Assistant Editor Holli Carrell: Molly Sentell Haile’s flash fiction story, “Sea of Love,” ponders how quickly the natural world and external forces can breach the safeguards of home and family. I am moved by how Haile illustrates a child’s sudden awareness of danger, her vulnerability, and her family’s. This story’s striking images and quietly ominous narrative will stick with me for a long time.
Sea of Love
The dogs started barking at something under the railroad tie—one of four laid into a square border around a dogwood and the mother’s tulip clusters, their fallen petals brown shadows scattered in the dirt. “Hold on—” the girl’s daddy said, and he ran into the house, the screen door slamming behind. The girl waited with the dogs. She stared at the railroad tie, hoping it or whatever was under it wasn’t going to move on her watch. He came back with a .22 rifle, a box of snake shot, and a revolver in a leather holster he had buckled onto his waist. He loaded the rifle and handed it to the girl. “This is in case you miss,” he explained as he checked the cylinder of his revolver and slid the gun back into the holster. “Gotta be a snake,” he told her. Her thumb slid the rifle’s safety from black to red. The night before, her mother had put the new Honeydrippers cassette in the stereo, and the three of them danced, the brown fabric of the stereo speakers tremoring while her parents swayed to the beat. One of her mother’s hands curled around the back of her daddy’s tanned neck. The other held a lipstick-stained glass of Riunite, and her head rested against his shoulder. The girl circled the two of them, dancing like a ballerina, the way she had when she was younger and would twirl across the floor until everything but her own dizzied body disappeared. “Get ready,” he said, and she aimed at the tar-soaked plank. Her daddy tried to flip the plank with the toe of his boot and then his entire foot, but it didn’t move. He crouched like a football player waiting for the snap, bracing both hands on the old railroad tie and pushing until it finally rolled over. The black underside was wet and rotted. Slick grubs white as the moon clung to the dark wood. Fleshy, thick earthworms slithered through the exposed soil. She heard a humming before she saw the paper nest the color of stone and the smoky spiral that rose from it. No point shooting at a cloud. A dog yelped at the first sting, and they all ran, the girl’s daddy to the creek with the dogs following behind, and the girl, still holding the rifle, through the back door of the house and out the front—as if something so small couldn’t follow her inside.
Molly Sentell Haile is a writer and educator whose short stories and nonfiction have appeared in Oxford American, The North Carolina Literary Review, Epiphany, and elsewhere. A Doris Betts Fiction Prize winner and a Pushcart and O. Henry Award nominee, she teaches creative writing classes for people with cancer, survivors, and caregivers at Hirsch Wellness Network in Greensboro, NC, and is at work on her first novel.
