One afternoon, after kindergarten, the garden for children, my dad told me a story about Satan coming across a hunter and asking him what his gun was for. The hunter shot the gun and Satan, said, “Oh, a cigarette,” took the gun and put it in his mouth, pulling the trigger. A smoke ring blew out of the back of the hunter’s skull and Satan walked away.
“What does that story tell us?” dad asked.
I screamed.
Ron Riekki’s books include And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 (Michigan State University Press), Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal Great Lakes Best Regional Fiction), The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book awarded by the Library of Michigan), and U.P.: a novel (Ghost Road Press).
Their husbands’ rigid fists became hands glib with plant soil, and instead of bruises down their thighs, they saw hickies planted like booby-traps along their collarbones.
