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Katie Estill
- University of Arkansas Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Katie Estill Katie Estill is the author of two novels Evening Would Find Me and Dahlia’s Gone, which was named one of the top 100 books of 2007 by the Kansas City Star, and was a finalist for the 2008 Dashiell Hammett Prize. Her short stories have appeared in such journals as The Missouri Review, The Mid-American Review, Ontario Review, Elder Mountain, and Surreal South. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she received her BA from Kenyon College and MFA degree from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She makes her home in the Ozarks with her husband, Daniel Woodrell. qQ The Three Beauties Lana woke up and thought she was dreaming still, for she seemed to be floating downstream, enveloped by the sound of a waterfall. Her hand sank into cold water then she understood she was sliding downhill from the mouth of her tent. Out she poured into the night, coming to rest near the edge of her stone-ringed fire pit, which was filling with water like a birdbath. I am all right. I am quite alive, she told herself as she struggled with the zipper on her sleeping bag and cried out in helplessness and utter longing for her relatives. She thought of her family’s house in the Philippines. It was made of bamboo and thatch, a platform built on stilts, so they would have slept above these waters. She longed for her sisters’ voices and wished to be small again, to curl up against her mother’s breast and be held and told in a soothing voice that everything will be all right. At home the rain would leak through 51 the roof, but no more bothersome than the nightly sprinkling of cockroaches that gathered on the ceiling and walls. How was it that she had accepted the slight tap of their bodies falling on her shoulder at night as fundamentally normal as the rising of the moon in the sky, but over here, in the kitchen of the barbeque restaurant where she worked as a dishwasher, the young waitresses shrieked at the sight of a few cockroaches scuttling on the floor or crawling out of drawers, their antennae squirming about. “It is only cockroach,” she’d say, to soothe their anguished faces. It was strange what people found frightening . She knew that after they closed and turned off the lights, the cockroaches would take over the night as they searched for leftovers. Like the stars, they came with darkness and disappeared with the light. Lana never told the waitresses that on her island, when she and her family woke up in the morning, they had to brush off the dry feces left by the night visitors, the droppings that gathered in the cracks of their eyelids, the seams of their lips. But rain and wind, explosions of thunder and lightning bolts thrust down to the earth did indeed frighten her. Get to the car, she told herself. The car is dry. Only this morning she had felt so at home in the world. She had crawled out of her tent and noticed a large spider web spanning the air between the tent ropes. The taut web was springy and resilient, glistening with dew. I am like you also, she thought, admiring the wood spider. I can unravel threads of power that will take care of me. She had waded through the morning fog, and when she walked downhill into the river valley she disappeared into the mist. This vanishing reminded her of the way she had left her small island in the Philippines. Tonight she was wretched and alone. Then she remembered the three Nubian goats tied to a post oak. Lana flung herself from the sleeping bag and stumbled through the dark, calling, “Oh, my beauties! Are you all right?” At the sound of her voice, their bells jingled, and the three beauties brayed in protest over what had become of this night. When Lana reached them they were bleating inconsolably. They had wound themselves up in the ropes. One had climbed up the oak’s gnarled roots above the waterline. Another looked down in horror at the rushing water, while the youngest had stumbled on the tree’s great roots and snagged her right front hoof. 52 Katie Estill [34.204.3.195] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:15 GMT) “Oh, what is happened? My sweet one, don’t panic! Stop, stop, let me see.” The storm battered her head...