Gerry Wilson

Gerry Wilson's debut novel, Spirit Light, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing. Her debut story collection, Crosscurrents and Other Stories, was published by Press 53 in 2015 and nominated for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Fiction Award. One of her stories, “Mating,” won the Prime Number Magazine Award for Short Fiction in 2014. Gerry is a recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship. A seventh generation Mississippian, she grew up in Pontotoc, a little town nestled in the red clay hills of north Mississippi, thirty miles from William Faulkner’s Oxford and far from just about everywhere else.

Story excerpt from Crosscurrents and Other Stories

Crosscurrents

On the boat to Ship Island, Jana and Eric sat below deck on a wooden bench facing a large woman and four children with carrot-colored frizzy hair and freckled skin like their mother’s. The woman wore a loud print dress, its buttons straining over her breasts and stomach. She fanned herself with a folded newspaper. The oldest child, a slight, vacant-looking girl missing her upper front teeth, stared open-mouthed at Jana. Identical twin boys were fighting over a bag of Cheetos. Jana wondered how old the boys were—four, maybe? With these drugs, multiples are a possibility, her doctor had said. The youngest, a little girl wearing a faded pink ruffled top and shorts fat with a diaper, clung to the mother and sobbed into her shoulder. When the toddler turned, Jana saw the wide, flat face and almond-shaped eyes of a Down’s Syndrome child. Jana shivered. So many things could go wrong.

            Eric had said there would be a place to change into her bathing suit on the island, but the thought of dirty stalls smelling of chlorine and sweat and urine had turned Jana’s stomach. She’d worn her suit under a pair of shorts and a tank top, and now it wedged into her crotch and bound at the legs and the spandex tummy panel was so tight she could hardly breathe.

            The nine o’clock boat on Saturday morning had been sold out, so Eric had booked them for ten-thirty on this one, the smallest and oldest of three boats that crossed the Mississippi Sound to Ship Island and back every day in summer.

            “It’s the same boat I used to take,” he’d said. “It’ll be like stepping back in time.”

            It had rained heavily along the coast the night before and the sky was still overcast. The boat sat dockside, dead still in the murky water, only the occasional slap of a small swell, the water more olive-brown than blue or green, foam on the surface like soap scum. Inside, voices echoed off the metal walls: loud laughter, an older couple sitting behind them arguing, children yelling and crying. It hadn’t occurred to Jana that the boat wouldn’t be air-conditioned. Sweat trickled down her back. Her thighs stuck to the wooden bench. She thought of cattle cars and slave ships. She glanced at her watch: ten-forty.

            “Why aren’t we going?” she said.

            Eric shrugged. “Beats me.”

            The little girl across from them had stopped crying. The woman sat her on the floor with a naked baby doll the child slammed against the floor repeatedly. One of the doll’s eyes was missing, a black hole.