Ten More Things About Us

Description

Spring 2022 Black River Chapbook Competition Winner

“There’s no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher famously—and cruelly—proclaimed. “There are individual men and women and there are families.” Through three stories in Ten More Things About Us, Nancy Welch illuminates the consequences of this philosophy-writ-policy in the very particular lives of women who labor to care for family as devastating illness frays familial ties and tests social consciousness.

EXCERPT from “Pretty”–

If Trudy had scooped the keys from Karl’s hand, if she had trilled, “How about I drive this time,” or if she had snapped, “You’ve got no business behind the wheel, you should know that by now,” they would have been stopped at that light, Trudy fiddling with the vents as the mist crept up the windshield and Karl bleating at the morning news. They might not have even noticed the ancient station wagon emerge from the thick valley fog, its parking beams dim yellow, the scrape of dragging muffler smothered by thick air. Certainly they would not have sailed onto Route 7, Trudy crying, “Red! Red! Red means stop!”, foot pumping madly at a brake that wasn’t there.

But Trudy had been looking for the grade book she’d failed to return to her satchel the night before, along with the pink sheet that would tell her which neurologist Karl was to see this morning and where. By the time she’d laid her hands on the latter, Karl was shuffling toward the garage. A thousand frustrations lay with the day before him: the too hot sweater he can’t wriggle out of, so it winds up bunched and binding his shoulders for the entire afternoon until Trudy gets home from school; the ringing phones whose callers hang up before he can find the word “Hello?” Even his feet are an upset, unresponsive as stones. Once he got himself moving so purposefully, Trudy didn’t have the heart to stop him. In both hands he’d clutched the keys like a prize.

“I know!” Karl shouts. His foot comes down heavy on the brake, bringing their Toyota to a citizenly halt very nearly in the middle of Route 7. “You think I don’t know what a red light means?” Trudy is reaching for the wheel, scrambling out of her seatbelt, no time to explain, with love and patience as the neurology nurses advise, that the light now lies behind them.