(photo by Megan Bean / Mississippi State University)
Associate Editor James Ellenberger: I love hitchhiking scenes in poems and stories. There’s something marvelously dramatic about two strangers putting their trust in each other, if even only for the next fifty miles. Here, matter-of-fact narration (“The woman climbed in”) is met with the phantasmagoric transformation that closes the piece. Of all of the things that could have happened (violence, romance, etc), we’re instead given a laundry list of almosts and what ifs that the woman literally regurgitates, dissolves utterly into. Inaction stifles. In the moments before sleep, regrets of all shapes and sizes rush into dazzling view. Pierce’s piece leaves me feeling haunted, not only by the woman’s transmutation but by own regrets as well. The small things. The piece gives the negative space of our lives a body. It shows us what, time and time again, we’ve chosen to be missing.
To hear Catherine Pierce read “Suburban Legend #3,” click below:
Suburban Legend #3
by Catherine Pierce
One foggy midnight, a man driving Old Route 82 saw a young woman hitchhiking. Her jeans were torn; her hair was the color of sawdust. The man, who had recently allowed a six-year relationship to slowly fade into white noise, who had once had a yellow Lab named Buster Keaton for whom he heated a small pan of milk each night, who was exactly old enough to realize that he probably never would visit the Andes but young enough to believe he might be wrong, pulled over.
The woman climbed in. She was from Tulsa, heading to DC to see a friend. The hours and miles spun out. He told her about Buster Keaton. She told him about a dove she’d had for magic tricks, how she couldn’t bring herself to shove him in the little velvet bag and so he just flew around her room shitting all over everything. She used words that made him dizzy—chanticleer, ousted. She laughed at his jokes and also at her own. Around 4 a.m. she closed her eyes. The man had many things to say—jeweled things, delicate cobweb things—but he told himself it was a long way to DC; there was plenty of time.
Near morning, the sky a bruised navy, she said, without opening her eyes, I figured, and sighed, and from her mouth fluttered a piece of white paper, then another, then another. Panicked, he pulled to the shoulder, but it was too late. She was gone. In her place, the Lowe’s receipts for the deck he never built, unopened bills, the letters that ended but I know I’ll never send this—all his small regrets, all the ones that never mattered.
Catherine Pierce is the author of three books of poems: The Tornado Is the World (2016), The Girls of Peculiar (2012), and Famous Last Words (2008), all from Saturnalia Books. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and elsewhere. She codirects the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.
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