All Faculty Excerpts

Drought

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Scott Alexander Hess's novel Drought.

***

“I talked to the preacher,” Parnell began.

Darl dropped and stubbed his cigarette. He stood up and began to do a toe-touching exercise.

“I think I best get in shape this summer,” he said. “Let’s swim tonight.”

Parnell took a gulp of his Coke. He began again.

“He told me some strange things about my uncle. I’m not sure how to say it.”

Darl did not pause his exercise.

“Let’s face it, he ain’t all there. I like the preacher, but you hear his sermons?”

“It’s more than that,” Parnell said, then he belched.

“Sorry.”

Darl stopped his exercise, but not because of the belch. He was looking at something in the distance.

“Well shit!” he said. “We got us a dust devil!”

“What?” Parnell said. Turning he saw it.

It was a gray funnel-shaped mass spinning up to the sky. Like a tornado, Parnell thought, but more contained, like a white-gray whirlwind shooting to heaven. It was in the distance, but moving toward them quickly.

Darl hooted.

“Well shit, I ain’t seen one since I was a kid,” he said.

Parnell froze with fear. He was not a person who could move quickly in the event of danger. He could not descend narrow staircases to dark root cellars as they did in Kansas in a black-and- white film, or run from things as he’d seen in so many films. He was doomed. He thought, I have heard this cursed story and now I am cursed. This is all really happening. This is the thing I came for. I wanted something to happen, I wanted to feel alive. This is it.

He felt too the terrible aftertaste of the preacher’s story, the fate of his ruined uncle imprinted on him now, in his very blood; he, the descendant, the chosen one to carry on the awful curse if only momentarily before he was sucked skyward then likely dumped onto his inherited farmland, maybe on the very spot where Horace was buried. And for a moment he thought he saw a face in the funnel speeding toward them, heard a screaming voice.

He struggled to stand.

“It dies fast, don’t worry. It won’t get us,” Darl said.

He put his arm across Parnell’s shoulder.

“I shoulda told you that first. It’s all right. They just pop up in summer.”

Parnell was shaken, but the touch on his wide shoulders, the so-foreign bit of comfort, along with the fact that indeed the funnel was suddenly and rapidly sifting downward to nothing, calmed him.

***

Reprinted with permission from Rebel Satori Press. You can learn more about Scott and his writing here.