The August night tells me that I’m home once again, down from New York City, where I’ve lived since 1987, a long barreling Interstate drive away. In the garage, the Subaru’s cooling engine ticks and clatters. All around me as I stretch and unbend, the darkness of a Chapel Hill neighborhood resounds, a vast, pulsing rave of cicadas, crickets, and frogs, with the occasional hoot of an owl thrown in to terrify the small mammals.

My family is never mentioned by name in Harlan County, USA, but it is alluded to in many passages about the county’s history. Over this they were none too pleased, which poses a problem: I love the film.

I’m in the Marriott lobby surrounded by hundreds of puppets. They’re peeking from behind the fake motel plants, eating dinner with folded napkins in the River City Grille & Lounge, slipping into elevators. A group of puppets sings in the corner. A fountain bubbles in the lobby’s center, surrounded by fold-out tables, all of them filled with puppets.

In the summer of 2014, nearly a decade after I buried my ties to home, and discontent with my restlessness, I set out to make a life in Austin. I carried with me one simple question: was Texas still home to my heart or just the site of dead memories?

It was dark all the time, and so it was dark when the ship’s captain crept into the corner where his young daughter was asleep. It was dark when he carried her out onto the deck and raised her up in the moonlight to better see him claim.

For Neddy Hill, giver of the first kiss,
Bobby Breman, No way, Jose,
Todd Winston, who knows his days of the week,
David Mellor, George to her Martha,
and Joe Telford, bell ringer, initials carver, home-run hitter:
Have mercy.

In April 2013, an explosion devastates the town of West, Texas. A media-hungry firefighter may be the man responsible.

Short fiction by C. E. Morgan from our Spring 2014 issue.

I probably shouldn’t tell you this, because it’s not politically correct to say, but it takes courage to kill something—you risk remorse, and remorse sticks.

From the summer fiction issue.

At half past ten the guy from the corner mart came into the shelter. Naomi had only seen him a few times, but he had a distinctive look, to say the least. He was young but rugged, with short-cropped hair and broad shoulders. It figured that the most attractive man in town her age was also a triple amputee.

Parts of the nation would succumb to despair as entrenched racial prejudice was mined to soothe the emotional needs of isolated, angry people. But those willing to resist the chatter, sit in silence, and sink into the pain found spiritual liberation in the struggle for racial justice. Those willing to look found humanity, joy, and love. For them, the summer of 2016 was to become a true Summer of Love.