"Between a Rock and a Hard Place" by Hiram McDaniels

“I think I want to go home,” I muttered.

“What?”

“I changed my mind! I want to go home!”

It was a little late to have a change of heart now, with only open air separating me from a long drop into the blue below. From this height it would be like hitting concrete.

My sweaty fingers were wedged into a crevasse in the rock face. I squinted up at Dan, once my climbing instructor, now a dark smudge edging out the light. He was so far away. A wave of vertigo surged up through my ribs and I nearly lost my grip.

He rappelled down to meet me. “You’re nearly there,” he tried to encourage me, checking the line connecting my harness to his, but all I could hear was my heartbeat thundering inside my skull as I tried not to look down. What ever had convinced me to scale this cliff? Mankind was meant to keep its feet on solid, flat earth. It was pure hubris to climb above one’s station. I would be struck down and fall to Earth for daring to get so close to the sun.

“You’re not going to fall,” Dan said, and I realized I had said that last bit out loud. He gave a long-suffering sigh, easily clambering sideways and up again, hardly looking at the rock as his chalked hands and feet expertly found each gap. I, on the other hand, was quaking in place. Any movement could be the one that sent me tumbling to my fate.

Finally I could hold on no longer. A bead of sweat dripped from my temple and I instinctively moved my hand to wipe my forehead; too late, I reached back for the rock face and met nothing. There was a half-second where I dangled, suspended over the abyss. Then came free-fall, the ground rushing up to meet me, air whipping my hair back from my face, the horrifying swooping in my gut that told me this was it, this was where it would end--

The line went taut and the breath was punched from me as I came to a halt. The harness had caught me, inches from death, the tips of my shoes brushing across the bottom. I felt a profound appreciation for the tenacity of life.

Then Don was back at my side, descending swiftly with the whirring of the harness mechanisms at his beck and call. He landed firmly on the blue mat and unclipped me.

“Maybe indoor rock climbing isn’t for you,” Don said dryly.

“I think I’d like to take up golf,” I breathed, and tried to keep my legs from crumpling.

"Pantoum for a Scapegoat" by Hiram McDaniels

 Note from the author: a pantoum is a poetic style where lines are repeated. But this isn't really a proper pantoum since I changed some words and the order..

I leaned on the railing the night that you lied.

The porch bulb swung gently, a spark still inside.

A sallow-winged moth, entranced by the sight,

Meandered in fruitless pursuit of the light.

The porch swing swung gently. A spark stilled inside me.

Who knew now what other foul truths you denied me?

I stalked off in fruitless pursuit of the light.

The doubt of you followed me into the night.

I knew now there were other truths you’d denied

As the shovel and pickaxe I deftly applied.

Not even you followed me into the night.

You just clutched at the porch-swing and said they were right.

The pick and the spade having been well-applied,

A dark plastic sheet in the earth I espied.

I clutched at the handle and knew they were right.

The truth of it tore at my heart like a bite.

A dark wrapped-up shape in the sheet I espied.

My hands with its dust, red and flaking, were dyed.

You warn with no bark. You’ve a deadlier bite.

Then, floodlights and sirens, all blindingly bright.

A sallow-winged moth burned up at the sight

Of floodlights and sirens, all blindingly bright.

My hands with your sin, red and blatant, were dyed.

I hung by the neck for the night that you lied

"Crabs a la Ovington" by Hiram McDaniels

My mother’s side of the family, the Ovington clan, hails from Maryland, so my blood is blue—blue crabs, that is. Every Memorial Day, we cluster in the baking sun around long tables covered in newspaper until some fashionably late Ovington arrives laden with the centerpiece of the occasion: a fragrant bushel of crabs. Then we dig in.

An assortment of tools are available, and the ones you choose tell a lot about you. Some are fans of the hand-held crab cracker, a specialized tool tailor-made for our purposes (and therefore far too easy). Others prefer a hammer and fork, a blunt approach that ends with shards of shell contaminating the meat.

My strategy is a bit different, two-fold and methodical: Surgical gloves, white and sweaty against my palms under the hot sun; precision implements like sewing scissors and a long silver tine. An unorthodox approach, sure, and somewhat ridiculed. It might be less comfortable in the short run, but I would rather earn the friendly laughter of family than pricks from sharp shell pieces or the three-day sting of Old Bay under the fingernails. In this game, it’s everyone for themselves; there are only so many claws in the barrel.

“If you don’t clean it, you don’t get to eat it.” When I was younger, this mantra was more often than not followed by a sly wink and the passing of meat into hands too young to wield a crabhammer, but I always took it to heart, a bit too serious until I figured out the joke. Today, however, with no cousins in the family under twelve, the law is enforced with an iron mallet. Not that anyone minds when I slide a chunk of claw-meat to the less fortunate, like the patient dog-turned-vacuum at our feet.

I learned from a young age the correct procedure for disassembling and consuming our friend Callinectes sapidus, an intricate motion of prying shells, scraping gills, and cracking the carapace to extract slivers of meat no bigger than your pinky finger. Such a struggle might seem pointless, but to me, it’s more about the experience and community than it is about the final product. If I just wanted crab, I’d buy it canned. The family and labor make it worth it.

"Adit" by Hiram McDaniels

The house is empty,

only you breathing

life into its still rooms

here, high in Appalachia, the setting sun

casting long shadows

down in the valleys.

Dinner by seven, a long night ahead.

By candlelight you twirl in time,

feet sweeping constellations across the kitchen floor,

the radio a conspiratory whisper of song

murmured to an audience of one.

Choral ranks of spring peepers

rise and fall, stay constant.

the daylight hum of grasshoppers

is hushed silent in the blackness.

It is a waiting game.

You listen for the door.

He is a flame you keep putting your hand in,

pushing the envelope, waiting to see how long

you can hold on before you burn.
The clock on the wall ticks toward two.

Imagine: a night where he makes it home

before the birds start.

Elsewhere,

the walls are damp, the mine winds

through miles of rock.

A single headlamp beam pierces gloom

and glints off great crevasses in the earth.

He dreams of dinners together,

He dreams of dinners with you.

(He dreams of dinners for three, for four,

small plates and smaller hands.

But he knows his lungs will be black by forty.)

He treads

unstable ground, smells only

coal dust, shale-stone, the drip

of groundwater over the seams.

Pitch here, differing still

from darkness above. The overseer

orders ten cuts by sunrise,

sweating in the heavy air.

He would rather be anywhere else,

your arm in hand, the dance floor,

a Co-cola, your girlish dress.

He will coax the machinery, listen

for the tremble of pine supports,

forecasting danger ahead.

Slurry pools around his ankles.

The radio goes silent, beams and bolts

gritted in the mountain’s teeth,

a great rumble from the gullet of an angry planet.

You will get the notice at five. The locusts

have not started their buzz, keeping mum

in a dawn vigil.

The creek will not run clear that day.

The creek will not run

but for a trickle of mud, the way ahead

blocked off by rockslides on the mountain.

Three knocks

come at the door frame,

your little country house he bought you

with what little country money he had saved.

The radio has been playing static for hours.

You stumble, knee-deep in arbutus, sinking

your palms into dry earth.

Imagine: a life lived with no sunrise.

You are a moth, spiraling dizzily

about an extinguished candle.

You fall

from orbit, singed

and stricken numb with grief.

A crushing weight.

Dinners for one, now and always for one.

The day dawns gray:

His eyes, never again to open,

you, never again to dance.

"A Work in Progress" by Hiram McDaniels

“No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just

enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it.”

― Karl Popper

I have a history of being a particularly mobile writer. In my earliest days as a self-proclaimed “novelist to-be,” I remember lying in the bathtub, holding a notepad over the water and scratching away at my latest idea; I remember writing at the kitchen table, shuffling my journal away when it was time for dinner; writing in bed after everyone else had gone to sleep, writing sprawled on the floor, writing on the bumpy bus ride to school, writing in the margins of my homework, writing on my arms when I had no other option and a writing mood struck. I never figured out how to write in the shower, but I was well on my way to a solution when I made the transition to the more stationary process of typing out my plans instead of scrawling them on every available surface. Despite this change, one thing that has remained constant is that I never