On What Matters

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."

William Bruce Cameron, "Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking," 1963. 

Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction

Did you know there is a Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction?

The prize is given to works that depict lawyers in society and their power to effect change. 

James Grippando's Gone Again won last year's award. 

Mother Mother by Koren Zailckas

Violet Hurst's family is a vortex of toxicity. Nearly everyone is a narcissist, liar, or addict, an abuser an enabler, or some combination.

After a drug-fueled night that Violet has trouble remembering, she is sent to a mental health clinic. Her mother, Josephine, insists that she has tried to hurt her brother, Will.


Though she can't remember the incident, Violet thinks she has been framed. She does not believe she would intentionally hurt Will.

What happened that night is slowly unfolded through the eyes of two of the novel's characters, William and Violet. 

Rose, who ran away from home before the incident, has her own emotional problems. Though readers never get her point of view, she blames her mother for pressuring her to have an abortion--a decision that has left her emotionally scarred. 

Trapped in lock down, Violet has a hard time discerning what is happening at home. She tries to contact Rose because she thinks her sister is on her side.  

Violet's yearns to be emancipated from her psychopathic mother, Josephine. This wish becomes even stronger when she learns the depth of her mother's deceit.

This is a novel by talented writer who writes with confidence and dark humor. While its a great read, it may not be a great Mother's Day present. 

"With Time Their Wings Fade" by Erika Swyler

This story combines loneliness with magical realism, the uncanny, canning, and longing.

El has lived with almost unbearable loneliness--visiting almost no one for twenty years in a house so far from town. Mercy is the only one who visits because she sells her canned vegetables for her in town.

Anyone, who longs for something, will identify with this woman. 

In this story, El has a stack of unused diapers in her closet and jars of tomatoes and other vegetables. Never having had the children she expected to have, she ends up with a cache of diapers.

She buries sparrows and bluebirds in unused diapers when they accidentally hit themselves against her glass window. They seem to do that frequently even after her strange house guest, a boy covered in dust, arrives.

The descriptions in this story are wonderful. The sparrow weighs less than "a breath of dust."

The boy, too, is made of dust:

"The cat was on the doorstep. Behind her was a child, brown, a layer of dirt covering every inch of his skin, making it velvet. His eyes were like his skin; soft, dark. A quick tilt of his head brought to mind hiccups or a sneeze. Four or five, she figured him, and without a stitch on but the dirt."

He appears to have wings that will not wash off:

Where skinny shoulder blades should have ended, they began, two shadows sprouting from the child’s back. Clouds, wings made of dust.

The wings are uncanny yet Mercy, El's only friend, tells her not to mind his strangeness. Children do not feel different until someone tells them they are different. 

The boy brings more and more children to the house--two little girls and a boy. El and her husband, Davis, a mason, contact the Sheriff but no one has reported missing children.

The mysterious boy clings to El's legs. He is mostly non-verbal but seems wiser beyond his years. He says "not yet," when she asks him his name. 

El finds homes for the other children; these children bring brightness to the people who have led dull lives like Mercy and Jeanne. 

The story tells readers that grief , like the uncanny wings, fade over time. 

Even though El loses Davis, she finds this unnamed boy who takes his rightful place beside her.

https://catapult.co/stories/fiction-with-time-their-wings-fade