Billy Goats by Jill McCorkle, 2001
The magic trick:
Showing the way a naïve child fascination with pain and loss can turn into a lasting reality
J is for Jill.
This story jumps into a warm pool of nostalgia from the very first sentence, remembering the way things used to be and the things the kids used to do.
There isn’t much of a plot, so the whole thing becomes more of a prose poem. Which is not a bad thing at all.
It addresses an interesting issue – the way death and tragedy can be so innocently alluring to children. The kids in this story are intrigued by the awful things around them in their town – murder, suicide, car accidents, mental instability, to name a few. It’s all darkly fascinating to these kids.
So, as the story goes on, the way they process these things is charmingly nostalgic. But the narrator, near the end, changes tone to reflect on how these memories affected the rest of her life.
It’s not so nostalgic, not so innocent, not so charming anymore.
And that’s quite a trick on McCorkle’s part.
The selection:
We used to all come outside when the streetlights came on and prowl the neighborhood in a pack, a herd of kids on banana seat bikes and minibikes. The grownups looked so silly framed in their living room and kitchen windows. They complained about their days and sighed deep sighs of depression and loss. They talked about how spoiled and lucky children are these days. We will never be that way, we said, we will never say those things. We popped wheelies in pursuit of the mosquito truck, which was a guarantee on humid summer nights. We rode behind the big gray truck, our laughter and screams lost in the grinding whir of machinery, our vision blurred by the cloud of poison. We were lightheaded as we cruised our town – the dark deserted playground of the elementary school, the fluorescent-lit gas stations out on the service road of the interstate that scarred the rural landscape, past the rundown apartment complex where transient military families lived, past houses that were identified by histories of death, divorce, disaster. Sometimes we rode up to the hospital, a three-story red brick building that stayed lit throughout the night. We hid in the shrubbery of what was known as the lawyers’ parking lot, a spot near the courthouse rumored to be the scene of many late-night rendezvous between people you would be shocked to see – mothers and fathers you would never suspect doing such things while their spouses and children lay asleep in their beds.
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