Tuscaloosa (Or, in April, Harpies)

By Margaret Emma Brandl

Wednesday, April 27, 2011. Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Esther and Kennedy Blake have barely spoken to each other all semester. Esther, a moony poet of a college freshman, is still searching for a sense of belonging, resentful to no longer be included in her sist

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bridge Eight Press
• Release date: Jul 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781087968292

Book preview

Persephone tastes the fruit

Kennedy Blake wakes, late afternoon, in a third-floor apartment on 15th Street. There is always more studying Kennedy can do, a 6:00 lab exam, but the weak light coming in the curtains of the bedroom gives her a fragile sense of security in the amount of time stretching out ahead of her, the silly hope of Brett in the next room making eggs in the disaster of his apartment kitchen. They’ve been back together now for two weeks but this is her first time in over a month waking up in his bed, the room around her strewn with clothes and a few Solo cups. Soft kitchen-sounds: she envisions the packed refrigerator, the counter full of dirty dishes, crowded with produce. They had purchased bananas to make banana bread, zucchini for its own bread incarnation, pomegranates on a whim. They cracked one open in the early post-studying hours of the morning and plunged it into water—the best way to extract the round red seeds, Brett insisted; their hands bumped as they separated the pulp, laughing, dripping fingers scooping away at treasure like rubies, the fruit. They stained their lips with red juice and left the groceries forgotten, a project to take off the stress of finals, dissolved into mouth on mouth and skin on skin and a tempest outside.

Judging by the light, the sky outside is still gray, and Kennedy is tamping down that part inside herself that warns danger. She tries to reframe the way she played possum when Brett woke her moving around in the bed, when the glow had worn off, when she remembered in the pit of her stomach all the times she’d thought maybe she shouldn’t have begged him back—how she struggled to keep her breath even as he pushed himself up against her, snaked his arm over her back and down the plane of her stomach, lower—how she twitched just then, as if she was asleep, moved away with her eyes closed. She tells herself she was just tired. She tells herself not to listen to empty anxiety, giving it that deliberate label: empty. She tastes pomegranate juice on her tongue.

Sybil sees the future

The traffic lights are out on University and the wind has been doing something strange all morning. The grass is wet and there are big branches that came down in the storm on the sidewalk, in the road. Esther Blake has been staring out her window and her head is all words, stamen, pistil, phylum (better, e. e. cummings: root of the root and bud of the bud); she is a poet stuck in core classes and lab finals are this week and she isn’t going to be the stupid spacey sister this time.

She leaves Burke dormitory and passes the stone druid statues on Hackberry. She wears uncomfortable rubber boots and crosses the Quad toward the steps of the plantation-faced library. There was a tornado a couple of days ago, out by the hotel where her parents stayed to help her move in. Some wires came down, a twisted gas station sign, but Kennedy says the sirens go off all the time here.

Or—she did, once. Kennedy doesn’t say much to her lately—hasn’t since she got to college. Too busy wearing impractical dresses to football games with her expensive friends. Esther had watched them one Saturday last semester, crossing the Quad in a pack, their only crimson-and-houndstooth a tacky, pinned-on button that proclaimed their sorority loves the Tide. Older men offered them beers, brisket, homemade brownies, seats in their tailgating tents. Esther had stood on the sidewalk, just a few yards away, as her sister’s group chatted up a man in his 40’s and downed something he offered in red cups. Esther, in jeans, Chucks, and her freshman orientation t-shirt, had waved when Kennedy looked her way, but her sister just ignored her. I really didn’t see you, Kennedy had explained at Thanksgiving, their first conversation in months. Of course not, Esther had wanted to say. How convenient.

The wind is blowing warm and the clouds are gray in spite of sun all around. She wants to stop and just watch everything, but instead Esther climbs the smooth white steps of the library and passes through the grand lobby of the second floor. The study space is claustrophobic with white stone-tile floors, fluorescent lighting, low ceilings, and study tables—all full. The circles of couches and comfortable chairs are also full. Off to the side in the periodical room, the ceiling opens up again and Esther spots across the room a girl lifting her quilted backpack and paper coffee cup as she vacates a comfy chair. The periodical stacks are short—bookcases like her bedroom at home—and she zooms between them to claim the space.

When Esther flops down into the chair, the cushion sags unexpectedly. It isn’t ideal. But back in her room in Burke her roommate Lucy is playing some game on her laptop and singing along (badly) to Korean pop music, a distraction Esther had welcomed all too much. The point is not to get distracted. The point is not to sit across the room from Lucy, making up meanings to the songs in her head as her notes go ignored. The point is to prove to her parents that she can be like Kennedy—except better. Except a good sister.

On Thanksgiving they’d shared a bedroom so their grandmother could stay the night before driving home. Kennedy got to keep her bed; Esther was relegated to the