Associate Editor Connor Yeck: It feels like fate this week to get the chance to feature not one but two entries from Beth Gilstrap’s ongoing flash series, “There Is News along the Ohio River.” As I write this, Cincinnati is in the throes of spring—lingering frost and violent rainstorms colliding with soaring temperatures, with every tree trying its best to bud and burst. Gilstrap’s flash fiction captures such a familiar yet dreamlike edge of change. These are stories filled with circus tents and sledgehammers, floodplains and mimicry. Propelled by a kaleidoscopic sense of texture and line-by-line music, we’re ultimately asked to consider shifting spaces instilled with both survival and awe.
from There Is News along the Ohio River
XIV.
There is news along the Ohio River: in their doldrums, the geese have huddled facing east but there is no sun today. You have returned from North Carolina, where you wiped sweat from your upper lip on Christmas Day feeling mutant in the place that forged you, having never mastered the art of crypsis, a kind of natural mimicry, but you can code-switch like a motherfucker to stay a thin kind of safe. If you could have only concealed yourself to look like the branch on which you perch, you might have built a formidable home there but you are encased in a body feminine so home eludes you, an unfortified earthen hut during the wet season. The goal is to divert the water, he says, when you live on floodplains and isn’t the whole world becoming. Becoming electrified in its hospital gown mis-tied, showing the deep unhealed torch cut from your liver, but necessity is a mother and the garment will do just to get outside for a little while and bum a cigarette off a gunshot wound talking about senescence, What a trip, baby girl, what a trip.
XVI.
There is news along the Ohio River: it’s two weeks shy of the solstice and the circus has come to fracture the expanding Kentuckiana gray. They have come—without animals, blessed be—in repurposed school buses painted rosemary green. They have come in old ice-cream trucks outfitted with solar panels. They have come in Muck boots and fleece with sledgehammers and showy muscles and butter-flavored oil. They have come to raise the tent against winter. They have come with tales of failure and oddity and the flourish of chosen family. They take turns hammering. The petite feminine one yahs so hard when they swing you’d swear we’ve all returned to particle, leaving these fallible bodies behind, but after a beat, after a breath, broad shoulders removes their pentacled hat, takes the hammer, and with a metal-on-metal shriek you are front-row center watching them wriggle and wriggle until the straitjacket loosens, until their shoulders bloom like rhododendron and your broke-down heart long since set to rest on cinderblocks begins to hum and before you know it, there you are again, crying in a roomful of strangers.
Beth Gilstrap is the author of Deadheading & Other Stories (2021), winner of the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize, short-listed for the Stanford Libraries’ William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, bronze winner of Reader Views Literary Awards, and a finalist for the 2021 Foreword Reviews Awards in Short Fiction. She is also the author of I Am Barbarella: Stories (2015) from Twelve Winters Press and No Man’s Wild Laura (2016) from Hyacinth Girl Press. Born and raised near Charlotte, she recently left Louisville for the lowcountry near Charleston. She also lives with c-PTSD and is quite vocal about ending the stigma surrounding mental illness.
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