Burning Bright: Stories (15 page)

Authors: Ron Rash

BOOK: Burning Bright: Stories

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She sat on the porch with the child and watched the dark settle in the valley. A last barn swallow swept low across the pasture and into the barn as the first drops of rain began to fall, soft and hesitant at first, then less so. Lily went inside, taking the coverlet and yarn with her. She lit the lamp and nursed the child a last time and put him back in the crib. The supper fire still smoldered in the hearth, giving some warmth against the evening’s chill. It was the time of evening when she’d usually knit some more, but since she couldn’t do that tonight Lily took the newspaper from under the mattress and sat
down at the table. She read the article again about the war being over by summer, stumbling over a few words that she didn’t know. When she came to the word
Abraham
, she glanced over at the crib. Not too long before I can call him by his name to anyone, Lily told herself.

After a while longer, she hid the newspaper again and lay down in the bed. The rain was steady now on the cabin’s cedar shingles. The young one breathed steadily in the crib beside the bed. Rain hard, she thought, thinking of what she’d be planting first when daylight came. Bad as it was that it had happened in the first place, there’d been some luck in it too. At least it wasn’t winter when the ground was hard as granite. She could get it done by noon, especially after a soaking rain, then rest a while before doing her inside chores, maybe even have time to plant some tomato and squash before supper.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my editor, Lee Boudreaux, and my agent, Marly Rusoff. Thanks also to Abigail Holstein, Mihai R
dulescu, Western Carolina University, and my family.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the publications in which these stories first appeared: “Hard Times” in
Sewanee Review
; “Back of Beyond” and “The Ascent” in
Tin House
; “Dead Confederates” in
Shenandoah
; “The Corpse Bird” in
South Carolina Review
; “Waiting for the End of the World” in
Oxford American
; “Into the Gorge” in
Southern Review
; “Burning Bright” in
Ecotone
; “Return” in
Saltgrass
; “The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars” in
Carolina Quarterly
; “Falling Star” in
Crossroads
; “Lincolnites” in
Smoky Mountain Living
.

About the Author

RON RASH
is the author of the
New York Times
bestselling novel
Serena
, which was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, as well as three other prizewinning novels,
One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River
, and
The World Made Straight
; three collections of poems; and three collections of stories, including
Chemistry and Other Stories
, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice a recipient of the O. Henry Prize, Rash teaches at Western Carolina University.

www.harpercollins.com/ronrash

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ALSO BY RON RASH

FICTION

Serena

The World Made Straight

Saints at the River

One Foot in Eden

Chemistry and Other Stories

Casualties

The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth

POETRY

Raising the Dead

Among the Believers

Eureka Mill

Copyright

BURNING BRIGHT
. Copyright © 2010 by Ron Rash. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

EPub Edition © January 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-198135-7

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