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New England Review

The Town That Went Away | By Christopher Barzak

The Town That Went Away
It was terrible, really, to hear of the town that went away. It was a nearby town, a little burg or a hamlet, the sort of place that requires archaic adjectives because it was so archaic. At least, what I remember of that town was archaic, but these days my memory is not so good. I am not old. The town that went away was old, though; and because it went away, it is hard to remember it exactly.

This is how it happened (or so those of us who vaguely remember it think): One day, the town was there. The next day, it wasn’t.

This is what was left in its place: a forest of old growth trees (how old they were, and so quickly!) filled with birdsong and clear streams that feed into Lake Glacier. Lake Glacier is so named because at some point in history a glacier formed it. We can remember its name because the lake is still with us. We see it when we drive over the causeway that once bridged the town that went away with the town on the other side of the lake, which is Shuttleworth. Shuttleworth is called Shuttleworth because at one time it was worthwhile to shuttle oneself from the town that went away over to the town on the other side of the lake. No one thinks it is still worthwhile to shuttle over to Shuttleworth, though, as it is a town in such decline and there are no jobs for people there, or fun things happening, but that is another story altogether.

The town that went away was there one day, then, and gone the next. Where it went to, no one knows. We have taken soil samples, water samples, samples of animal dung, and samples of air quality. We have dug down into the earth to see if an unknown sinkhole swallowed the town that went away, and we have searched the sky with binoculars and telescopes. It is not among the clouds, so far as we can see, nor among the heavenly bodies, and it does not exist somewhere in the ground beneath our feet. There are no remains of previous inhabitants to uncover, not even those who had been buried in the town that went away’s cemetery. And there are no witnesses to the disappearance, probably because they disappeared with the town that went away.

It is as if those other towns that bordered the town that went away had dreamed of its existence, and it is as if we have now woken from that dream to find the world to be a much different place than we had thought.

What was it we’d thought, again? We couldn’t remember this, as we couldn’t remember what, exactly, we’d been dreaming. Or why we trusted our dreams.

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Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives.

Image via Flickr – View from the Interior of an Abandoned Farmhouse Across Land Strip Mined by Coal Companies Off Route #800, near Edgewater Park, Ohio, and Barnesville, National Archives and Records Administration College Park. The photograph was taken in July 1974 by Erik Calonius.

Christopher Barzak is the author of One for Sorrow, The Love We Share Without Knowing, and a new collection of short stories, Before and Afterlives. He teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University.

Stone Disease | By Alexandra Teague

Landscape(“Stone Disease,” n:  The Victorian obsession with constructing monuments)

Sarah Winchester, Having Been Rescued from Her House, Considers Rebuilding (Apr 20, 1906)

Already, the newspapers are shilling for new buildings:  safer, stronger, walls that will withstand the earth’s dis-ease, as if windows could be willows:  tousled, weeping glass, unbreaking. Why should I believe?—stretching the chimney back to sky:  unsteady cache of bricks, like prayer words stacked inside a shaking throat. Who finds firm ground in probability? Having contracted like a crushed egg shell, the earth is stronger now, less likely to explode. As if my floorboards didn’t quiver like oaks again, rocked by the wind—my room, those hours I waited, a cradle held in breaking branches. Who—having dovetailed plank to plank or breast to breast—hasn’t felt the space that still resists? That fissure where our blent compulsions meet. I cannot consent to heaven and earth, this world and the next, beaten like the white and yolk of egg, Hawthorne wrote. And yet what holds them separate? Even strong walls bend:  soft as envelopes around a page of fear. Last year, in Argentina, I read, a girl’s heart stopped as she dressed for dinner—silk ribbon at her throat, silk stillness of her blood. She woke to stone, scraped knuckles raw against the dark:  that Doric-columned mausoleum built to honor her. There is no reason for fear, the papers tell us now: No need to leave this beauty spot of earth. We still have sunny skies, invigorating breezes, fertile soil. As if we could live, Edened, inside a peach pit—those fine-webbed hollows deep enough for breath. Who says the ground can’t be mistaken? Cannot take back what’s taken? They found her there months later. The thinnest doors stay locked; yet marble crumbles under its own shine like sandcastles under the gleam of waves. We have so little—chiseled stone, small scars—to mark the earth-flung earth.

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Read “Safe,” Teague’s companion sketch to “Stone Disease.”

Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives. 

Image via Wikimedia Commons – San Francisco Earthquake 1906: Fairmont Hotel and Synagogue, National Archives and Records Administration College Park.

Alexandra Teague is the author of Mortal Geography (Persea, 2010), winner of the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and a 2010 California Book Award. She is Assistant Professor of Poetry at University of Idaho and an editor for Broadsided Press. Her work previously appeared in NER 25.1-2.

Safe | By Alexandra Teague

 Landscape
 
“The more comfortable man makes himself indoors,
the more dangerous do earthquakes become.”
 
“Let us all banish from our minds forebodings of
the future. WE ARE SAFE. Of this we may feel assured.”
 
-San Jose Mercury News, late April 1906
 

When your city wakes as the new ancient ruins:  blocks’ scrambled rubble:  Delphi’s oracle stone-lipped and raving in the streets (wasn’t it she who said to place your faith in wooden walls?). When buildings crumple like newsprint, catch in the wind’s fist, words burning into voweled cries, the living asleep with the dead—whom can you believe? A man shoots a man for stealing a can of tomatoes for his wife and child. A man shoots a man for cutting rings from a corpse’s fingers. Men crowd up broken brick to watch the bank safe opened:  Grecian doorway gaping dark as a throat. Natural contractions of the Earth’s crust, say the papers. Sun spots. Men who were millionaires at daybreak paupers. Saw blade of wall above dark bowler hats, the white sky cut. Inside the safe:  safe gold? Or paper money? Wings of bees? Or olive branches? Siren songs that drove the gods to murder? There is always a future, the past says. Always temples falling. Prophesies offered in a death-smoke high:  We Will Rebuild Better, Stronger.   Theater Dark Until Further Notice.   (Phroso, The Mysterious, Performance Cancelled)   Barnett Real Estate:  Proudly Selling The Earth. 

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Read “Stone Disease,” Teague’s companion sketch to “Safe.”

Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives.

Image via Wikimedia Commons – San Francisco Earthquake 1906, Opening a Safe, National Archives and Records Administration College Park. 

Alexandra Teague is the author of Mortal Geography (Persea, 2010), winner of the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and a 2010 California Book Award. She is Assistant Professor of Poetry at University of Idaho and an editor for Broadsided Press. Her work previously appeared in NER 25.1-2.

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