"Spearfinger" by Nicole VanderLinden

Pearl had grown up knowing and not knowing her mother. It happened sometimes: a child raised by an aunt, by grandparents. The mother hovering at the borders of their lives. Even John Lennon had one of those, once upon a time.

And when her mother Cecilia invited Pearl to join her for a few spring days on the Appalachian Trail, the unspoken agreement was that this would not be a trip of excavation or truths. It would not be about where Cecilia had been, or who she had been, or why. Let alone who the father had been, wherever he was. And the rest of the family, as expected, tried to get Pearl to decline.

“She’ll want you to know how to do everything,” Pearl’s aunt said, her eyes sweeping over Pearl’s dimpled upper arms, which sometimes looked like clotted cream. “How to build a fire, how to hang a bear bag. She won’t help you.”

Pearl’s grandmother sighed over her lemon cakes. “Don’t you know by now that Cecilia’s a wolf?” she said. She adjusted the tie of her apron and looked out the kitchen window toward the lawn, where Pearl’s pet goat Lola liked to graze.

Sometimes Pearl read headlines on the fringes of the paper and imagined them in retrospect, the seeds of what would become the next great calamity. A new strain of plague in Peru, an asteroid scheduled to hurtle past the earth. She cut these headlines out and put them under her pillow. And later, she imagined, when the survivors of the far future found out what she’d done, they’d know that she’d been the first to see what destiny had brought them, that she hadn’t been one to be fooled.

•

Cecilia was wild; that part was true. The farm should have been a free place to roam, for Cecilia and her older sister to shout out monologues on bales of hay, to swing on frayed ropes over the irrigation pond. But, the family lore went, their farm was already too ordered, too clean, even when Cecilia was small. Chickens filing in and out of their coop like pupils, corn set in neat rows not much different from the straight lines she was expected to make at school. Instead, Pearl’s grandparents would find their younger daughter walking along the highway miles away, looking for dead barn cats. Combing her hair with her fingers, tearing out the knots.

Pearl never heard these stories from Cecilia herself, though she did hear them in Cecilia’s old room in the teetering farmhouse. The wood planks gray, the walls gray, just as Cecilia had kept them. Pearl still slept there under a quilt the grandmother had made when Pearl was a baby, even though she was now nearly an adult. She’d move out someday soon, to college or something else. She’d say goodbye to her friends at the high school, but she’d never been close to them, not really, because the pull of a farm kid’s life is most often to their home.

“Why do you want me to come on the trail?” Pearl had asked Cecilia on the phone. A part of her worried she’d be left behind, that she’d wake up one morning to cold ashes and broken walking sticks, her mother having become one of the fairytale mothers, the ones who disappear.

She could picture Cecilia on the other end of the line. She imagined that she still wore her hair in a thick gray braid with wisps escaping, her hair being untamed as well. The wide, flat nose and thick ankles, the scar on her cheek where she’d once fallen off the top of a bus. Cecilia lived in North Carolina, outside of Candler, in a house covered with vines and nestled into the Blue Ridge Mountains, with two old hounds who bounded out into the hills and sometimes didn’t return for days. Pearl had never been there, though she’d asked for pictures once. And Cecilia had brought them, on her annual visit to the farm, a stack of unfocused Polaroids.

Now, Cecilia took her time in answering. “I’ve been going there more and more,” she said. “I think it’s a thing to see.” Pearl misheard her at first: she thought Cecilia had said the trail was a thing to share.

The night before she was to leave, Pearl sat on the living room floor with the aunt and the grandparents. This was special, because farm life almost always demanded that somebody be doing something, but for Pearl they were here, all of them, surrounding a great pile of sleeping bags and stove parts and ancient bags of jerky.

Pearl picked up a rain jacket that was itself cloaked in must. She held it up to her body uncertainly. “Will it be cold?” she asked. “I don’t know what to take.” She thought of her violin and her favorite of the barn cats, a heavy old girl named Hen.

“That’s why we’re here,” the grandfather said. He was the only one Cecilia still spoke to on the phone, aside from Pearl. He was, they all said, where she had gotten her anomalous spirit. Long ago, he’d lived on the road for a time.

Pearl and the aunt and the grandmother had pulled everything up from the basement, anything you might use for a hike or a camping trip, anything made of canvas or tarp. Pearl had never seen most of it, except for her old sleeping bag, embarrassingly designed to look like a box full of crayons.

Cecilia had sent a list: shelf-stable snacks, wool socks. A water filter if they had one.

And now the aunt and the grandmother, who in their matching house dresses were almost the same person in two versions of a life, began to sort the big pile into smaller ones—things to take and things to return to the basement. The aunt lifted an electric lantern. “This?” she asked.

“Too heavy,” the grandfather said.

Pearl’s heart swelled for them then, her farmer family. While she was gone, the aunt would hang her bedsheets on the line. The grandmother would cover for her at the farmer’s market, selling eggs and flowers, and the grandfather would drive his corn planter through the fields, the tractor’s engine purring and his head full of the lives he’d lived.

That night, before bed, the aunt found Pearl searching on the family’s one computer for how to build a fire. “I hope she appreciates you,” she said, putting her hands on Pearl’s shoulders and giving them a squeeze. “I hope she sees who you are.”

Pearl wanted to ask then about bringing her violin, her books. These were her gifts, the things she knew and could offer. She wished she could bring more than what was foreign to her and new, in an unknown place where she didn’t know how anything worked. But she already knew the answer.

“Please be safe,” the aunt said. “We’ll want to, but we can’t protect you out there.”

•

Pearl and Cecilia met at the trailhead, at a place called Sam’s Gap in eastern Tennessee. Pearl had taken an early flight to Asheville—Cecilia had sent an envelope empty of all but a messy stack of bills—and the driver she’d ordered had scoffed when she told him where to drop her.

“There’s no cell service out there,” he said. “I won’t be able to take a call.”

But Pearl, in her enormous backpack and stiff boots, had waited him out, and eventually he’d let out a mouthful of air. “Fine,” he said. “You don’t seem to have other options.”

As they drove, deeper and deeper on a county road laid out like a spasm, Pearl fixed her mind on the dangers ahead—black bears, big cats. She breathed in the conditioned air and tied and retied her boots, too tight and now too loose.

And when they finally arrived, at a dirt turnoff no bigger than a driveway, standing fixed as stone, there was Cecilia.

Once the driver had gone and they were alone, Cecilia said, “Hey there, kid,” and set to work emptying Pearl’s backpack.

“Grandpa helped me pack it,” Pearl said, hoping to curry some favor.

But Cecilia frowned and tossed a few things to the side. A small skillet, the bulky sweatshirt. “We can’t take these,” she said, stacking the items next to the road. “You’ll thank me in the end.”

Pearl was already busy thanking herself for not bringing the violin, for not having to watch her mother leave her greatest talent by the road. “Grandpa said this was for you,” she said, and she handed Cecilia a compass, an impossible face of dashes and numbers, and on the back, a simple and crude engraving: Cece.

Cecilia made a clucking sound and smiled. “Now this, we can use,” she said, and she put the compass in her pocket. And they packed up the rest, and then they set off on a narrow dirt path snaking up from the road and into the trees, and this, Pearl soon learned, was the Appalachian Trail.

•

Cecilia had a plan: hike to a place called Flint Mountain Shelter, camp within a mile of that, then Little Laurel and Spring Mountain beyond, and then, on the fourth day, to a town, to Hot Springs.

“Here’s what it looks like,” Cecilia said, pointing at a map that looked like a doodle to Pearl, a series of lines and whorls and circles, like nothing she’d ever seen.

“It shows the topography,” Cecilia told her as Pearl traced a finger along the lines, which were like fingerprints, as if they were traversing the earth’s very thumb. Her mother smelled like woodsmoke and ginger and dog, and Pearl wondered what arrangements she’d made for the hounds.

At first, their descent into the forest felt no different than a day hike, the kind the aunt sometimes took Pearl on in Backbone State Park, where they packed peanut butter sandwiches and apples and a thermos full of cold tea for when they rested against the bluffs. The Devil’s Backbone, it was called. Everything was wet and green, new buds and soft earth. Here, the trees were different than in Iowa—thinner, more aged—but the squirrels still skipped about on branches above them and clusters of red ants still busied themselves at the bases below.

They didn’t talk, and Pearl fixed her gaze on the trail before them, this narrow dirt path that nonetheless covered thousands of miles, weaving over mountains and through forests. She ignored her chafing thighs inside her old work pants from the farm, the sweat tickling its way down her back.

Soon, though, the forest lost its sense of Iowa, of day hikes. They hadn’t seen anyone else yet, and the trees seemed to grow denser, closed in toward the tops, as if they were whispering among themselves. Pearl saw a black snake coiled in a tree, and later, a millipede so large it looked transported here from ancient days. There was a sense of going backward, and she had an unsettled fear that if she checked to find her cell phone, she wouldn’t be able to, because they’d walked back to a time long before phones existed. At one point, Pearl pointed to a stripe of white paint on a tree trunk. She stopped. “What’s this?” she called out to Cecilia in front of her, and the sound of her own voice startled her among all the silence they’d shared.

“A blaze,” Cecilia said, not turning around. “It marks the trail.”

Pearl looked again at the dirt path. “The trail seems easy to see.”

“It isn’t always,” Cecilia said, and then she hoisted her backpack higher up onto her shoulders and continued on.

•

At the fire the first night, Pearl asked, “Should we be worried about the bears?” They’d made it to Flint Mountain Shelter, although it was not what Pearl had expected, something with a bathroom or a door. It was a simple wooden structure with a picnic table out front and wooden slabs for sleeping. They’d nodded to one couple setting up camp nearby, but it was late in the season for thru-hikers, Cecilia had said, for those who quit their jobs and divorce their spouses and spend four months traveling from Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine, filtering stream water free of sediment and eating tortillas for bread. Pearl had begun walking toward the shelter, but Cecilia held her back. Rats sleep there, too, she’d told her, and they’d continued on for a mile before setting up a camp of their own.

“It’s not unreasonable,” Cecilia said now, “but you should be more afraid of falling.” Her eyes were on the fire and her braid was now undone, the ghost of its weave still present in the kinks of her hair, how it lay against her chest in parts. “Broken bones and dead trees, because those can fall, too. She seemed to consider as Pearl massaged her own tired calves, her sore feet through the wool socks. “If you listen to old Cherokee stories, you could be afraid of Spearfinger, I suppose.”

Then Pearl asked who Spearfinger was, and Cecilia explained that she was a woman made of stone who wandered the hills in search of lost children, one long nail on her right hand sharpened to a point.

“She pretends to be family to the lost children,” Cecilia said, “and when they come to her, that’s when she digs into them, and then she eats their livers.”

“How?” Pearl asked. She sat on the overturned log next to her mother, and she could swear she could see the real stars spinning in the sky, as if they were at the very top of the earth, at the place where it spun the tightest around an invisible center. The farm was so far away—the chickens in their coop and the coyote that vexed them all who was even now, Pearl imagined, testing the wire fence, which had so far held strong.

“With the nail,” Cecilia said simply. “The sharp one. That’s why she’s Spearfinger, or U’tlun’ta. Though sometimes she’s called Stone-Dress, too.”

Pearl had many questions then, but none she could think to voice. Why would there be lost children in these woods? Why a woman, and why of stone? Eventually, Cecilia said, “Thru-hikers brought her back, wanting a ghost story for the trail, but in the Cherokee version, she’s dead.” She sounded sad, as if the monsters of the mountain were something you could mourn. Or maybe, thought Pearl, she was mourning the Cherokee.”

The fire spit, and around them, treetops swayed in the night. Pearl could make out the bear bag in the distance, swinging off the branch of a birch. The air was somehow heavy and cold at once, and this surprised Pearl, because in Iowa you got one or else the other. She tried to pick out the creatures that must be hovering and crawling and climbing all around them, just out of reach of the fire.

A chickadee saved them all in the end, Cecilia said, the lost children who might have made the mistake of trusting a woman in the woods. Villagers had tracked her down, this Spearfinger, and they gathered to kill her, but their arrows broke against her stone chest. She stomped around in furious delight, and her footsteps shook the forest. Rocks began to tumble down the faces of the mountains, loose as tears.

But then a miracle happened. A chickadee, such a little thing, landed on Spearfinger’s right hand, and it was only a second, but the villagers could see the stone woman grow nervous, and they could further see that she was holding that hand in a tight ball of a fist.

“It was an omen,” Cecilia said. “And that’s how they knew to aim not for her chest, but for her fist, and that’s why they call the chickadee a truth-teller.”

“And that killed her?”

Cecilia nodded. “After she was dead, they pried her hand open, and they found she’d been holding her heart.”

There was logic to that, in its way. Where else could the heart have lived, if it couldn’t beat within stone?

Pearl said, “I feel sorry for her.” She picked up a twig and tossed it onto the fire.

“Why?”

“It was her nature,” Pearl said. “She probably wasn’t even a woman. She probably just looked like one.”

They sat in silence for a while, the coals burning hotter even as the flames died down. Cecilia dug out the compass, which she’d been keeping in her pocket, and finally, she spoke. “Same,” she said. “I’ve felt sorry for her, too.”

•

The next day the path grew steep, and Pearl, who’d gotten heavy her junior year and wasn’t athletic, waited until she felt dizzy, until her backpack straps felt like talons in her shoulders, before she asked to rest. And even then, Cecilia sat on rocks and tapped her boot on the hard earth as she waited for Pearl to drink water.

By the afternoon, though, they reached something called a bald, and Pearl gasped when she saw it, this little slice of Iowa sitting right on top of the mountain. It was a meadow, flat and green, with wildflowers greeting the great blue above. The trail cut through it, but all along there were tall grasses like corn, and Pearl could see, for the first time since they’d entered the trail, lazy clouds making their way through the sky.

She asked Cecilia if they could camp here, and Cecilia said no, that balds were pretty but dangerous, because lightning liked them, too.

Later, as they walked, Pearl turned the Spearfinger story in her mind. She saw birds with short beaks and bold striped heads—they had these in Iowa, too. Chickadees, truth-tellers, and she called to them: “Chicka-dee-dee-dee.”

“That’s an alarm,” Cecilia said. “The more the dees, the more the trouble,” and then she whistled, a pure, two-tone sound that came out like fee-bee. “That’s their usual song.”

When they finally did stop for the day, in a quiet little inlet back down in the forest, Cecilia went to a nearby stream to filter water while Pearl watched over their bags and set up the tent. She’d learned by watching Cecilia, and she pulled the thin nylon from the stuff sack and pieced the poles together, light as hollow bones. When she was done, she wandered the area looking for kindling, and soon she came across a baby bird that must have fallen from its nest, abandoned.

“Buddy,” Pearl said, feeling a special affinity for birds that day after hearing the Cherokee story, and she dipped her finger in her bottle and let the water drop into the bird’s waiting mouth. She hurried back to her pack and tore some tortilla into tiny pieces, breaking them up with more water in her palm.

In the damp cold of the morning, while Cecilia disassembled the tent, shaking out the nylon free of bugs and twigs and stuffing it back in the sack, Pearl ran to check on the bird. She wasn’t altogether a stranger to the brutality nature could mete out. She’d seen a mangy fox wander onto their porch in its last throes of life; she’d said goodbye to chickens and goats. But even so, her family had always protected her from the harshest parts of the farm, the parts Cecilia had long ago sought out. So she was stunned to find the bird, dead, its beak wide open as if it were still hungry. Its throat stuffed with the mash she had made.

She didn’t turn around when she heard Cecilia come up behind her. Somehow, her mother had guessed what had happened. “It would have been more merciful to step on it right away,” she said, and Pearl blanched until Cecilia added, “But what you did was kinder.”

Mercy and kindness at odds, and who could say which was better? Pearl regarded her mother. She’d been taught, as had all the kids at school, that mercy came in forgiveness, that it came in the Florence Nightingales of the world, those selfless women in white. You did good when you might otherwise do harm. But fast cruelty, like a liver pierced—maybe that was mercy, too.

Pearl knew it was childish, but she dug a little hole with their trowel, a place to put the baby bird, and although she expected Cecilia to stop her, her mother didn’t. She tried to hide that she was crying, that she was feeling like a very stupid girl. Tortillas to a bird. And here she was, a farm kid.

•

Their last night on the trail, they met a man, and not a bear as Pearl had feared.

“Afternoon,” Cecilia said curtly as they passed. The man was going the other way, as all of the thru-hikers were by this point, all of them heading north to make it to Maine by October, while the women were going south. They’d only seen a few here and there, the last of the line. But there was something bear-like about this man, furred, though he was very thin. He didn’t have the gear a lot of the serious hikers had, the Osprey packs and aluminum poles. Just a dirty brown sack and one dead branch for a walking stick.

By this point, Pearl was dreaming of burgers. She was over the dehydrated packets of eggs, the freeze-dried spaghetti that tasted like a memory of other meals. The next day, Cecilia had said, they’d switchback their way down to the French Broad River and onward into Hot Springs, and Pearl would once again know the simple pleasures she’d taken for granted. She’d take a shower. She’d chew on ice. The trail in these parts was less obvious, less direct, and twice she’d sighed with real relief when they came upon a blaze.

“Where you heading?” the man asked, stopping, but Cecilia carried on ahead with Pearl hurrying behind her, a duckling through her circumstance. As the days passed, Cecilia had been talking even less than usual, and Pearl had begun to spin a grim fantasy in which her mother died on this trail, or, like the old worry, disappeared. She’d begun to press closer even though she tried not to show it.

“Wherever we set up our tents,” Cecilia called back.

And that should have been that, but the man turned around and began to follow them. The afternoon light was already waning, and Pearl had learned that choosing where to camp was just the first in a line of many tasks before the sun went down. They’d soon pass Spring Mountain Shelter, and then they’d do what they usually did, which was nod to the shelter campers who made use of wooden tables that were luxuries by now, and then they’d go further on a mile because Cecilia preferred it that way. “This isn’t the KOA,” she’d said.

A gnat bit Pearl’s wrist, and she slapped at it even though she knew that this was just the first of hundreds, that the twilight bugs had teeth and that they were now beginning to wake.

“That’s funny,” the man said. “Me too.”

An uneasy time, then, the crunch of leaves and twigs behind her as he followed them. Her mother in front of her, steady, like a ship cutting through ice. And through it all, Pearl’s hope anchored between the two of them: please let there be some hikers ahead.

But when they got to the shelter, it was empty.

Cecilia sank her thick body onto the table’s bench. There was no human sign of life anywhere, no wrappers or empty cans, because that was how everyone did it on the trail, not wanting to attract a bear. Pack in, pack out.

The man grinned. “We taking a break?” he said. His teeth were big and white. Trustworthy teeth, Pearl thought, absurdly. A man who went to the dentist.

And she might have trusted him, if their only other company hadn’t been black snakes and distant bears, and trees and trees and trees.

Cecilia opened a zipper to the front of her backpack, and she seemed to fish around for a moment, and what she pulled out then was, shockingly to Pearl, a gun. Some kind of revolver, hefty and small and short-nosed.

“How long do you think you’ll be tailing us?” she said to the man, setting the gun on the table as if it were an invitation, a snack she’d offered to share, but she kept her grip on the handle, tight and secure. Like a heart, Pearl thought, in a fist.

The man sucked air through his big white teeth. “Christ, lady,” he said. “That’s no kind of trail spirit.”

A gentle rain began to fall then, the kind you’d describe as cleansing, and Cecilia gave a hard laugh. She wasn’t Pearl’s mother in that moment. She was the other woman Pearl’s family had known, separate from the grandparents, from the aunt and from Pearl. “Trail spirit,” she said. “Good one.”

The man grunted. “That’s not a real gun,” he said. “You wouldn’t add that kind of extra weight.”

“Wouldn’t I?” Cecilia asked. She tapped a fingernail lightly on the gun—a metallic click-click-click—while the rest of her stayed very still, still as the rocks around them, and Pearl began edging closer to her mother in microscopic movements, trying not to be seen.

But then it was the man’s turn to laugh. “Hey,” he said. “Easy.” He nodded at Pearl. “Little girl, looks like your mama thinks she’s the big bad around here.” He winked. “But maybe I’ll see you again sometime.” And then Pearl watched as he tossed his dead branch back into the woods and ambled away, now back the way he’d originally been going.

“What do you think he wanted?” Pearl asked, once he was out of earshot. She was leaning against the shelter now—the rain was growing more insistent. It was so obvious to her in that moment, how exposed they really were.

“What do any of them want?” Cecilia said, not moving on the bench, hand still on the gun. She looked over to Pearl, huddled into her pack, and seemed to relax. “I don’t know. There’s been some trouble here this year, but I didn’t want to worry you about it.”

There’d been, she said, a machete attack earlier that spring, two women in their tent. It was rare, but these things did happen. What the man had said about trail spirit was mostly true.

“What my sister would say if she knew,” Cecilia said, and then, of all things, grinned.

Pearl watched as Cecilia stood and placed the gun carefully in a front pouch of her backpack.

“I didn’t know you had that.” Pearl couldn’t explain it, but this felt like a thing she wished she’d known.

Cecilia shrugged—something about the encounter with the man had enlivened her somehow. “Well, he did have a point about it being heavy,” she said.

They didn’t have a fire that night. Cecilia told her that it was because of the rain, but that had ended shortly after it began, and Pearl wondered but did not ask if it had something to do with the man, if they were trying to remain unseen in case he came back. This time, they pitched their tent near the shelter, though it remained empty of other hikers. Pearl heated water over the little propane stove while Cecilia set out their bowls, and they had their final meal on the trail, rehydrated curry with peas. Afterward, they dug a hole a hundred feet from their tent and buried their food scraps and dishwater. They brushed their teeth and spit into the hole, and then they gathered everything with food smells and hung it in the bear bag.

“Are there really bears in these woods?” Pearl asked. It was silly to her, that she’d been afraid of them when they seemed now like a myth. And anyway, she didn’t think a bear could outsmart her mother, because everything around them seemed to be less than what she was. The very forest seemed newly charged with her presence, and if Cecilia were to walk around, Pearl thought the ground might shake.

“Bring some jerky into the tent,” Cecilia said, “and then you can find out.”

The bugs had grown oppressive, so they sat in Cecilia’s little tent with their headlamps and played a round of rummy, but it felt to Pearl like they were just breathing each other’s air, that they might suffocate like this, and she asked, gambling on a question she’d carried all the while, “Can I come to your house after we get to Hot Springs?” She hadn’t told Cecilia, but she’d bought a one-way plane ticket. She’d been hoping the trip might have another leg to it, this one with hounds and a house nestled into the hills.

She could barely make out her mother, her shadowed face, and above, the piercing light of their headlamps, which were intertwined and hanging from the top of the tent. “Pearl,” she said. “You’re a good person. Dad tells me that, and I know it’s true. It’s why I wanted to do this.” She seemed to look outward, to the feral this around them. “But I’m built different.” Pearl felt something on her knee then, and she flinched, because it could be a snake or a spider, but instead it was her mother’s hand. “It’s a mercy, kid, to not have me in your life.”

But Pearl didn’t want her mercy. Instead, she wanted the kindness.

•

The next morning, when Pearl woke up, Cecilia’s side of the tent was empty, though her things were still balled up, an old plaid shirt and a gray bandana and the ties she used for her braid. The compass that she’d carried in her pocket. Pearl checked her phone and, although she still didn’t have reception, she knew she’d be expected to call the aunt and the grandparents once they got to Hot Springs. Her family would gather around the one computer, most likely, while Pearl stayed on the line, and they’d check for flight prices. She’d feel and she’d loathe their tenderness as they charted a straight path back to them. And then Pearl would begin her process of coming home, to the chickens and the wire cage and Lola the goat with her dumb and docile face, grazing on the lawn. She wanted, for the first time, to go anywhere else.

Pearl lay looking up at the morning, and through the tent’s mesh she saw a bird. “Chick-a-dee-dee-dee,” she whispered, circling her hand lazily upward, waving. The bird, no fool, who knew who the stone woman was, who could say where she kept her heart. Who straddled two worlds, both wild and tame. For a moment, Pearl forgot that she’d whispered the alarm call and not fee-bee, a song to greet the morning.

She thought of her violin then, sitting inert next to her bed, the bed in Cecilia’s old room. On the farm, on flat land your mind could map for miles, no need for thumbprint whorls. Had she told her mother that she still played? That she’d given a recital at the school that year and that after, the aunt had cried, “Oh Pearl, this is your gift”? She couldn’t remember now.

The sun was inching higher then, and soon the tent would grow hot, too stuffy to stay. Cecilia was somewhere, she knew, maybe getting more water, although she couldn’t yet tell. “Chick-a-dee-dee-dee,” Pearl said again, louder, to the flitting little bird, and she waited in her envy to see where it might fly.

—

Nicole VanderLinden’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review—where Lauren Groff selected her story as the winner of the 2020 NOR Fiction Prize—Shenandoah, New Orleans Review, The Florida Review (Aquifer), and elsewhere. Sshe serves as the fiction/nonfiction book review editor for Colorado Review, is a reader for Ploughshares, and was recently awarded a Tennessee Williams fiction scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She can be found at nicolevanderlinden.com and on twitter @vandanicole.