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    Phantom Pain
    Phantom Pain
    Phantom Pain
    Ebook34 pages29 minutes

    Phantom Pain

    By Lydia Peelle

    ()

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    About this ebook

    "Lydia Peelle has given us a collection of stories so artfully constructed and deeply imagined they read like classics. It marks the beginning of what will surely be a long and beautiful career." —Ann Patchett

    In Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, Lydia Peelle brings together eight brilliant stories—two of which won Pushcart Prizes and one of which won an O. Henry Prize—that peer straight into the human heart. In startling and original prose, she examines lives derailed by the loss of a vital connection to the land and to the natural world of which they are a part.

    Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing conveys an almost Faulknerian ache for the pre-modern South, for a landscape and a way of life lost to the ravages of money and technology.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 21, 2009
    ISBN9780061960697
    Phantom Pain
    Author

    Lydia Peelle

    Lydia Peelle is the author of the novel The Midnight Cool and the story collection Reasons For and Advantages of Breathing, which received an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. She received her MFA from the University of Virginia and has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Ucross, Yaddo, and Ragdale. Peelle is a recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Prize, the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" honor, and a Whiting Award, as well as the Anahid Award for Emerging Armenian-American writers. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee. 

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      Book preview

      Phantom Pain - Lydia Peelle

      Phantom Pain

      Something’s out there. Something has shown up in the woods of Highland City. Dave Hardy was the first to see it, the opening weekend of bow season, up in his grandfather’s tree stand on the hill behind Walmart. Afterwards he bushwhacked hell-bent down to the parking lot, and, gasping for breath, tried to tell the story to anyone who would listen. The story changed with the telling, and after a while, Dave Hardy himself didn’t know what to believe: See that old pine tree over there? It was close to me as that tree. As close as that blue Honda over there. As close as you to me.

      Panther. Painter. Puma. Cougar. Mountain lion. Whatever you want to call it, by the end of October, half a dozen more people claim they have caught a glimpse of it: a pale shiver in the distance, a flash of fur through the trees. In the woods, hunters linger in their tree stands, hoping they might be the next. In the houses, the big cat creeps nightly, making the rounds of dinner tables and dreams.

      Twenty years in a taxidermy shop and Jack Wells has heard his share of tall tales, near misses, the one that got away. But the panther stories are different, told with pitch and fervor, a wild look in the eye. They don’t carry much truck with Jack. No one, after all, has any sort of proof—a photo, a positively identifiable set of tracks, or even a really good look at the thing. For all Jack is concerned, it’s an overgrown coyote, someone’s German shepherd, or a figment of everyone’s imagination. A mountain lion in Highland City? Sure, there’s woods out there, hills with deep hollers and abandoned tobacco fields; not a whole lot of people, nothing to the south but the PLAXCO plant, nothing to the north but Kentucky—but the chances are just as good you’ll run into a woolly mammoth. People, if you ask Jack, have lost all sense.

      His ex-wife Jeanne is the worst of them, jabbering on about it like it’s some kind of cuddly pussy cat.

      Oh, isn’t it something! she tells Jack, when they bump into one another in the frozen foods aisle of Tony’s Shur-Save. Wouldn’t I like to catch me a glimpse of it.

      Jack is on one of the store’s motorized scooters, the basket filled with items he has begrudgingly picked from the doctor’s new list: brown rice, cottage cheese, egg replacer.

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