Georgia Earth
by Jan Starkey
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
I. Clay
In the early light of the sun, a highway stretched away in a straight line as far as Claire could see from the backseat of the silver Bonneville. She sleepily turned to watch two water droplets of condensation race across her side-view window. Claire had been in the car for what felt like an eternity.
She thought how lovely were the street lamps that dotted the road, how they towered over it while they weaved in and out of focus, together with the telephone poles, their black wires crisscrossing along the shimmering, newly paved parking lots. She forced her eyes to blur so that the lights transformed into hazy snowflakes or misty gray dandelions.
Out of nowhere, a swath of civilization materialized: a Howard Johnson’s, a Shell station, a Chevrolet Dealer, Shoney’s, Hardee’s and White Castle. And when they stopped the car, the smell of pancakes, bacon, eggs, and stale syrup wafted through the air.
This would be her family’s next home, Macon, Georgia, though not completely quite yet. For the next weeks, off this road, her parents arranged for lodgings at an extended-stay motel: The Red Carpet Inn — second story, a balcony over the swimming pool — with a window air-conditioner, double beds, one full-bed for her and her brother, and one for her mother and father, right next to each other.
“Wait until you see the Georgia red clay,” her mother said. But when she saw the dirt for the first time, it wasn’t red, it was orange. She thought how when she first saw the ocean, it wasn’t blue, it was green. She didn’t understand why people would say it was one color when it was another.
The orange dirt did have the properties of clay; it could get slick-smooth when your heel slid through it after a rain. She spent summer days barefoot, learning to walk on whatever rocks or sticks suddenly cropped up in yards or paths in the forest.
At the beginning of the summer, her feet weren’t used to the ground but, by the end of summer, she could run on rocks and dirt, which is what her road led to.
II. Mud
The houses on her road — she could count five — were only just built: on her side of the road, four, and on the other side, one; Daphne’s house. Claire didn’t much like to play with Daphne because she didn’t understand her or the ways of her family. They all adored Elvis Presley; there was a black velvet poster of him in the unfinished basement.
Daphne’s sister was older, really older, practically a woman. It was almost as if Daphne, herself, were an old lady in a child’s body; she was always sort of sickly and wiped her nose a lot, and she seemed perpetually bored.
The Van Deveres lived next door: two sisters, Sonya and Nina, and their brother Alex. Every weekday morning, Claire’s mother would stop the car in front their house to pick them up on the way to school. The two girls’ hair was in perfect Laura Petri flips because they used hot rollers. Alex wore thick black glasses and sported a crew cut. Sonya and Nina told her that their mother would sometimes walk around the house topless; they were used to nudity. Claire couldn’t even bring herself to say the word “naked.”
The house at the top of the street, a steep hill, belonged to Jimmy McClellan. He rang the doorbell for Claire and Cal to join him at the swimming pool where they all cooled off during the high heat of summer. They walked together down to where the road changed to mud, then forest, past a construction site that repeatedly metamorphosed in a swampy mess of sand piles, clumps of clay and bulldozers, which to Claire looked like monster-sized insects. A footpath laced through the forest to the clubhouse.
As for the other two houses, she didn’t know who lived there because they didn’t have children, though she saw the man from the house next door when he put out sprinklers to water his lawn.
On the parallel road, up from the pool, lived the Dunleavys. Kevin Dunleavy, her brother’s friend, said he wanted to marry Claire when they grew up. He had a twin named Mark and five other blond-haired siblings — Claire couldn’t keep their names straight — and Donna Langley, who would become Claire’s best friend. Donna wore glasses that she kept pushing up so much she broke them and had to tape one of the temples for it to hold it.
III. Slime
One night Claire slept over at Donna Langley’s house after a dinner at Shakey’s pizza parlor. “Come into my parlor said the spider to the fly!” Scott Joplin’s “Stop Time” ran automatic on the player piano as if the keys were played by a ghost, and the black-and-white films of Laurel and Hardy spun from reel to reel.
Claire ate too many slices of pepperoni pizza, not realizing it until she thought she might burst. When Donna’s mother gave her an Alka-Seltzer, Claire drank the fizzy, cloudy concoction and promptly threw up everything, but then she felt better.
At Donna’s house, the grownups went to sleep first, and that’s when Donna pulled down a pile of Playboy magazines that her father kept in the guest room closet. Donna dragged stacks into the den and they flipped through page after page. Claire didn’t like to look at anything except the comics in the last section; after a while, she skipped the rest and turned straight to the comics. The whole time, she felt wrong about gazing at the pictures, although that didn’t stop her.
It was two o’clock in the morning before Donna snuck the magazines back. Then Claire pulled her covers up to her chin in the second twin bed — lights out — and she was under in a wink.
IV. Blood
The room of The Red Carpet Inn, once you turned on the air-conditioner, was a bit of heaven. She liked sleeping next to her older brother, Cal, under the cool sheets with the whir of the air.
“It may take a while before we move into our new house,” her mother said. Her parents were still looking for it, but already her father was back at work. It was August. This year, Claire would start school.
For now, outside the window, she lived aside the glossy plastic statue of Big Boy, his strong right arm holding up a super hamburger like he was offering a magic lamp.
After breakfast, Cal and Claire swam in the small pool, half shallow, half deep-end. Cal practiced jackknives off the diving board while Claire spun in a tube-float, keeping an eye on the time.
Claire and Cal and their mother watched Dark Shadows at four o’clock, religiously; they never missed it: the vampire, Barnabas Collins, in his bleak elegance, charming his distant cousin Victoria Winters, as he traveled through history, in and out of parallel universes, with a cast of ghosts, witches, warlocks, and werewolves who haunted Collingwood mansion. Claire was enchanted.
In the late light of the long days, as she drifted toward the close of evenings, she would listen to the radio. Some songs came around again, she noticed, on a loop.
She waited for “DOA.” The music carried her into its eerie atmosphere. The airplane pilot crashed the plane and, as he lay soaked in warm, silken blood, he asked God to take him to heaven. Claire felt a tingling all over her body; the refrain enthralled her...
I remember
We were flying along and hit something in the air
I remember
We were flying along and hit something in the air
V. Beach
Claire had been afraid of the dark since she was three, when she met Old Scratch on the rooftop of her first house in a dream. His sidekick lived beneath her bed, his matted fur sticking out from under.
Claire talked with Old Scratch as they perched at the crown of the roof’s slant, under a starless sky. “What’s that in your hands?” she asked him.
“It’s a slat,” he said. “I’m removing them one by one.” His voice was deep and soothing. They looked out over the neighborhood houses and yards. The grasses glittered in the dream light.
“Where do you live?” she asked him. He paused and motioned his arm toward the neighbor’s swing set, then pointed his forefinger to a spot imperceptible in the distance.
Old Scratch came to life out of the coat on a hook by her bedroom window, his face under the hood, his pointy ears, his moustache and forked beard clearly visible in the lurid light streaming through the crack where her door met carpet.
When Claire was four, her parents said they wrapped Old Scratch in a blanket and packed him in the car trunk on their way to the beach in Emerald Isle, and there they cast him into the ocean. It took him three more years, until they moved to Georgia, to crawl out of the water and back to her.
But there was the Devil — who was God’s opposite — and then there was Old Scratch, a different devil, so Claire knew that even if Old Scratch were drowned, the Devil was still around somewhere.
She had heard that the Devil would come to the windows of children who were left alone in their houses during the day. In the interstices of the afternoon when her brother was at school and her mother left to drive their maid home, Claire tried to keep the curtains shut but, sometimes, she couldn’t help herself and peeked behind them quickly. Relief washed over her every time his face wasn’t there. And when it was raining and the sun was shining, that meant the Devil was beating his wife.
VI. Muck
“Hotter than hell,” said Jimmy McClellan. The summer temperatures in Georgia climbed up to the hundreds for days on end. For periods, the air hung so thick with moisture, to breathe felt like you were swimming in a dream.
At the bottom of her street, where the road stopped and turned to mire, four houses lingered in various stages of construction. On one patch of land, with cinderblocks only, the rich, clumped-up clay mucked up against the walls of what would be a basement, and you could walk across a bridge of planks to the border of the blocks.
Two half-built houses had full rooms, the one on the left with doorways like giant nostrils, the frames absent of actual doors to close and open, and the one on the right with a bare wooden staircase leading up to second and third floors. That house was ideal for playing “Dark Shadows,” a game that Cal had made up, like hide-and-seek.
There was a perpetual odor of the powdery white substance that spilled out of the drywall, slaps of fresh, vaporous paint, newly mixed cement, sawdust, and the sour scent of Georgia earth that permeated everything so that you had to get used to it, though Claire never could.
One house had a drainpipe that emptied to a trench, which filled after a hard rain and rarely completely dried up, the surface clay wet, glimmering and yellowy. Claire spied a swarm of mosquitoes there that laid and hatched their eggs. “Egg, larva, pupa, adult,” said Jimmy McClellan. “Then the cycle starts up again.”
In the carport of the fourth house, Jimmy McClellan spotted a cottonhead snake. He alerted the neighbor who watered his lawn a lot, and the man chopped its head off with an axe. Claire stayed far back and hid her eyes, but Jimmy McClellan described it, saying the snake body kept lashing and squirming about even after the head had been severed from it.
“Do you think it was still alive?” he asked her.
“It had to be dead,” she replied, “How can something be alive without a head?”
VII. Cinders
All late summer long, the soft music from Sleeping Beauty floated up from the record player, and when it ended, Claire set the needle back to the beginning for “Once Upon a Dream.”
I know you!
I walked with you once upon a dream...
Yet I know it’s true, the visions are seldom all they seem.
In their unfinished basement, Cal orchestrated worlds that arose from his measureless imagination. He directed musicals for Claire and the neighborhood children to star in. Claire played Cinderella, smudges on her cheeks, sitting in her chair by the cinders, musing, “On the wings of my fancy I can fly anywhere, and the world will open its arms to me...”
She played Lili, too, the girl captivated by two marionettes on a miniature stage, in the musical she watched with her brother at The Red Carpet Inn. When their parents left to run an errand to the ice machine, Claire and Cal hopped up and down on the beds, strings from the ceiling guiding their movements.
Frequently, Cal set up stations on the ping-pong table to create creepy crawlers; the children pouring the muted colors of goop into metal molds. Or he divided the children into teams and they lay on their stomachs atop the fluffy rug, shooting marbles that held shiny flecks like pixie dust, suspended.
Time and again, Cal played the spinning wheel song on the piano while the children jumped and danced. Or Claire sat by his side on the bench in a duet of “Heart and Soul.”
Copyright © 2026 by Jan Starkey
