Dark as a Dungeon in the Heart

The night of 9/11, I couldn't sleep. There was a metal plate on the street a couple of blocks over, and every time a car clanked over it, my eyes shot open and my heart spiked. There was so much violence and sadness in the world.

This story started brewing that night. I was trying to boil the earth-spanning horror down to human scale, as a way of dealing with it. I wanted to connect it to music, which was my own refuge at the time, and I'd been listening to a lot of bluegrass thanks to time spent with my dear friend Molly--one of the great songwriters of all time. The title of the story, Dark as a Dungeon in the Heart, comes from the chorus of a traditional bluegrass number that Molly played. A song that romanticizes the coal mine: "Where the rain never falls, and the sun never shines / it's as dark as a dungeon in the heart of the mine."

The character I chose to hang this story on ended up being a musician. Her alcoholism and family dynamics became stand-ins for the helplessness and angst of 9/11. Originally, I planned for the grounding of airliners to be the reason why she had to drive cross country instead of fly, but I eventually decided against pegging the time period. The urge to drive sprang from her character instead, her desire to fix her life before it got out of control.

Skeptical readers may feel that the story traffics in too much Appalachian cliché, with porch-side hootenannies and grinning hillbillies. But I've spent some time around Molly's hometown in southern Ohio, and I've been to those whiskey-and-banjos hootenannies. It's real, and it's magical.

Woven Tale Press published this version of the story in Summer, 2018.

Photo Credit: Denise An (Instagram @mysterious_substance)