Rumors from the Lost World (17 page)

She ran toward our car. I snapped on the emergency lights and inched to the roadside. Shoulders slumped, she stopped several feet from us. “Wait here,” I said absurdly, zipping up my coat.

We talked on the edge of the flat snowy fields, and I knew from her tone of voice, even before I made out the words, that her companion had left the car. It's the one thing you never do in such weather, not ever. You pack slow-burning candles, sleeping bags, high-energy grub in case of breakdown. But leaving the car is taboo. The cold makes you tired, sluggish; not even an arctic expedition would have better than even odds if the wind started up again.

The skin on her cheekbones was purple and raw, tears of frustration frozen beneath her eyes. Her old car could have been propped up with a pair of two-by-fours.

“Have you seen him?” she shouted.

He was dead. I found out next day. The two of them had a fight. He decided to cool off, fast, in his windbreaker, and got frozen against a fencepost. He looked alive in the picture—jeans snagged on barbed wire, one hand scratching at his scalp.

Over her shoulder a squad car U-tumed across a strip of neutral ground. Lights flashing, it pulled beside her disabled vehicle. My eyes stung in the wind as I pointed to the officer. She turned to see the hooded bear-like figure walk to her car, peer inside, then spot us.

She squeezed my arm. “Thanks.” We stared at each other. She had pale determined features, lips indrawn, eyes hard-set. Under different circumstances, I might have found her quite lovely.

Before I could offer a lift, she was halfway to the squad car, running bow-legged for balance.

“The police are out on a day like this,” I said, with authority, but Audrey and I exchanged glances.

Later we stopped again. In the distance we saw a mountain range. “We've gone far enough, haven't we?” Stevie asked.

“Besides,” added Audrey, “I think I see the sun.”

Huddled around the car, we argued. In the far distance, through a geometry of high-powered telephone lines and scaffolding, there was something, though it provided little heat or light, just the barest trace of a disk, something noticeable only because it was different from what had been there before. It was like the way you can tell in a dark room, by heartbeat or breathing, whether you're with people you care for or not.

Alan Davis received a doctorate from the University of Denver and a master's degree from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His third collection of stories,
So Bravely Vegetative
, won the Prize Americana for Fiction 2010. His other two collections are
Rumors from the Lost World
(1993) and
Alone with the Owl
(2000), both winners of the MVP award. He also co-edited ten editions of
American Fiction,
an anthology of short stories that in 1998 was chosen by
Writer's Digest
as one of the top fifteen short fiction publications in the United States.

 

Davis was born in New Orleans, near the mouth of the Mississippi, into a large Catholic family of Italian, French, and Irish ancestry. He has received, among other honors, two Fulbright awards (to Indonesia and Slovenia), a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship, and a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction in Creative Prose. His work appears in
The New York Times Book Review, The Hudson Review, The Sun
magazine, and many other print and online journals.

 

He now lives in Minnesota, near the Mississippi's headwaters among Garrison Keillor's Lutherans, where he's a professor in the English Department and M.F.A. program at Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM). He is also on the faculty of the low-residency M.F.A. program at Fairfield University in Connecticut.

 

Davis also serves as senior editor at New Rivers Press. The press was founded in 1968 by C. W. “Bill” Truesdale and has published more than 330 titles. In 2001, after Truesdale's death, Davis was instrumental (along with Wayne Gudmundson, photographer and professor in Mass Communications) in reviving and relocating the press to MSUM, where its dual mission is to publish new and emerging writers and provide learning opportunities for students in partnership with MSUM. The press honors Truesdale's progressive spirit by publishing work with a strong sense of place that speaks to our troubled times with
satyagraha
(the truthforce), empathy, and aesthetic courage.