Griffin Reed’s “Here, There” was awarded Second Place in Nimrod’s Katherine Anne Porter Award for Fiction competition by Kelly Link, and it appears in our Winter 2025 issue. In her commendation, Link writes: “Very little—and, simultaneously, a great deal—happens […]. We begin in an airport and end in the same place, following a young woman traveling to Ireland to join a troupe of dancers and musicians, and then returning home more or less unchanged. Rory loses her luggage, sings a song at a stranger’s wedding, writes letters to two boys. We are told that she doesn’t like to be the center of attention, but that her talent is for being present as a member of a group. And this is how the story works, too—Rory at the center refuses to be centered. Instead, she listens, she sees, she acts in such a way that she becomes a kind of matrix in which the meal and the substance of the story floats, rich in detail and feeling and sense of place. ‘Here, There’ demonstrates how the pull of a story isn’t necessary in its stakes or its turns, but can rather exert attraction and interest simply through patient, accumulative, observed detail and delicate nuance of character.”
When she touched down in Ireland, she discovered that the airline had misplaced her suitcases. The carousel spun around and around, conveying carpet bags and duffel bags and clingfilm-wrapped plastic coolers on their circuit of eternal recurrence, but there was no sign anywhere of the brown and tan checked match luggage her mother had bought her specifically for the summer.
“Excuse me?” She came up beside the woman at the service desk, who was easily identified by her vest in mermaid-green. She heard her voice, how young and American it was. “I think my luggage is missing?”
“Oh, right so,” said the woman. “Give us your name and number then. We’ll sort it.”
She wrote down her name in careful, ballpoint capitals. For the address and telephone number she pulled out a card from her jacket pocket.
Fionn mac Cumhail Cultural Centre
+ 353 57 0309055
Upper Green Street, Co. Kildare, Ireland
Places didn’t always have numbers, in this country, she was coming to realize. With nothing to her but the clothes she was wearing and her instrument, clutched tightly in her hands, she left the luggage counter and the airport and she went to stand outside at the bus stop in the gray, pissing Irish rain.
She had been sent to Ireland for the summer because she had, her music teacher had decided, something called “presence.” Her teacher, an Irish woman who had come to America fifty or sixty years ago, leaving behind her job as a midwife in County Limerick, called presence the girl’s ability to remain smiling for extended periods of time while sitting on a stage. It was easy for her, there was a trick to it. You just looked at different things in front of you and pretended they were funny. She was only a fair musician, only a fair dancer, an average, really, Irish folk singer. When it came down to it, she was actually quite painfully shy; in competitions or solo performances, her voice cracked and her hands shook so badly that her teacher, whose husband Patrick was a former physician, had offered to acquire for her a Xanax prescription. As a member of a group, however, she had the skill of blending in—of smiling, of looking curiously and affectionately on as her bandmates performed their bit, of adjusting the dynamics on her instrument so that they bled, soft and loud, into the grander tapestry of the art. So here she was, for a month and a half: a paid performer in Ireland’s foremost revue of traditional music, song, and dance. The show took place in a little hall at the foot of an old king’s castle. They were giving her a thousand euros a week.
The bus rolled away from the curb, and she lay her head against the window. She was tired, and she had a lot of thinking to do.
At nineteen, she had been with the same boy for four years. Her first kiss, her first almost everything. He had taken her virginity, and at the senior dance, where she had worn a cast over a broken foot, fractured during the execution of a more difficult step of hornpipe, he had placed her one damaged foot and her one intact one over his own and moved them both around the room. But they had both been away at college for a year now. There was another boy, a recent transfer to her university after a suicide attempt at his last. He read Apollinaire out loud to her in the original and had written her notes expressing wishes like that she could be a surgeon and he, an organ transplant patient, spread out and helpless on an operating table before her. Last night, before she had departed America, she had lied to both of them about her whereabouts and her plans and had hidden in her room at home, watching television and hearing the steady, familiar sounds of her mother and father in the house around. The idea of making decisions had never really occurred to her. It had never really had to. She had always been committed only to feeling things deeply, and life had organized itself around that practice.
After a couple of hours, the bus announced her stop. A little blearily she descended, still holding her instrument in her arms. Her teeth were beginning to tack. There was meant to be someone waiting for her here.
“Rory.” She looked around at the sound of her name. “It’s Flora.” She remembered her now. A banjo player, they had met once or twice before, when Flora and her family had come to America to give Rory and her schoolmates lessons in the finer points of the music that teachers raised far away from Ireland, from the lifestream of it, could not quite get across.
“The airline lost my luggage,” she said.
“Oh, right so,” said Flora. “Let’s get you settled, and then we’ll go to the shop.” The land here was green and wet and peaceful, like drops of condensation on a cold jug of milk. Flora took Rory’s carrying case out of her hands, and pointed the way down the hill.
The first rehearsal was that afternoon, which seemed impossible. Rory presented herself at the theatre at the appointed time, found that she was the only person there. But gradually the rest of the performers began trickling in. The dancers were mostly women, five or six years older than herself, and muscular, with false tans and matte, shellacked-on faces of bronzer and mascara. The musicians were all sorts. They introduced themselves to her, one by one–she was something of a novelty to them, who returned here, for the most part, summer after summer. There was Fingal, the fiddle player who lived, for the rest of the year, on a farm a few miles away, and who worked as a veterinarian. There was Martin, who played the bodhrán and who was closest to her in age. He had white-blond hair and thin, skim-white skin, like a baby. Sinéad and Ciara were sisters, who played the harp and sang duets, and Mícheál, who played the flute, was a schoolteacher by trade and was mounting, in his off hours, a campaign for political office as a member of Sinn Féin. Once the pleasantries were out of the way the first question everyone wanted to ask her was if she was going to be a musician in the show, or a dancer. “I don’t know,” was all she could answer. “I’ll go wherever I fit in.”
The show opened with a set of rousing polkas in D, G, and A. There were numbers designed to feature various of the instrument groups–the boxes, where Rory belonged, on her concertina, lined up on little stools at the front of the stage and beat out a brassy minor reel. The highlight of the show was something called the “Ghost Dance,” in which six of the girls swapped out their tights for ultraviolet-white knee socks and performed an intricate, lacy set of slip jigs, with the lights in the theatre turned out black so that all you could see were their movements. The costumes for the show were purple velvet, with corsets for the women in some simulacrum of the medieval. Rory was very tired, and after a little more of this kind of thing she started to laugh.
After the rehearsal was over, Martin and some of the others told her they were going to a folk music festival the next county over. “It’ll be great craic,” they said. “You should come.”
They all piled into a tiny European car and let out an hour or so later, clambering out again like so many off-duty circus performers. Rory followed the others, as if in a trance, as they wandered through a smattering of houses with their doors and windows thrown open, music wafting out into the night. Someone bought her a pint of red cider and she drank it, and she watched as Martin and Fingal settled into a session where they fell in time, right away, with the vibrating bitter music of the fiddles and the drums. Suddenly she was about to fall dead away where she stood. She found the car again and crawled inside of it to sleep. As she slipped into unconsciousness, she heard, as if on a conveyor belt or a carousel, an endless loop: Oh, right so, oh, right so, oh, right so. It echoed, Irishly, in her head.
Weekends, she had to herself. The others all had houses out of town to go to, or family. The little house where she was staying did not have a computer or cable TV, so she went out. She would walk into the heart of town, where there was a teetering tall coffee shop, each level a different function, with cakes and sweets on the second floor and great, meat-smelling Irish fry-up breakfasts on the third. She read books and looked out the window. Later she would walk through the crumbling Catholic cemetery, or sit under the war memorial obelisk in the square.
She started writing letters. She wrote a few to her mother, and one to her music teacher, thanking her for the opportunity. She wrote letters to her boyfriend and then she started writing letters to the other, to him. She was nervous at first but it became easy, especially after she sent off the first with its creamy paper envelope and its international mail stamps and she realized that she had no way of knowing if he had gotten the letter unless he wrote back. So, it was like talking to herself. She poured out all of her complaints about the weather, listed out the music she was listening to, described to him the impossibility of getting along with the other girls in the show. All they cared about, she told him, was losing weight. “You’re not hungry, you just have a craving,” they would tell each other, after performances and drinks in the pub. “Go home and have a bowl of cornflakes. Better—have a cup of tea.” She wondered what he was doing, back home in the city where they lived, but it was hard to picture, and she didn’t really know him that well at all. She sent the letters off and then she forgot about them. At night, she would buy a bottle of sweet sparkling wine and a bag of chocolates. That was dinner, and then she fell asleep.
A few weeks into the run of the show, the girls decided to go to a nightclub in the county’s largest town. They rented a van and a driver, and all the way there, Tara, one of the older women, who had shiny black hair and who had once competed for the Rose of Tralee, led them in an Irish drinking song, and so, at rhythmic intervals in the verse and the chorus, Rory took large obligatory swigs from a naggin of vodka. They got to the nightclub and Tara handed her a drink. “This is terrible,” Rory said, knocking back another huge, saccharine gulp. “What is it?”
“Cointreau and Red Bull,” Tara told her. “It’ll keep you going all night.” Rory heard the first measures of “Gold Digger” and then her vision went out. Next thing she knew, she was in the backseat of a taxi, spewing up Cointreau and Red Bull over her dress so that she would keep the cab clean.
“I’m so sorry,” she heard herself saying to the driver, who seemed disgruntled but unfazed. “I’m so sorry.”
“Let’s get you home,” said the driver, a middle-aged man with glasses and whiskery Irish eyebrows. “It’ll cost you enough anyway.”
When she woke up the next morning, she was still drunk and they had a matinee show to do for the residents of a local retirement home. Tara was furious with her. “Is that the kind of thing you do in America,” she asked her. “Run off dead-drunk without a word to anyone?” But then she laughed, and touched Rory’s hair. “Oh, we’re suffering today,” she said. She invited Rory to a party at her cousins’ place that evening.
“I’m not sure I’m up for anything after last night,” Rory said, sheepishly. Tara assured her that tonight would be different.
“Come on,” she said. “They’re getting married in a few days. Come send them off with me.” And so, she went.
The house stood square and white in the middle of a field. The green stretched away to all sides, and the sun was just setting, so that the wooden fence in the distance, and the low, cresting hills were smudging in the leaving light. They had stretched a tent out to one side, in the garden, and set picnic tables and barbecue grills underneath its awning. A huge iron stove burned on one end, and the tent filled with the smell of fire and cooking.
“Alright there.” She was greeted by a man sitting at the picnic table closest to her. It seemed as good a place as any to sit, she didn’t know anyone here besides Tara, who knew everyone. The man slid her over a can of beer.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’m Rory. Tara’s friend?”
“I know who you are,” he said. “An American. That’s big news around here.” He smiled; he was joking. “I’m Danny.”
She smiled, too. “Who’s getting married?”
Danny craned his head over his shoulder, and gestured first in one direction. “That’s Cormac,” he said, pointing to a tall, thin man with sandy hair and narrow-set blue eyes, “and that’s Caoimhe.” Caoimhe was short, and pale, with auburn hair running down her back. She was standing near the stove, with a glass of beer in her hand, talking to some people. Cormac stood in the other corner, by the barbecue. As Rory watched Caoimhe looked over at her fiancé, and he, sensing her eyes, looked back at her. They grinned at each other. Rory kept looking at them a second after Danny had turned his head back to face her. “They look happy,” she said.
“That’s now,” he said. “Wait until they’ve got a couple more drinks in ‘em.” But again, there was a glint in his eyes. It had taken Rory a while to get used to this, the Irish manner of deflection. People were false in America, too, always throwing out great colorful parachutes of language to describe things as simple as a new top, or the angle of the sun in the sky. They pretended things were better than they were. But the Irish way was different from that. She recalled a long drive she had once taken with her teacher, out somewhere to a performance in the country. Her teacher was talking about a painting that had hung in her father’s house in Limerick. A clown with all his makeup on, crying. It had always frightened her. “That’s what we are, in Ireland,” she had said, with a shrug. “A nation of sad clowns.”
Danny pulled a packet of papers and some tobacco from inside his pocket. “So, then,” he said, rolling himself a tight, translucent cigarette. “How are you getting on?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean, you’re far away from home, aren’t ye?”
She took a sip of her beer. “I guess so.”
“And what are you, about twelve?”
She rolled her eyes. The pull-tab on the beer can was loose, and she started teasing it from side to side. “I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes I’m homesick.”
“Sure I would be too,” he said. “This is a small little place. And hard.”
“Hard?”
Danny looked around the tent. “It’s loud in here, did you notice? I was messing around a moment ago, but in a few hours’ time we’ll all be falling down drunk. Look at my skin.” He tilted his face to one side and held up his hand to his cheek, almost feminine. His skin was red and coarse and wind-beaten. “We always say that you lot have skin like babies. So untroubled. It takes a lot to get by in a place like this.”
“My country has its problems too,” she said. “The city I’m from has the highest rate of gun crime in all of America.”
Danny leaned in a little closer to her. “I bet you’ve never seen one single gun in your whole, wonderful life.” He stood, and gestured for her to come with him. They left the tent, and walked across the tall green grass, already damp with dew. In the darkness, Danny led her to the edge of the wooden fence, and clicked his tongue, and shambling up to them came a shaggy, tawny cow. Danny reached out his hand to pet its neck.
“Truth be told, I envy you,” he said. “There’s only about five professions in a town like this. And my brother’s already a priest.”
“What do you do, then?’ she asked.
“I’m a hurler.” She was surprised. He smiled shyly. “I’ve always been good at it.”
“But you don’t like it?”
“It’s not that.” He moved his hand to the top of the cow’s head, ruffling it in the furry space between its animal wet eyes. “It’s more like I want room to fail. Succeed, that’d be alright, but to fail… Did you ever see that film, Paris, Texas? That red desert. So empty. And it goes on forever.”
“It’s beautiful here,” she said.
“Sure, it’s beautiful,” he said. He looked at her. “But people are always leaving.”
Someone called them from inside the tent. “You two.” It was Tara. She was standing silhouetted by the glow, waving to them to come inside.
“We’d better look lively,” said Danny, and he gave the cow one final pat. It stood there, watching him, as Rory and Danny made their way back inside the tent.
The partygoers had all assembled into a loose kind of circle. When they saw Danny reenter, Rory trailing close behind him, some of the men hooted, not without lewdness. While they had been absent a group of the guests had broken out fiddles and guitars. Tara’s father had set his accordion on his knee. The musicians ambled their way through a few old jigs and reels, and then voices took a cry up for a song.
“Danny,” Caoimhe called out, her eyes bright with drink and feeling. “Danny’s our man.”
There were yips of agreement, and Cormac yelled, “Go on, Danny.”
But Danny just sat in his seat, and smiled up at Rory standing next to him. “I think our American should give us a song.”
“Me?” He nodded. “I couldn’t.”
“Oh, couldn’t she?” He reached out his hands to the whole of the party. They cheered, and shouted her name. She smiled wanly as her knees nearly gave out beneath her. She pressed her fingernails into her hands.
“This is a sad song,” she said, trying to settle her breathing. “I hope that’s alright.” Danny nodded at her meaningfully from his chair. A silence fell over the room.
“A stor mo chroí,” the song went, the pulsing darling of my heart. A lover says this to the one she loves, as he is about to set out on a journey for the stranger’s land, and again, at the end of the song, where she hopes he will hear her calling it across the water. Rory had sung the song once before, in competition. It always made her cry. The judge had marked her down for that, had written in his notes that although the music necessitated some elements of performance, she must try to refrain from enacting too much emotion. Here, though, as tears rose in her eyes and she tried to keep them down, she saw that they were reflected in the eyes of the people who were watching. When the final verse was over the silence hung on the air. Then, Tara’s father called out, “Good girl,” and the room broke into applause.
They played some more tunes after that, and there was a bit of dancing. One of Cormac’s groomsmen served her a steak on a paper plate, covered in ketchup, and she took a bite in front of him to be polite before swishing it out of her mouth and sticking to beer from there on out. Caoimhe taught her how to do Sean nós dancing, with her arms swinging loose. Someone passed around a bottle of vodka. In the wide, o-shaped hours of the morning, she finally stumbled inside, where Tara had told her she could sleep in her bed for the night. Rory had always hated sharing beds with anyone. As a child, she had often called her mother from sleepovers, begging her to make up some excuse and take her home. In the spring of that very year, at an out-of-town music competition where they had to stay the night at a hotel, she had made such a scene of her anxiety about sharing one of the room’s two queen beds with anyone that another girl had offered to sleep on the floor. Tonight, she fell into the low white bed beside Tara’s wild spread out body with barely a second thought. In the instant before she fell into unconsciousness, she cast her eyes up to the spinning ceiling. She saw stars.
The morning came with the smell of rashers and the sound of rugby on TV. Rory awoke and put a hand to her head. Tara was already gone.
She padded down the stairs and emerged in the unsettling peace of someone else’s life. An older man, either Cormac or Caoimhe’s father, she didn’t know, was sitting on a large squashy armchair watching the game on the television. He had a can of beer in his hand, and he raised it in her direction as she passed through the room. Tara and her mother were together in the kitchen.
“Morning,” said Tara, greeting her from the white wood kitchen table where she sat, with a teapot before her. “How’s your head?”
“It’s okay,” Rory said, as she came to stand inside the room, leaning up against the robin’s egg blue of the wall. “I feel good.”
Tara handed her a mug of tea, and she held it, warm, between her hands. Tara’s mother cooked silently at a stovetop looking out, through a window, at the garden and the fields. She had the radio turned on to a poetry program. A woman’s voice was reading out a poem about a blackbird.
“That guy I was talking to last night,” Rory began. “Has he already gone home?”
Tara looked up at her with understanding eyes. “Danny,” she said. “Afraid so.”
Rory sat down at the table. Tara’s mother served her a plate of breakfast. They ate, and then they packed themselves up in the little car to go on home, too tired to talk, listening to Donovan sing his song about colors and watching, as they sped through the peaceful morning countryside, the trees and rocks and direction signs grow larger to meet them and then retreat, as they passed, into the small and infinitely receding distance.
A few days after that, Rory was returning home from a solitary dinner. It had become a ritual, the kind of thing only imaginable to someone with too much time on their hands and money of their own for the first time in their life. When everyone else had gone home for the weekend and she was left to herself, she would go down to the Cloncarlin Hotel and take a seat by the window. Usually it was early, no later than five or five-thirty, and she was the only customer in the restaurant. The same server, a tall, graceful woman in her thirties, with a cloud of brown hair tied back in a tortoiseshell clip, would bring her a menu, and then return to listen as, every week, she ordered the same pasta with shrimp and tomatoes and rocket, the same split of white wine, and Eton mess for dessert. Rory would bring a book or something and then, when she was done, wind her way back home, slightly drunk, in the gathering darkness.
This time, when she got back to the little house in the shitty part of town, there was something waiting for her. A piece of mail, propped up in the black wrought-iron mailbox. She wondered how anyone had found her, the house didn’t even have an address. But there it was, glittering up at her from the bright white paper of the envelope. Rory Graham, c/o Fionn mac Cumhail Cultural Centre. She recognized the handwriting as soon as she saw it. It looked like spiders.
She brought the mail inside with her, holding it slightly away from her body, and she took it to the sunken red sofa in the living room. She tore it open in one decisive motion.
Dear Rory, the letter began, on one single piece of yellow legal paper, folded. When your first letter came in the mail I was overcome. I got on my bike even though it was after midnight and rode it down a hill. I almost crashed into that stone wall in the park separating the grass from the water. Come home soon. And then he signed his name.
She folded the paper again and put it back inside its envelope. She set the letter on the end table and then let rest her head in the hollow of her hand. Her time here was coming to a close. Her plane back to America left in only nine days’ time.
The night of the last show of the summer, they played all the hits. “The Ghost Dance,” the hard reel. Sinéad sang “Carrickfergus” to teary, uproarious applause. With the blinding stage lights in Rory’s eyes the audience was as obscured as ever. But every once in a while, when a gel was switched over, or when a woman in one of the aisles lifted up to her face a hand adorned in a coruscating diamond ring, she caught sight of them. Faces, captured in the feeling of something, winking in the darkness.
They all went down to the pub in the high street for one last round of drinks and conversation. It was the one they always went to, a low, narrow building, with stucco walls on the inside and wooden beams jutting out from the ceiling. There was a back room that led out into a little alley, where some of them went to smoke cigarettes and, honestly, to piss, and the barkeeper always let them stay for a lock-up.
“I’ll get the first round,” said Mícheál, and he set off for the bar.
“What a way to send it off, eh,” said Fingal, pulling a knock-kneed wooden chair around to one side of the table.
Aisling, one of the dancers, raised an eyebrow. “Fionn mac Cumhaill himself,” she said, “would be proud if he could see it.”
Rory was settled in a chair in the back corner, snug between the table and, from a hook hanging on the wall, an enormous wooden pipe. “That’s one thing I never understood,” she said, “why the theatre was named after him.”
Some of the men at the table started to laugh. “You mean,” said Martin, “you’ve never heard tell of the warrior-king with the magic thumb?”
Rory smiled. “I know who he is,” she said. “But I don’t see the connection to this place.”
Flora shook her head. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just a bit of ceilteach magic to get the tourists in.”
“That is not true.” Mícheál came beelining back, bearing in his arms a chandelier of beers and whiskeys and vodka-cokes. “Flora, you know why it’s called after him.”
“Oh, stop the lights,” Flora said, and she rolled her eyes, but Mícheál was already starting in.
“He wasn’t born here, but it’s where he ruled. That hill up the R154. That’s where he had his fortress.”
“He wasn’t real, Mícheál,” Martin called from across the table. “That hill is a gaping pit now. Owned by a building company.”
“That hill was his fortress.” Mícheál took a drink from his beer, and turned to Rory, with one hand stretched straight before him. She could see him now as the schoolteacher he was, the man he would be again in a couple of weeks’ time. “He led the Fianna warriors from that hill, and it’s where he met the love of his life.”
“The love of his life?” The others at the table were quiet now, and listening. Martin was still shaking his head from side to side, but he, too, had his body turned toward Mícheál and his voice.
“Her name was Sadhbh. She had been cursed, by a druid. She didn’t love him, and so he turned her into the shape of a doe. She lived like that for three years. A deer. Finally, a servant of the druid took pity on her. He told her that if she ever found herself in the fort of Fionn mac Cumhaill, the curse would lift, and she would become human again. Straight away, she ran to Fionn’s lands, and she was discovered by him when he was out hunting. His dogs didn’t attack her. They were men, too, who had been cursed to live as animals. So Fionn took her back home with him. Once they set foot inside the fortress the deer fell off of her. She was human again. Fionn fell in love with her. He gave up everything else he loved to be with her. They were happy, for a time.”
“For a time?” The table was dead silent now. You could have heard a heart beat.
“She was taken from him, while he was away, in battle. An image of his face appeared before her, outside the limits of his land. She was afraid for him, and so, she followed it. As soon as she reached it, his face transformed itself into the face of the druid. He struck her. She became a deer again. Fionn searched for her his whole life, but he never found her, as long as he lived.”
The talk drifted gradually to other things. People made plans for the rest of the season, for the year to come. Most of them were coming back here next summer, but Rory didn’t think she would return. At the end of the night, after they’d all had a few drinks, Martin tugged at her arm and implored her to change her flight.
“We’re going down to Sligo for the Fleadh,” he said, “it’ll be great craic. You’ve got to come with us.”
Rory laughed, and put one hand to his cheek. “I can’t,” she said. “I’m going home.”
There was the hiss and then the roar of the recycled air switching on. Someone she had not yet met would tell her a year from now, in an apartment in Paris, that people were more likely to cry on airplanes. She had never cried on an airplane, but the statement made sense to her when she heard it. Crying was like an expression of something happening. It was a sacrifice you made for crossing over.
The plane touched down, and it was late morning in America. Almost noon, and hot, that kind of searing yellow heat she had almost forgotten existed. When the passengers ahead of her had filed out she pulled down her instrument from the overhead compartment and followed the slow line leading out the door. She made her way to the baggage carousel on the lower level of the airport. She waited for her suitcases to come around, and she picked them up, and then set them down again on the airport floor as she got herself in order. For the first time since she had left six weeks before, she could use her cell phone. She switched it on, waiting for the little black surface of the screen to come alive to its glowing, slack-jawed white.
There were dozens and dozens of messages and missed phone calls. Her parents and some of her friends had known what she was up to, and had left her relatively unmolested, but there were other messages, people inviting her to parties or telling her about albums they had heard. There were three messages from the hour before her flight had landed. One was from her father, telling her they’d be waiting for her at the house. The others she scanned quickly and then ignored. She put her phone back in her pocket.
The airport was quiet, even in August. The few people there were moved around her where she stood, as if she were a stone in a river and they the water. There were high glass walls separating the airport from the outside and through them she could see the buses, the highway, the heat shimmering off the cracking black concrete road. She could hear the sounds of people greeting each other at the exit and of traffic, in the yards and miles past that. Pulling her bags behind her she started to walk, straight forward toward the great glass walls. The doors leading out parted as she approached.
The air was thick and dirty, it smelled like what she remembered. There were men smoking cigarettes on the pavement all around her, and the sidewalk where they stood was covered in shade by the high metal eaves. It was almost there, but it wasn’t enough. There was a bridge crossing the car lane and she went over it. She reached the other side, a narrow strip of cement standing in the sun. She let drop her bags from her arms. She lifted her face to the sky, and then she was part of it.
Griffin Reed is a writer originally from St. Louis and currently living in Chicago. Her work has appeared in december, Full Stop, and the Colorado Review. She’s the Managing Editor of Boulevard.
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