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2004 Season
 Steve Sherrill is an assistant professor of English at Penn State Altoona. He earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Fiction in 2002. His poems and stories have appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, River Styx, and The Georgia Review, among others. He is the author of The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break. He lives in Pennsylvania.
The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break: A Novel (2002)
Visits from the Drowned Girl: A Novel (2004)
Chapter 1 (from Visits from the Drowned Girl, by Steven Sherrill)
Benny Poteat has seen a lot of THINGS.
Benny PO-teat has seen a lot of things.
Benny Poteat has seen a LOT of things.
Almost NOTHING would surprise him.
Almost nothing would SURPRISE him.
ALMOST.
Emphasis is negotiable, and emphasis is everything.
Of the vast array of things Benny Poteat would claim to have seen in his life, the ones he’d consider formative, the handful, or less, of those experiences one tends to have while hurtling blindly through the banalities of day-to-day existence, moments that leap so suddenly, so forcefully into your path that you careen off them two or three degrees into a different sort of future than before—for better or worse, who can say—most of those things he’s witnessed from above. That day, as with countless days before it, from two hundred feet up, the Carolina Piedmont spread out 360 degrees around him, county bleeding into county: dogwood, pitch pine, and red-dirt hills for mile after mile. It was spring, wet and fecund. Benny Poteat had been climbing towers, legally, since he was fifteen years old, and fifteen years later he still loved the struggle between the late-March winds and the rigid metal framework he buckled himself to Monday through Thursday, weather permitting, well into winter. So, while it’s true that Benny Poteat had seen a lot of things from up there, mostly he just did his job and bore witness to hour upon mundane hour in sometimes vertiginous solitude. He was rarely prepared for the extraordinary. In fact, he’d be hard pressed to come up with anything that could have prepared him, truly prepared him, for what he saw that day.
Off in the distance, the perimeters of Buffalo Shoals were defined on one end by the harsh silver dome of the water tower Benny painted just last summer and at the other by the tall rusting hoppers and conveyors at the defunct Purina factory. Goat, swine, and other small-mammal foods. Counting the drivers, almost eighty jobs lost. Somewhere behind him, Benny knew that the pitted quartzite crags of Crowder’s Mountain jutted skyward, in places six hundred feet higher than the surrounding hills. It was a tired and crumbling relic of some ancient grand range of mountains that made its tectonic march across the land long before any humans ever trod there. Now, Crowder’s Mountain, with its token of a name, claimed its position of power in smaller, more provincial ways. At least three times a year some fool fell to his death. A cocky climber, too cool for ropes and other safety equipment. Drunken frat boys from Piedmont College. The occasional depressive. Mostly men; boys, really. The worn-out little mountain seemed to eat them. Depending on who you asked, Crowder’s may or may not be the starting point of the Blue Ridge foothills.
Continued...
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