ABSTRACT Title of Document: TERMINUS AND OTHER STORIES Alison Emilia Hennessee, Master of Fine Arts, 2013 Directed By: Associate Professor Maud Casey Creative Writing, Department of English This collection of short fiction includes four stories. Though the situations and characters in each are unrelated, the collection as a whole treats recurring thematic interests: individual and shared origins; tension between loving one’s home and needing to leave it; childhood and parenthood; and the American South. The stories are ordered to create a chronological arc from wild uncertainty of childhood to the measured acceptance of late middle age. TERMINUS AND OTHER STORIES By Alison Emilia Hennessee Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts 2013 Advisory Committee: Professor Maud Casey, Chair Professor Howard Norman Professor Emily Mitchell ii Dedication For James iii Acknowledgements I want to thank the University of Maryland for giving me the opportunity to pursue this work and engage with so many brilliant and kind members of a wonderful academic community. I especially want to thank Maud Casey, without whose guidance and wisdom and infinite patience, I would have abandoned this endeavor long ago. Thank you to my family: my brother Ian, who engaged a whole Senegalese village in supporting me; my brother Zachary, who let me know in no uncertain terms that his love is dependent only on my existence; to my father, who instilled such a firm sense of place in me that I can’t seem to stop writing about it; and to my mother, whom I will never stop thanking as long as I live. Finally, I want to thank my husband for, you know, everything in the whole wide world. iv Table of Contents Dedication ..................................................................................................................... ii   Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... iii   Table of Contents ......................................................................................................... iv   Smash Factory………………………………………………………………….……...1 Lowlands………...…......……………........……....……...……………..…………....29 Terminus......................................................................................................................58 The Hour Hand............................................................................................................99 1 Smash Factory It started with a penny. We were walking along the railroad tracks down by the Dairy Queen, kicking gravel at one another and looking for hobo dens. Wayne had a hand in his pocket and was jingling the change from the Dilly Bar that was now all chocolate streaks down his school shirt. “Wayne, you got a penny?” Kevin was always asking Wayne for money, and Wayne was always giving it to him. Wayne dredged up a handful of grubby coins and sifted through them. He handed Kevin a penny. “Minted 1972.” “That’s old,” said Shelva Ann and everybody laughed. That was always happening, too. Everybody laughed at Shelva Ann; if you didn’t, it was like you liked her, or at least thought she was all right, and Shelva Ann was too little and dumb to be all right. “Your mom’s old,” said Kevin, and everybody laughed again, but it was a different kind of laugh. “What you want a penny for, Kevin?” asked Weathers Bolt. Weathers Bolt had honey-colored hair and more money than the rest of us. I thought he was cute, but I wouldn’t say so. Kevin and them would have laughed my face off and never asked me to come tramping with them again. 2 Kevin just grinned, his braces gleaming. He flipped the penny up in the air, but missed it on the way down, and he scowled as he dug it out of the gravel. Then, watching us all the time, he laid the penny on the tracks. Shelva Ann’s eyes got wide and her mouth dropped open to a little pink “O” and you could see all the gaps where her grown-up teeth still hadn’t grown in, even though she’d lost the last of them months ago. “You can’t do that!” Shelva Ann was pointing at the penny balancing on the steel rail. “You’ll crash the train!” We laughed. “It’s true!” Shelva Ann said, her voice creeping into a whine. “My daddy said that if you put a penny on the tracks you’ll derail the train!” “My daddy said!” whined Kevin, putting his hands to his face and screwing up his eyes like he was going to cry. He made loud bawling sounds and wiped imaginary snot off his nose. Weathers Bolt and Wayne started in on it, too. They were all prancing around, mincing on their tiptoes, shrieking, “My daddy said, my daddy said!” Shelva Ann’s chin was beginning to tremble, and I could tell she was trying to squeeze back the tears. The boys always tried to make her cry. The only reason she was with us today was because Ms. Hamby was standing right there when Shelva asked if she could come with us. I felt bad for her and I thought about saying something to the boys, getting them to lay off her for a minute. Instead I pitched up my voice and made my chin quiver. “My daddy said!” 3 Then Weathers was looking at me and thinking I was funny, too, and we were all laughing, except for Shelva Ann, who was still trying not to cry and who would never leave us, because she didn’t have any other friends. We left the penny on the tracks and kept on walking. Weathers and Kevin turned off first, on Euclid, except they weren’t going to the same place. Kevin was going up to Elizabeth Street, where he lived because his daddy worked at the water plant, which was just a few streets further out of town. But Weathers Bolt, he had a long way to walk to Finley Park, where the houses had porches all the way around and nobody cut their own lawn. I waved to Weathers Bolt, trying to put something extra in the wave, something only Weathers would see, but Kevin looked at me funny, then flipped me the bird. Shelva Ann turned herself right around, because she didn’t even live over this way, she lived in a split-level on F Street, but she just wanted to walk with us so bad. Wayne and I split up at Hinshaw Baptist. He kept on walking along River Road to go out to the shotgun house where his family raised rabbits and chickens. And I turned on Beech and then home onto Orange. I let the back door slam, because my mother was working the day shift at the hospital, so she couldn’t yell at me to hold it and let it close soft. Opa was sleeping in his chair that had the stuffing pilling out of the arms because his old cat, Ormaloo, always used to scratch it. Ormaloo’s dead now, and so is Jake, who was Opa’s dog when Opa was young. Opa says the chair’s not “quality,” but he only says that because my daddy made it, or at least, he ran the machines that made it. He used to work at American Drew Furniture, and then that became La-Z- Boy. But now the plant’s closed, and Daddy lives with a new family in Charlotte. 4 As I was grabbing a fistful of Vienna Fingers from the cookie jar, I heard Opa snort grunt himself awake. “Laney, that you?” Opa called, his voice soggy-sounding from sleep. “Yeah, it’s me.” “Well, get in here, boy.” Opa did sometimes get confused about things, but he knew I wasn’t a boy. He said he called me that because I kept my hair short and got dirty and wore pants. I told him that it wasn’t the olden days, all girls wore pants now, but he just said, “Hush up, boy.” Momma said it was because he didn’t have any sons or grandsons. Opa’s hair was all flying up off his head when I went into the den, and he had two different colored socks on. I guessed my momma had helped him dress before she left for work, when it was still dark. “Where you been?” Opa asked, rubbing at his eyes with his fists. “Walking the rails,” I said, sitting Indian-style on the floor in front of him. “Walking? I used to ride them rails,” Opa crowed. “Me and Jeff Tippins would’ve got all the way to Mexico if we hadn’t run into Preacher Chalmers in Chattanooga. We’d a been Mexican cowboys!” Even though I had heard this story before, I laughed at the thought of Opa with one of those tall hats and a big shiny moustache. “What're you eating?” “Cookies,” I said and opened my mouth to show him. “Boy, I know you have better manners than that,” Opa said and frowned. Then he grabbed my ear. “Gonna have to pull this thing right off if you don’t act better.” 5 I squealed and squirmed, pleading with him. I knew Opa wouldn’t pull off my ear, though, and I knew he wasn’t really mad about the manners. “Those them Vienna Fingers your momma’s always buying?” Opa asked after he let me go. I nodded. “Damn. Those things ain’t any good.” He paused. “Get me a few, boy.” “But you said they weren’t any good.” “Yeah, but I’m hungry.” I brought the cookie jar into the den. Opa took one and I watched his liver- spotted hand with the skin loose like it was going to fall off. He opened up the cookie, and scraped out the filling with his bottom teeth, which still looked good. When Oma, my grandma, died a few years back, she didn’t have any teeth at all. Opa stacked the scraped-out cookies on the end table, and said, “We’ll feed these to Jake later.” I didn’t say anything about that, because sometimes Opa’s brain lives somewhere else. “I got something for your walker, today, Opa.” I was brushing the last of the cookie crumbs from my tee shirt. “Well, don’t just sit there, boy. Go get it.” I fetched my backpack and pulled out a strip of stickers. Each one was printed with a dog wearing a trench coat. “McGruff came to our school today, and I got these.” “Who’s McGruff?” “He’s a crime-fighting dog.”