of professional habit. It was Leonard who’d showed him the way. You had to love your marks.

The Con Artist
Read more...

Muscle and Rubber and Cotton and Bone

By JULES FITZ GERALD

There is no such thing as silence in the South. There is always the percussive hum of insects, winged bodies waiting in the weeds for dusk. This sound fills the fissure before Coach Meeks fires the gun, while Joanna leans over the spray-painted line in the crabgrass field. She is sixteen but still as stick-legged and bird-chested as she was at twelve, brushing daily knots from her homeschool-length hair because her mother gave up trying to teach her how to make a braid. The billow of smoke erupts from the pistol’s nose before the crack of the blank reaches her ears. Her hair streams behind her, loose and wild, as she pushes off the line. She believes that it makes her faster.

Muscle and Rubber and Cotton and Bone
Read more...

Para-

 
Image of a wooded mountain range with gray clouds in the sky and green grass below.

Photo courtesy of author.

Cherokee, NC and Phoenix, AZ

 

As a child, I watched horror movie after horror movie. An attempt to make myself brave or to make others think I was. And now, I fear I’m manipulative because how much can a person really change. Bones and weight and cartilage can only be altered to certain degrees.

When it comes to film, body horror disturbs me the most. Things that happen to a person’s body without their permission. And sometimes they don’t notice until their bodies are so acted upon that they are grotesque, twisted, so completely othered with pain they are no longer sovereign, but colonized by something outside of themselves.

Para-
Read more...

Into the Woods

By ANNE P. BEATTY

person with an orange bag walking through the dirt paths in a sun-spotted forest

Stone Mountain, North Carolina

A mile into the woods, I am always slightly afraid. Fear’s lace knots the cuff of an otherwise lovely afternoon. Nights, when I peek out of the tent, the moon is a bright friend too far away to help.

Into the Woods
Read more...

A Geology of Memory: Whiteside Mountain, North Carolina

By GREGORY ARIAIL

Image of mountain

Romanes, Whiteside Mountain from Road to Grimshawes


Whiteside Mountain, North Carolina

Some call it the world’s oldest mountain. Once, millions of years ago, it was Mount Everest.

Quartz and feldspar stripe the cliffs of this vast pluton, which looks burnt, as if it had survived some great conflagration or were, in fact, a meteorite scarred by its descent through the atmosphere.

A Geology of Memory: Whiteside Mountain, North Carolina
Read more...

Hurricane Alex, 2004

By JAMES A. GILL

We sat side by side on the shore, staring into the sky above the sea, as if we could see the hurricane approaching. The same as standing on the porch back home, scanning the horizon for a tornado, wondering where it would hit. But this was no tornado. There was no escaping it.

Hurricane Alex, 2004
Read more...

Two Lighthouses

By JAMES A. GILL

Cape Hatteras Light

We visited the lighthouse on our honeymoon. Tallest in the U.S. It stood right on the sand, backdropped by surfers riding between wooden jetties built to keep the thin strip of beach from disappearing into the sea.

Two Lighthouses
Read more...