The Captive Condition by Kevin P. Keating Page A

said, her voice occasionally cracking from infrequent use, “a few graduate students may come along and try to decipher the engravings on the headstones. I like to think they feel obligated to check on the eccentric octogenarian living alone in the woods, what with all the squalid meth labs dotting these hills and the desperate junkies willing to murder you for a dollar, but mainly I think they come to purchase my shine and hear a few of my crazy stories.” She tapped the jar with a crooked index finger and winked. “Ah, looks like you could stand for another taste of the creature yourself.”
    The Gonk, who had a fondness for homemade potions, accepted her offer; it made him weak in the knees, hot and sinewy and cathartic beyond all reason, like sex after many months of celibacy, something he knew a bit about, especially after his wife left him for his nemesis at the bistro and didn’t bother to send him the terms of the divorce until several weeks later, only after she made certain the uninhibited sucking and fucking had a real shot at long-term success. In the months that followed, he conditioned himself through rigorous practice and discipline to abstain from any activity that might compromise his goal, but now he allowed himself a celebratory drink or two.
    Dismissing the whole notion of abstinence with a knowing smile and a wave of her hand, the old woman proclaimed, “Sobriety is a myth. We all live at various levels of intoxication.” From a glass pitcher she kept close by, she poured him a tall drink, and they clinked their jars together like two old friends. “I learned it’s easier to give up a mate than it is to give up the bottle. For nearly forty years I lived in this valley, sometimes with a husband, more often not. I lured them here, you might say, to the undertaker’s old cottage because the asylum seemed too romantic. I’d reached my breaking point in the city, you see. Everyone has a breaking point, I believe that, but I reached mine sooner than most. Unfortunately, my ex-husbands didn’t take to the valley.”
    The Gonk looked at the wrinkled flesh of her small, animated hands and the long spirals of gray hair protruding from under her straw hat, and suddenly he wished this whispery husk of a woman, with her flair for psychotropic pedagogics, taught a class or two at the college. On those rare occasions when loneliness got the better of her and she didn’t have the heart to putter around the headstones, she visited the college to deliver guest lectures to undergraduates. Unused to her odd way of speaking in grammatically correct sentences, the students grew restless and fidgeted at their desks. She hardly noticed. While standing at the podium, she sipped her moonshine and smoked her cigarettes, a bent and shriveled elf from a forest that had forfeited its sundry enchantments for the false promises of progress—a country road that served no purpose other than to bury the vegetation under miles of crushed gravel; a hideous tangle of power lines that cut through the canopy of hardwood trees—and with eyes sharpened by decades of living hand to mouth, she told her unenthusiastic audience, “I used to get drunk on art, you understand, but over the years I built up a tolerance to it. These days I find that I need something a wee bit stronger.”
    Instead of fleeing to New York or Paris, what she called “the centers of cultural confinement,” Colette Collins chose to remain in Normandy Falls, where for most of her career she lived in the humble cottage. She chose the cottage not for its seclusion and scenic beauty but for its proximity to the ancient cemetery. Every morning, before the sun funneled into the valley, she rose from her bed and stood at her window, where, as if searching for a way to alleviate the burden of her genius, she surveyed the headstones and contemplated the ephemeral nature of existence. In this way her home became a kind of memento mori, an around-the-clock meditation and