Smokey Mountain Breakdown

Just to let you guys know. Idgie, the editor, over at Dew on the Kudzu, has done gone and nominated me for The Million Writer's Award over at storySouth.

The Dew is the only ezine that publishes me on occasion. Primarily because Idgie contacted me first. As you all know, I am notoriously lazy about submitting my work to places. All that talk of SASE's and mean editor talk just makes my head swim and I end up saying screw it, I'll think about it next week. Honestly, I wouldn't mind having a mean editor to whip my ass into shape now and again. Fish net hose and spike heels are strictly optional but highly recommended if you are interested in the job.

Everyone has been so supportive of my writing and I do recognize that I should make more of an effort to get out there and get published. I will try to do better. Next week, maybe.

The story that was submitted was Cat Fur Jelly. This was my story about my pilgrimage to Martha and Lizie's grave one fine spring day and my reverence for these two lovely, elderly mountain women who I never met. Re-reading it...it's a good story, but my verb tenses forgot to wear their underpants.

storySouth is a fairly well distinguished online literary journal that focuses on writers and writing from the "New" South. For this reason, it has not been on my short list of places to submit, but I'm quite sure there will be some excellent stories and writers nominated and the competition will be quite stiff.

The Million Writer's Award is open at this time to reader and editor submissions. You may nominate a 1000-plus word story that you have read or published as an editor as long as it has appeared in an online literary journal or ezine during 2006. Here are the rules.

If you are an editor of an online ezine or literary journal you may make your editor nominations on this page.

If you are a reader and would like to nominate one story you have read in an online literary journal or ezine you may make your reader nominations here.

Nominations will be accepted until April 15, 2007. Then 10 of those stories will be selected by the editor of storySouth and voting will begin on May 15th and continue through June 15th.

The Indians called this place "Shaconage". The land of blue smoke. It fairly seems to cry out for misty figures who fade in the fog and leave no footsteps in the wet springs where they tread.

But the reality and history here is so much more fascinating. I have yet to hear one ghost tale related to me by someone who actually grew up here.

Once, I brought a couple of filmmaker friends from Asheville to visit a local woman. They had come to visit me for the day and wanted to make a film based on Appalachian ghost stories. I really didn't have any ideas for them, but was able to get her to retell my favorite eerie, but true story.

There is a sheer rock face across from my house. It rises three hundred feet in the air from her north pasture. The top was once cleared and a small homestead used to sit on the edge of cliff. A young woman with two children lived up there with her old father. They farmed the steep slopes on the other side with steers.

They used to plant corn in places no one could plant today. You can still see the little terraces on the sides of the mountains where the steers pulled the plows.

She was married once. But the man took off to live with another woman down in the holler, leaving her with the two babies, a toddler and an infant.

I'm not sure exactly what the grim tale was about the relationship between the girl and her father. Maybe he was just mean as a snake. Maybe he drank. I'm just not sure, but for whatever reason, the two did not get along. She was dutiful, though, and was taking care of him in his later years.

It happened on one of those cold, cold nights we have here in the mountains. The sleet and snow was hitting the tin roof of the cabin, being driven by 40 mile per hour gusts. The wind sounded like a panther cry, like a woman screaming. It was on a night like this that the old man decided to die.

As he lay dying by inches and on his last night on earth, he cursed his girl.

"Mark my words, girl," he told her, "for as sure as I'll die on this night, I'll come back and haunt you. I'll drive you mad for sure. You see if I don't!"

As the warmth seeped out of his now dead body in the middle of a cold winter night, the daughter made up her mind. She bundled up her two young ones and scaled down the cliff with them in the dark, in the snow and driving ice and wind. She arrived at the woman's house seeking shelter late that wintery night.

Her hands were cut and torn from her climb down the sheer rock face. She had bruises over most of her body and was shuddering with cold. It was a miracle that she didn't plummet to her death. It was a greater miracle that neither of the babies had a scratch on them.

The next morning she left the two babies with their father and went to Knoxville. She checked herself into what was then known as the "Sanatorium" but is now the State Mental Institution. I suppose she expected her dead father to make good on his promise to drive her insane, and thought it best to be in an appropriate place when it happened.

Many years later, the woman tried to go get her and bring her home, thinking the fear might have gone out of her.

The woman looked at her over the steaming vats of laundry with haunted eyes.

"This would be my home now." she told her.

She lived out the remainder of her days at the Sanatorium, patiently waiting to go insane.

There are no ghosts here. The dead still live with the living.