Amanda Bales
Assistant Editor Jess Jelsma Masterton: When I read through submissions, the question I return to again and again is “What is this story’s occasion?” Well-crafted openings put forth an answer for why the story must start where it does. What has changed or is in the process of changing for the protagonist? In essence, what is at stake? When the story is told using the first-person retrospective perspective, the occasion becomes even more complicated, with the author needing to account for the time that has passed since the original event. Why tell the story years after it first took place? How have the narrator’s views of the event changed? In “A Drift: The Year She Moves Back Home,” the past occasion is clear: a childhood prank turned tragic accident. It is Bales’s use of the retrospective, however, that renders this story into a subtle and satisfying stunner, showing readers how the accident continues to haunt the narrator after she moves back to her childhood home as an adult.
To hear Amanda read the story, click below:
A Drift: The Year She Moves Back Home
We spent much of that childhood summer in the 4-H barn learning the agricultural values of parents who’d moved to town when Reagan and ConAgra ran the family farms away. They held some hope, I guess, that our educations might overcome the economy. But we were mostly bored, and so one morning, for no reason I can give now, other than that children are cruel to weaker beasts, we snatched a baby pig from its mother, then sprayed it with paint leftover from when we had matched our bikes and ridden the streets in tribal friendship, aluminum bats clanging across chain link fences and voices whooping into the sky.
A few thought suffocation, the kind where the skin itself cannot breathe. Others thought someone had squeezed too tight, broken a rib, pierced a lung. Most likely, terror seized the suckling’s heart. But some nights, desperate for a pattern, a plan, a platter on which if not justice then at least a kind of symmetry is served, I wring portent from this day, imagine the pig’s alveoli saturated in toluene, the chemical we would huff in the coming years while our bikes slumped in garage corners, chains slacked off gears and rubber sagged off tire frames.
Amanda Bales hails from Oklahoma. Since leaving, she has lived many places, including Fairbanks, Alaska, where she received her MFA. Her work has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, The Nashville Review, Raleigh Review, and elsewhere. She lives in central Illinois and teaches at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. See more at her website or follow her @amanda_bales.
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