Danielle Barr
Novel Extract
Nothingbergers was named a third-place Finalist in the 2025 Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration, judged by Michael Nath.
Chapter 1: Cletus
I’m not sure whose bright idea it was to stick the old water tower next to the graveyard–how many boil water notices had there been on account of somebody’s mawmaw leeching her corpse juices into the water supply?–but it sure did make it convenient for Daddy after Mama fell the hundred-fifteen feet from the balcony of the Hyacinth County standpipe onto the gravel road of Cemetery Circle below.
Generally I’d assume there would’ve been some sort of investigation, a medical examiner’s report, and various other what-have-you. But of course Hyacinth County troubles itself with no such nonsense, open and shut as it was. Dead body, high tower, small-town scandal: a suicide, obviously, to escape the inevitable shunning, though that only served to deepen the distaste lobbed at the rest of us Bergers, but that part comes later.
That summer, I am ten, Amber twelve; someone had the sense to leave baby Tandi with the neighbor when Daddy sent for us. At first I was sure it was a surprise–hadn’t Amber and I driven our parents near to madness with talk of a pony from the November prior clear through to that very morning in July? It’s only on the walk down toward Cemetery Circle, sweltering, sweat dripping from the tips of our Berger noses–skipped a generation, mayhaps, because Daddy sported a squat, flat nose, but ours were straight, and dignified, all but identical to Granddaddy’s–that Amber got a hunch something was awry.
A smattering of Daddy’s pals in their rusted square-body pickups, shabby next to his own shiny-slick F-150 in a pearlescent color that shifted in the sun like a beetle carapace, black-purple-green depending on how you came at it, clustered around, heads shaking, murmuring how sad it all was. Wade Timms clapped his hand around Daddy’s shoulder when he saw us coming down the way and breathed something bracing, to which our father rubbed his face and nodded, looking dazed.
As for Mama, she looked fine, no serious trauma but for the hollow quality of her chest and the purple-red pall of her skin, less a woman anymore than one big bruise; not our mother, but an overripe plum. A small, nonsensical voice deep inside me–I was ten after all, and too old for such nonsense–was sure that if we were to just tote the big fireplace bellows down from the house and blow her up, convex again, inflate her insides, wouldn’t that solve it?
“Daddy, what happened?” I asked, and Amber’s sharp elbow jabbed deep into my ribcage.
“What do you think, dummy,” she hissed, and I took that to mean she’d fallen someways and died, not that I was supposed to intuit she’d killed herself, like everybody else seemed to. I moved to be indignant until she gave a little whimper and out of the corner of my eye I saw her lip quivering like a high-hat.
Daddy only removed his cap–Mama called it a Crocodile Dundee hat, olive canvas, curled up on both sides, with a long drawstring that dangled down his sternum–and ran his hand over his stubbly scalp, fireworks of sweat exploding in all directions when he did.
“You girls shouldn’t be seein’ this,” he muttered, as if he was making any move to shield us from the sight of her, as if he hadn’t sent for us.
You know how in the movies, when the main character dies, you kinda sit there awestruck for a moment, waiting for the big reveal that it was just a nightmare or an intrusive thought or something all along, because it wouldn’t do for the main guy to up and die? That’s how I felt that day, wondering when somebody would shoot me a finger-gun and gotcha, but the longer I waited the less likely it seemed to happen. Ten’s old enough to know what it means to die, I guess, but I felt stuck in that part in between believing and denial while everyone sort of shifted around, smoking cigarettes and trying to figure if it was okay to talk, or crack open a Coors, or if they all just needed to avert their eyes from Mama and look somber until it was decided what would be done. Someone went and fetched a quilt from their truck bed–too late to spare much of anyone the sight of it, but still altogether decent, I guess–and laid it over top of her gently, taking uncharacteristic care to straighten out the corners and make everything look tidy, like they were preparing a picnic. Somehow the lumpy blanket there in the middle of everything was worse; I couldn’t see her, keep sight of her, stare and stare at her until my brain registered the lack of breath-bellows beneath her ribs. Mama’s dead, Mama’s dead, I chanted in my head, but still the back of my neck prickled thinking how suffocating hot it must be under that blanket.
At long last the men hoisted her up, the all-clear having come down from the Sheriff–which even then, we understood to mean they’d put in a call to Granddaddy, who in turn had rung the Sheriff to speed things up–that there’s no sense prolonging all our suffering and since we were all already here they might as well get her in the ground before nightfall when the coyotes came sniffing around.
Daddy let out a fulsome howl–“How’d she do this to me?”, all the vowels drawn out like a shifting semi–what scared me nearly half to death, wondering if the carrion scavengers had set upon us early, and, for a brief second, I weighed in my my mind, to my great shame, exactly how far I might be willing to go to defend my mother’s corpse from the varmints (the answer was not all that far, in spite the wretched guilt that plagued me besides). But no, it was only my own father, broken just like Mama, and little old us, Amber and me and Tandi at Ms. Kindly’s next door, suddenly pitiable and motherless.
It was only then, Wade gripping her by the armpits and Jimmy Riggin up under the hollow behind her knees, the horrible looseness of her joints, appendages jiggling like gelatin, that the terrible truth of the whole matter clarified itself frank-like for tender me, aged ten: things could not possibly be the same after this, for one, and for another, the curse of Hyacinth County spared nobody, not even the lineage of her most favored son.
Hyacinth County sits high on the top of a mountain ridge in southwest Virginia, the proverbial last stop on a disused highway branched off of I-77 somewhere around Hillsville and then winds up like a serpent through the hollers and corkscrews around the final steep climb of Possum Spit Hill, then drops precipitously down the other side toward West Virginia. It’s just remote enough that the speed limit ends a half mile from the foot of the highway exit ramp and things’s left up to God and Sheriff Watanabe (misleadingly not Asian, if you can believe it) to keep the hot heads and gear heads and crackheads flying down County 21 alive and kicking long enough to breed, thus continuing on the fine tradition of wallowing their pitiful lives away landlocked here between Maileyville and Fourtree. Reason being, for those curious, that nobody ever moved to Hyacinth County, only away. Which I’d wager is part of the reason Granddaddy was such a hot commodity in these parts his whole life long: not only was he a transplant–from the big cities no less–but then there was the whole being filthy rich aspect that made everyone feel real chest-puffy over the fact he’d chosen our little hovel to hunker down in, proof that the place, and by extension the people who lived here, were something worth being proud of–a new and wholly novel impression as addictive as anything Barley Holt sells out of his Impala down by the stockyard.
So he was a real big-time fellow to have around, and the family, by which I mean Daddy, wielded his influence–our proximity to it–like a hot poker to get things moving in our favor when we needed, getting Mama buried without a fuss just the latest in a long line of bitsy favors he considered Granddaddy owed him, on account of uprooting him from his life out in California and dumping him in a place like this to begin with.
That summer was satanic-hot, at least according to Father Ramsey at the following Sunday service, which pinch-hit as Mama’s memorial for those who hadn’t been summoned to the roadside those days prior. This ad-hoc funeral had the upside of seeing we two girls not need to purchase any mourning clothes; rather, we’d just stood there next to the hole Buddy Dougal dug with his big orange tractor with our hands folded in front of our skint-kneed denim jeans and dirty Keds, and as we’d come to find tout-suite, somehow our mother’s death had plunged us into a distinctly different standing, financially speaking, so it was something of a blessing, to hear Daddy tell it.
That summer the heat was so ungodly strong the deer carcasses lining County 21 had developed the habit of exploding like innard grenades. I had no need to’ve been worried over Mama being picked clean, because the heat folded the grapes into raisins on the vine, and almost all the coyotes and stray dogs in town poisoned themselves to kidney failure gobbling them up out of grass that sickened yellow, then brown, then altogether disintegrated into the cracked dirt.
So hot here in the county that there was always more liquid sweating down the brittle face of our borosilicate drinking glasses than in it. The glasses themselves something of a trap laid by our parents, just waiting for one of three sets of clumsy young hands to shatter them so Daddy could thread his belt out through its loops fast as if he were pulling a tablecloth from beneath a tower of champagne flutes, and lay a couple good wallops across our backsides that bloomed and welted like poison ivy, though I’ve never had the unfortunate occasion to get poison ivy on my ass.
Father Ramsey never said it outright, that type thing being impolite when there were half-orphaned children sitting in the pew front and center, but there was a lot of pointed hand-wringing over the damnation-worthy sin of killing something made in God’s own image, prompting the older women with their accidental lavender hair puffed up in cotton candy helmets around their waxy collapsing faces smeared with lipstick and upturned chins to nod along like now she’s gone and got her just desserts.
As for me, my world had become a house of mirrors, everything grotesque and uncanny, me nauseous and unsteady in the center of it all. Hadn’t Father Ramsey heard Mama’s dutiful confessions every week for years on end? Hadn’t we sat in these pews every Sunday my whole life, with Father Ramsey smiling benevolently down while Mama paused at the end of every scarred bench to pass round the little wicker basket for the offering? Years and years of that song and dance, erased by one little swan dive?
For her part, baby Tandi squalled and squalled, unconsolable. Her furious face was the same purple-red my mother’s had been, but besides that she bore a striking resemblance to Mama even then: so much straw-yellow hair for a six month old you’d nearly take it for a wig, inky black eyes that I suppose were actually dark brown and a pleasant roundness to all her features that compelled Amber and me to give her cuddles at every opportunity. There was no way for Tandi to know that Mama had up and died, save for her absence, attributable to anything if you think on it–lock-up or vacation or a three-county tour with the church choir–but babies must have a sense for that type of thing, as she had started squalling that day at Ms. Kindly’s and not stopped since. Daddy’s eyes were bloodshot with sleeplessness standing up at the pulpit next to Father Ramsey.
Earlier in the summer, our one and only sow, aptly named Girl Pig, went into labor. She delivered two piglets, both still and cold as they slid out onto the straw floor of Girl Pig’s pen. Amber and I both looked up at our father with grief-wide eyes, Amber’s deep blue rimmed with red and lacquered shiny as a billiard ball, and his wooly-thick eyebrows knitted together but he swallowed hard and told us there weren’t nothing to worry over, sometimes that sort of thing happens is all, and to keep a lookout. The next tiny piglet was silent, too, but wriggling like a grubworm, black and white as a Holstein but painted with bright red blood that continued to rush out geyser-like afterward, signaling some type of trouble Daddy wasn’t educated enough on porcine matters to figure. Nobody was surprised, then, when Girl Pig’s snorting, straining, squealing transmogrified into slow, belabored breaths and then stopped altogether, blood still gushing.
That one surviving piglet–Moo, we called her, Amber and me–wailed pitiful and desperate for hours. She rooted around in the pen for a teet, flailing blindly and crying the whole time until finally Daddy concluded there was nothing could be done for a runty baby like that with no sow to care for her. Amber and I wailed ourselves, throwing our knobbly bodies across the door to the pen trying to block Daddy getting at Moo, but you know as well as I that two pre-teenaged girls are no match for the burly kind of farm man our father’d grown up to be. While we rained down a maelstrom of anguished fists on the clapboard pen he’d wisely thrown the bolt to when he entered, his footfalls crunching across the chaff made Moo still. Her nose twitched expectantly and she wobbled toward Daddy with soft, happy oinks like he must be the mama she’d been looking for: a look of hope and gratitude I think will stick with me until my last. My vision blurred with tears such that I couldn’t see what happened next, but he called it mercy what he’d done when the oinking stopped and we had no pigs left save for one mean, pokey boar that I came to regard as a murderer for having gotten Girl Pig–and Moo, by extension–into this whole mess in the first place.
With Tandi carrying on in the church I couldn’t help remembering Moo and the type of mercy reserved for motherless things.
You wouldn’t know it to look at Daddy up there, with his coveralls and the red paisley kerchief always dangling a furtive corner from his front pocket, but he’d grown up out in the Hollywood hills with his mother: mansions and pools and fancy private schools filled to busting with the kids of big-wig actors and fancy-pants producers and what have you.
Those are different type people than here. Humans all, obviously, but bred and brought up to be so far removed from us they may as well be a different species. Right from the very first breath they take in mood-lit birthing rooms, with aromatherapy and Enya, things are different for them. Mama’d had Tandi in the Urgent Care clinic just up the pike, the hospital in Clareytown being too far a trek once the contractions started up, and her birth-shrieks rattled the leaded windows out in the waiting room where Amber and Granddaddy and I sat watching reruns of Reba.
Once born–but not fully, with their placentas still tied on and anointed with oils and lovingly slipped into little silk-lined satchels to rot away on their own; Mama once joked she’d, feral with adrenaline, torn Amber’s with her teeth like a wild dog–they pluck some gilded highfalutin word from the ether, Peaches or Minnetonka or Colonel, and that’s what their baby would be called. So Daddy grew up with a slew of playmates the names of which sounded more like shopping lists for the Army surplus depot, and, he himself being called Bison by a supermodel mother who parlayed her burgeoning single parenthood into a reality TV show called Mother Berger’s Got Beef (presumably the aforementioned beef being with my Granddaddy for not troubling himself to stick around), regarded this convention as a sign of upward mobility he should lord over the Hyacinth County townies like a key to the city, just to remind them he came from better stock. And that right there is the long and short of how we got such outlandish monikers as we do: Ambergris and Clytemnestra and Tandoori Berger.
The winter previous, I’d been invited to dinner at the home of a school friend by the name of Mindy Keene, and as they settled in around the great round oak table, I’d excused myself to the powder room to wash the ink and mud of an elementary school day’s work from my hands, and their clanging, too-loud voices drifted down the hall, drowning out the sound of the faucet.
“Her name is Clytemnestra,” Mindy said, her voice betraying her awe.
“That’s interesting,” offered her mother, charitable.
“That sounds like an STD,” said her brother.
“That’s enough,” barked her father.
“But everyone calls her Cletus for short. Like the boys’ name! Isn’t that funny?”
When I crept shame-faced back to my seat, all blazing cheeks and a feeling in my chest like a swarm of locusts, wishing that I was a Candy or Brayleigh like the other bologna-on-white-bread girls at the county school, Mindy’s parents were sharing a bemused look across the table, her mother’s fork hovering over her plate, a sauteed asparagus spear dangling limply off the tines.
There was an undercurrent of something else there at Hyacinth Holy Fellowship, some judgment beyond my mother’s suicide I couldn’t quite suss out, long-faced looks out in the pews but not a one making eye contact with us or with Daddy, but I was given to understand that something about our family standing had been irrevocably changed; we’d left the ranks of those who tended to get on alright and instead joined up with the rest for whom there’s only striving and striving and still falling short. How everyone else happened to intuit this so promptly in just forty-eight-odd hours seemed like magic, telepathy, preternatural-level deduction back then, but that was before I’d come up and seen just how quickly word travels around, an underground railroad.
Granddaddy was there at Mama’s service, too, in the back pew, looking petulant, as he was self-proclaimed to be anti-church but pro-Jesus, whatever that meant, but the quote had been blown up on a billboard in Nashville once and all the Jesus folks really thought it was something. He tried his best to be unobtrusive in a tailored button-down and Levi’s, but anywhere he went in town people always got to whispering over his presence, his legend preceding him and all that. The priest would say something about forgiving Mama’s sins–sins, there being others he wouldn’t come at directly–and Granddaddy would snort, a rodeo bull hoof-tearing at the dirt, and a ripple of shifting church ladies suddenly uncomfortable on their hard seats would radiate out toward the pulpit.
Mama was a hard-line tee-totaling kind, inviting him to church every Sunday with the clucking concern of a hen gone broody, but he’d always said something self-deprecating and full of overwrought machismo along the lines of, “Saving a man like me’s above Father Ramsey’s pay grade,” and she’d just wave him off, assuring us kids that he was just playing up his part and come hell or high water he’d be joining us all in Heaven one day if she had anything to do with it. Course, now Mama was gone and there was no one left to save him. I wondered that day if he was thinking on that.
Only at the end, right before the whole threadbare congregation monotoned their amens, did anybody deign to bother wondering over us kids.
“Lord God,” Father Ramsey intoned, tacking it neatly onto the end of his prayer that otherwise was a stunning rebuke of all Bergers packaged up like love, “keep your hand, Father, upon Amber and Cletus and Tandi, God, and comfort them, Father God, and guide them and spare them, Lord, from their wickeder inclinations. Correct these children, Lord Jesus, and turn their hearts from the sins of their forebears, God, so that they might be made new, Jesus, Father God..”
The whole thing stank like maybe we’d done something wrong in all this to get caught up with a mama who’d jump off a water tower, and my church dress felt tighter around the collar, strangling, so I wrenched at it and flapped the hem of my gingham skirt a few times to kick up a draft–anything for some relief, but nothing seemed to help. I kept craning my neck around, looking for somebody–anybody–to have the same look on their faces like, what the fuck? What kind of loving God-ass service is this? But there was nobody. Just everybody sitting there in the heat, the air itself laying heavy like velvet bedclothes on sweat-slicked skin, choking except for the little pockets of draft from the granny ladies’ lazy fanning, everything so damp and sticky I didn’t notice the indignant tears on my cheeks until Amber reached over and squeezed my furnace-hand in hers. The whole congregation all caught up in Mama’s sinningness, and all I could do was imagine how rough the rusted foamy green of the ladder rungs must have been on her hands as she climbed, how they must have been poker-hot, branding the flesh of her palms until they sizzled and popped, melting like pulling taffy in the sun.
Danielle Barr is a full-time mother of four children aged nine and under living in the rural Appalachian mountains. As a writer of short stories, she was recently named the winner of the annual Driftwood Press Short Story Contest. Her last project was selected as a semi-finalist in the William Faulkner-Wisdom Novel Contest as well as a finalist in the Regal House Publishing Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction. She can be found on Instagram @daniellebarrwrites or Twitter @dbarrwrites.
Photo Credit: Stasha Cole is a PhD student in literature, a poet, and a photographer. She is the editorial assistant for Nimrod International Journal. Her work is forthcoming in Constellations, Zaum, and others.
L'Esprit Literary Review 