In Janet Peery's "What the Thunder Said," our eighteen-year-old narrator, Mackie Spoon, newly across the Texas border from Oklahoma to escape a family run over with religion, embodies the qualities a Texas protagonist should. She's passionate, free-thinking, loner with a heart, and tough. Her language locks her into her setting, a wheat farm in Texas dust storm country where "willow brakes and cottonwoods and sand plum trees had kept the damage down. Still you could see in it the scoured look of things." And Mackie tends to the types of chores one might envision when they think of life on a Texas farm: gathering eggs, milking cows, even assisting the birth of a calf. And while Mackie might have been right at home in Edna Ferber's Giant or Larry McMurtry's "Horseman Pass By," through Peery's story -- a tale of adultery, grief and unrequited devotion -- she tells us something genuine about human nature, no matter where it's lived:

"...We lay down in all of it, in a way that felt like all the world was gathered into one sweet skin, and though you know it's wrong, down deep, in bone and blood and muscle, you want the one thing your head tells you you're not supposed to want, and in that wanting, in that knowing it's wrong, there is a stillness at the center, calm and full and sly, that comes from knowing you will do it anyway, and you tell your head to cease its thinking, to let the bone and blood and muscle have their way; glad, for what you're doing seems the holiest of human acts. And in that time when everything's afight within you, you are whole as you will ever be..."

Luckily for short story fans, Texas looks out for its own. In making a place for voices from every corner of the state, the Texas Bound collection of short fiction and stories on tape just may begin the chronicling of our contemporary literary tradition. In this sense Texas literature doesn't have to arrive, it's already home.

on to Arts and Letters Live

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