Badlands

by Cynthia Reeves

A novella about a suburban mother dying at home and attended by her architect husband and two grown children.

222 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Dewitt]

BAD LANDS by Cynthia Reeves (Miami, 2007) is an extraordinary short novel about marriage, family, living, dying, stories, archaeology, and the massacre at Wounded Knee. The visionary memories, dreams, and hallucinations of the suburban wife on her deathbed and of her husband as he tends her bring to mind Katherine Anne Porter’s PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER. The descriptions of the wife’s pain (for which medical vocabulary is bankrupt) are a poet’s: “He had been home alone with her the afternoon the pain in her spine became so much like flame she thought she would literally burn alive. She remembers screaming, the sound emanating not just from her mouth, but from her whole body, as if every pore had found a voice, and Henry shouting into the phone, C’mon, c’mon, my mother is dying here….That was the day they started the morphine.” In one moving scene, the woman’s grown children have retreated to a purchase on their peaked roof, and the father joins them: “’So this is what you two do, when I’m not around?’ Daniel hunches over and presses his fingers into his ribcage. ‘Court certain death?’” Attempting to speak about their common grief, he and his son end up howling: “ahh-ooo—a single soft blues note, the ‘ooo’ pitched high and then cut off in a low strangled scream. The strange scream carries outward into the deep wall of blue and dies away. Henry glances at his father, and then, as if on cue, the two sing softly together—Aah-oooooo, ahh-ahhoooooo. Their howls echo and die.” There are transfiguring beauties , however bleak and menacing these bad lands.