Blood Moon (tentative)
an excerpt

It was a moon you could drive by. The storm clouds had cleared, leaving the road glistening like coal and pockmarked with mirrors. Maddie clicked off the Civic’s headlights and turned onto Gratz Street, slowly steering around the puddles.
This was the long way, but she wanted to drive by the old mill. Its decaying bulk was bordered by the interstate overpass and an overgrown railroad spur that crept underneath it. The brick mill sat perched in the corner like a punchdrunk boxer huddled on a stool.
Usually, she avoided this part of the neighborhood. In daylight, the broken windows and weed seamed lot depressed her. But tonight under the flood of a harvest moon, she could squint her eyes and imagine the big double doors clanging open, a steady stream of workers pouring out at shift change. She saw her mother, purse swinging in one hand, her other arm hooked through Margaret Covey’s. Childhood friends, neighbors, a solace to each other through hard times and good until the day her mother died. Perhaps she had been in that building, a tiny fish swimming in the salty sea of her mother’s womb.
Maddie pulled the car up to the chain link fence that surrounded the property and stepped out. The rains had cooled things off a little, broken the unseasonable heat that wrapped the city like a shroud. Knoxville sat in a valley, and weather gathered there, hemmed in by mountains to the southeast and north, while hot fronts and pollution pushed in from the southwest. Summer had lingered into October; the air felt heavy and listless. No matter how Maddie pushed, it would finally slow her, stop her, drain her will. The entire city grew slow and still in the heat of the day, shaking itself out of it’s lethargy in the evenings, and when a sudden storm broke the heat.
Broken glass studded the asphalt. Maddie crunched through it to the fence and laced her fingers through the links. She pressed her cheek against the cool metal and breathed in the ozone smell of rain.