The Thanksgiving Girls and Other Works

By Ablity Mouwon

This book is a collection of short stories, essays, and other works.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781514485217

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 by Ablity Mouwon.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5144-8522-4

                eBook            978-1-5144-8521-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 04/27/2016

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Contents

The Thanksgiving Girls

Weatherby

Bicken Back Being Bool

A Revolution in Nashville

A soul without a soul

Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained,

And walk your memory’s halls, austere, supreme,

A ghost in marble of a girl you knew

Who would have loved you in a day or two.

–Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

The Thanksgiving Girls

This weekend was to be the third Thanksgiving in a row that I did not spend with my family. The first November, during my freshman year of college, I boarded the Greyhound bus out of Warrensburg on Friday night and arrived at the Newark Penn Station on Sunday morning. I left that same station on the following Friday morning and landed back in Warrensburg on Sunday night. The entire trip cost around six hundred U.S. dollars! After cold utilitarian calculations, I decided that four and a half days with my family was not worth six hundred dollars (flying was never an option). Besides, Christmas break followed only two weeks after Thanksgiving break and for Christmas, we were to be out of classes for a month.

Through those three Thanksgivings and a few summer vacations when I opted to take extra classes, I developed a romantic appreciation for my small town. A good friend of mine once joked that Warrensburg was nothing but four very long streets with a large University parked in the middle. My mama called it a village. Warrensburg was a little more than those two characters gave it credit for, especially compared to other small towns in Missouri that I had the pleasure of visiting during my college years. Missouri was constituted of a million of these small towns, and two very large cities, three counting Columbia.

For me, however, Warrensburg embodied freedom; instead of just a dry, abstract idea, in the city of Warrensburg I met the person of freedom. Freedom existed. She was alive and she was gorgeous. I loved this little town; admired her like James Quale Burden admired country girls. By proportion, most of my life had been spent in Newark, but those long 11 years seemed historically insignificant in comparison to the very short three years I had lived at the University. Now that a new realm of intellectual diversity was thrust upon me and sparked my conscious, those childhood adventures I now remembered with embarrassment—how had I found any excitement or sorrow in them? I often think myself a ghost in my early years, unconsciously floating my way through those smoky, light-polluted streets of Newark, NJ, like a drunk in a small country bar.

My parents tell me I am an African, a Liberian, but when I think of home, I often think of a small college town in Johnson County, Missouri. I think of the moody nature of the forecast and it’s clear, star-heavy summer nights; and how much they contrast to the brutality of its December winds. The signs of both extremes in between months made every day seemed slightly colder, or warmer, than the last. Still, the lonesomeness that invaded the town when the students abandoned it could prove overwhelming to newcomers. Being a three-year veteran, however, I was adequately prepared for the week that followed.

I received two keys from the housing department for my fifty dollar transfer from South Yeater dormitory on the far end of the University to North Ellis, near the main streets of the town that ran all the way through it, all the way to the local Walmart and highway for entrance and departure. The first key was for my bedroom up on the third floor and the other to open the door to the main North Ellis door. The North Ellis dormitory was the only dorm open on those skin-tightening November afternoons, so the second key was certainty the most important thing my possession.

As I entered Ellis for my first long stay on this part of campus, I was surprised to find a lounge area that detoured off the narrow hallways past the main offices of the building’s most important people. There was a large couch in the rear and several soft chairs surrounded it. Scattered throughout the room were four round tables; short in radius but tall in height, black bodies, and red surfaces. They seated two people at