Mt. Adams at Mar Vista

Excerpt

The Mt. Adams varsity softball team warms up in right field, throwing yellow balls back and forth in sunny arcs. They try to be quiet, but they cannot stop their chatter as their shoulders loosen. The field is a good one. The grass is close cut, the bases bright, and the brick dugouts painted red and navy, the home team’s colors. It is nicer than the Mt. Adams ballpark, with its outfield full of divots and dugout full of weeds and half-eaten sunflower seeds. The girls like to see how far they can spit the uncracked shells, sucking off the salt first and then aiming them through the diamonds of the fence, the best shots flying over the first base line.

It is a perfect day for a game except that everything is wrong. All week, adults have plagued them. How do you feel about playing Mar Vista? Do you want to talk about it? It’s so soon—and in this pause fall all the words they don’t say.

Gwen E. Kirby

Gwen E. Kirby’s stories appear in Guernica, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, New Ohio Review, New Delta Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. A proud graduate of Carleton College, she has an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and is finishing her doctorate at the University of Cincinnati. She won the 2017 DISQUIET Literary Prize for Fiction and has received a Pushcart Prize special mention. During the summer, you can find her in Tennessee working as fiction faculty at the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference and staff at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Patrick Ryan on “Mt. Adams at Mar Vista”

Our new issue, “Mt. Adams at Mar Vista,” was sparked by a conversation the author had with a group of friends following a school shooting that had been in the news. The fact that she now can’t recall which school shooting is as chilling as the story she’s written.

No one dies in this story. There’s no bloodshed, there are no weapons, there’s no mass evacuation. We’ve recently seen what an amazing force young people can be when they’re galvanized by a tragedy—and what’s all the more impressive about them is that they’re kids. Brave, angry, focused, articulate kids. In its way, “Mt. Adams at Mar Vista” underscores that by investigating what it’s like when kids in a similar situation try to get on with the business of being high school students.

As Gwen E. Kirby says in our Q&A, this is not “an explicitly political story.” At the same time, it revolves around a topic that, against all reasonable thinking, has become politicized. When what happens to one of us can happen to all of us, when what happens to some of our kids on an average school day can happen to any of our kids on an average school day, and we disagree on whether or not that matters—our definitions of winning and losing need to be redefined.