Badlands/Cynthia Reeves: brief reflections on a stunning novella

I have known Cynthia Reeves for what feels like a long time now. She is a friend, she is a cook, she is the mother of two talented children, she teaches, she writes. She is there, often, telling stories—standing at the counter in Libby Mosier's house, ruling over a platter of fine cheeses in her own home, walking a windy Philadelphia with me not long ago, as we searched (unsuccessfully) for a hostess-gift bottle of wine. We bought Di Bruno Bros. chocolate-covered pretzels instead. We found the party. We talked some more.


But perhaps we don't really know someone until we dwell, quietly, with their work, and over the past several days, when I could tear away for an hour, I have been reading Cyndi's award-winning novella, Badlands, published in 2007 by Miami University Press.

The story—about a dying woman's final hours and the blend of time, about the topography of regret and the last light of clarity, about secret dreams and the collective dream, about the bones we bury or seek to bury or can never bury—is one of the most beautifully rendered stories I've ever read. Devastating. Intelligent. Knowing. True. Locked in tight. Held so close. Never once losing its purpose, nor its rhythm.

Think of Carole Maso channeling Colum McCann. Think of Jack Gilbert stretching out the lines of his poems. This is Cynthia Reeves.

This is how she sounds:

If hearing is the last sense to leave the body, then snowfall whispering over their faces, over itself, is the last thing they hear. Blankets laid gently one on top of another, nothing else. No weeping, no iron nail driving into pine board, no lamentation but snow sweeping over them, whispering its final prayer: Come, Grandmother, Great Spirit, hold them gently in your arms. Caro hears this whispering soft, softer now, and finally the quiet rustling of sheets.

Find Badlands. Read it.