The Flat Place
New Fiction from Reginald McKnight
Many years ago, I read a short story called, “The Kind of Light that Shines on Texas,” and it rocked my world. Here was a story that transported me, as fiction at its best does, but that also grappled with U.S. race politics in the South in a way that felt lived and lived in, felt personal for me as a deeply meaningful shining through. Reginald McKnight wrote it, and when I first read it, I had no idea that one day, I’d call him Reg and be able to thank him for the story and all it meant to me, when he became my PhD advisor.
I may never be able to write like Reg does, but he inspires me to try. As a teacher, he led by example while generously cheering me on, not only to try, but also to push boundaries so far over the edge that I’d fail, and when I often did, he’d kindly support me to try again, to find and hold the right edge. I’m still aspiring, and that’s the best place I can hope to be as a writer, a thinker, an artist, a liver of life.
When I got sick, so very sick with cancer that eating and living were too painful for longer than a year, and I wasn’t sure that I’d keep being a liver of life, never mind all the rest, Reg sent energy that helped me hold to my life’s edge, rocking my world in yet another way. Another kind of holding. The very best of art and people can rock our worlds in all the ways that keep us living up to the lives we inhabit, that keep us inhabiting the lives we live.
It’s been more than ten years since the committee Reg led first called me doctor, and I feel lucky to call him friend now and thrilled to debut the first chapter of his new novella this week on FED. So, drop what you’re doing and read this tidbit of his work, then find a good book store or library and read some more. Hug all the light that shines around you in these final days of summer, before we all must hunker down for the seasons to come.
Big love, Ashley
The Flat Place
Chapter The First, a novella excerpt by Reginald McKnight
It’s flat here, pallid and dry, piercingly bright, so bright, everything’s diaphanous – sheer curtain trees, houses, cars. You can see clean through your own hand. If you squint—which you can’t help doing because of the light—till you can barely see a thing, you’ll see the general colors are wheat and gray. It’s silent, for the most part. You don’t hear helicopters and boom boxes. No pistol shots and jungle music making tambourines of windows and eardrums. Instead, there is the susurrus of tires on pavement, the occasional magpie, finch or sparrow, or people whisper by, or bikes hum downhill and up. It is suburban, and not only that, but the worst kind of suburban. Three basic unit designs: one-garage, two-garage, three-garage and one tree per yard, either ponderosa pine or linden—all of them weak, thin, sickly. There are sprinkler systems beneath each lawn, but the grass is sere, tan, bald in spots. The streets themselves, the layout of the place, is an ugly pale web. It seems to go on forever outward.
It is hot, and if the sun moves at all, I have yet to see it. My shadow has been the same three-foot blob since I appeared here. But then, I don’t have any sense of time as of yet. Perhaps it’s because the sun won’t move. It simply will not move. I think I have been walking for four or five hours, but only a blink and a breath before I appeared here, I’d been in Baltimore, walking from my apartment to Eddie’s, which my daughter Spike took to calling Smelly’s. We were on our way to buy tomatoes and fish. Spike had an idea for dinner. I would be her sous-chef. We were doing what we always did, every Friday since she could walk.
On my way to Smelly’s with Spike. Friday.
Then here.
Quite suddenly.
Spike and her green dress gone, the way to Smelly’s, gone. Baltimore and Charles Village and St. Paul Street, and the whole fucking scene eased away and gone as natural as uh huh. And I’m walking—same pace, same thoughts in my head—here, walking and walking. It took me ten, fifteen steps to get it. My right hand cool for the lack of Spike's grip, and my neck felt the sun before my eyes saw its glare.
“I am dead,” I was thinking in the first five minutes. The first five minutes, anyway, after my heart stopped rocking. “I’ve been shot, or suffered an aneurism, and I’m walking in the land of the dead.”
I have read that ghosts exist largely because a lot of people don’t know they’re dead. They don’t see today, February 5th, 2014. They see their personal 1956, or their own little June 29th, 2004 forever. The soul goes its merry way as the body tumbles, and the soul never looks back. Walks away like a wayward child, a happy duck.
It must be 100 degrees, but I'm not sweating. My skin stings. my eyes burn. I stop walking, and gaze up at the sun. It's bright pink, and it doesn't hurt my eyes, or make me squint. I stare right into and it goes from pink to violet to blue, and the sky around it is cerulean, cloudless. I look down at the blob shadow, and then at the neighborhood. A metallic, lime-green car putters by. Behind the wheel is a pink, pink woman with a blonde topknot. She smiles, and waves. I raise both my arms, and wave like a drowning man, but she places her left hand back on the wheel and continues on down the street. Her license plate, green letters on a yellow field, reads UBU-4-EVER, but I can't make out the state.
"You look lost," I hear from behind me. An old man's voice. I spin around, and see him in his front yard. He is clutching a rake. He wears a red and blue plaid shirt, faded, brownish corduroy trousers, and green Crocs. He is pink, peeling, sunburned, balding.
"I'd say I'm a little more than lost." I approach him, and as I draw nearer, I see that he has what looks like a barnacle peeking through his thinning hair. A goddamned barnacle about the diameter of a dime. My heart leaps at the sight of it, and I stop in the gutter, a step or two from his mailbox. A goddamned barnacle protruding about a half inch in height. The man moves a little closer, his Crocs crunching on the dry grass. A goddamned barnacle. A goddamned barnacle. A little stony volcano protruding from his scalp.
"You're not from around here. What brings you?"
I am nearly giddy with fear and revulsion. I look at his shoes, my little black shadow, the sidewalk, my own shoes.
"Did you?" I ask him. I don't know why. The words had come out of my mouth of their own accord.
"Did I what?"
I begin trembling. "I meant to say... I wanted to say--"
"Oh, I see. You been plucked."
"Sir?"
"Fresh plucked."
"Dead?"
"Ha! Not hardly, though if I was you, I'd wish I was." When he'd laughed, his face split into a thousand creases, and his yellow teeth were webbed with saliva. He shakes his head, chuckles, says, "Naw, you ain't dead. You're enslaved. I shoulda known. Not too many free blackies running around this village, thank the Old Fella." He makes two or three idle scrapes with his rake, then says, "We'll need to find you your owner, someone prolly in this neighborhood who fed in the wrong routing number. I reckon you're fairly close to where you're supposed to be. A block or two, no doubt. Stay put, and I'll call the police to come pick you up and have you brung to your proper place."
He drops his rake, and crunches across his parched grass, and up his brick steps and into his house. My little black shadow spreads out like a flat black balloon, wider and wider and wider until it covers the whole block.
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