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"There is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off."
—T. H. Huxley
The town of Millbrook existed in a perpetual state of January. Not the calendar month, but the emotional landscape, a liminal purgatory between winter's desolation and spring's false promises. It clung to the hillside like a desperate afterthought, its once-prosperous main street now a museum of faded awnings and repurposed storefronts. The coal had left first, then the steel, then the people with ambition. What remained was a populace who found comfort in stagnation and a newspaper that refused to die.
The Millbrook Messenger occupied the second floor of what had once been the town's only department store. The first floor now housed a bizarre combination of a laundromat and a craft beer bar called "Suds & Suds," which did surprisingly robust business among the town's remaining young people. The newspaper itself was a twelve-page weekly broadsheet that subsisted almost entirely on obituaries, church announcements, and Corrine Weber's advice column, "Ask Corry."
Corrine was fifty-three, childless by choice, divorced by mutual exhaustion, and had written "Ask Corry" for twenty-seven years. She had outlasted three editors, a conversion to digital typesetting, and the great newsprint shortage of 2014. She had also, to her ceaseless amazement, survived the internet age. While larger papers had watched their advice columnists rendered obsolete by anonymous Reddit threads and relationship podcasts, the citizens of Millbrook still slipped their questions into the small wooden box outside the Messenger's office or, increasingly, emailed them to her.
The questions had metamorphosed over the decades. In the nineties, they concerned workplace disputes and neighborhood feuds. In the early 2000s, they shifted to financial anxieties as the town's economy disintegrated beneath them like wet cardboard. Now they often excavated loneliness, probed at children who had moved away and never returned, circled obsessively around the gnawing certainty that life had happened elsewhere. Corrine answered them all with the same unsentimental compassion that had become her hallmark—a voice that cut through bullshit like a wire through clay.
"Stop romanticizing your own suffering," she had written just last week to someone who signed themselves "Forgotten Dreamer." "That's the quickest path to ensuring nothing ever changes. You're not special for feeling left behind—half this town feels the same way. The question is what you're going to do about it. The world doesn't owe you a second act, but it usually rewards those who insist on writing one."
She had reread the response three times before submitting it, wondering if it was too harsh. But harshness, she had learned, was sometimes the only kindness she could offer. Millbrook had a surplus of people willing to sympathize and a drought of those willing to challenge. The town trafficked in comfortable lies—that decline was inevitable, that ambition was futile, that accepting stagnation was somehow noble. Corrine's column was possibly the only place where these comfortable fictions were regularly punctured.
It was Wednesday, her busiest day of the week. The next edition went to press at 5 p.m., which meant she had six hours to finish her column, proofread the town council meeting report, and help the new intern lay out the community calendar. She had just settled at her desk with her second cup of coffee—a bitter, inadequate brew from the office's ancient Mr. Coffee—when Dennis Kaplan, the editor and publisher, appeared in her doorway like an unwelcome apparition.
"We've got a problem," he said without preamble. Dennis had been handsome once, in that broad-shouldered, square-jawed way that small towns produce with reliable frequency. Now he was mostly jowls and regret, his body surrendering to gravity in incremental defeats, his once-commanding presence diminished to something vaguely apologetic.
"What kind of problem?" Corrine asked, already regretting the question.
"Marjorie Sutter died."
"That's sad, but I wouldn't call it a problem with in regards to the Messenger She was ninety-two and had been talking about ‘going home to Jesus’ for the last decade. I imagine she's delighted."
Dennis shook his head. "The problem is, she wrote the Poetic Reflections column for the last thirty years. We've got nothing for that space this week."
"Dennis, no one read that column. It was just Bible verses and sappy rhymes about grandchildren and sunsets. The woman once spent four hundred words comparing God's love to a microwave oven."
"Doesn't matter. We promised a twelve-page paper, and without her four hundred words of drivel, we're coming up short. You're going to have to expand your column this week."
Corrine's headache, which had been politely lurking at the edges of her consciousness, now took center stage, a full orchestra of pain behind her left eye. "I can't just make up questions to answer." Though that was a lie—she had plenty of questions she could answer, she just didn't feel any of them were worth answering so soon—she did not reveal such to Dennis.
"Then find someone to write a poem." Cleearly finished, Dennis turned toward the door. "Hell, ask Naomi Blackwood. I hear she writes poetry."
The name hung in the air like an undetonated explosive. Even in a town as small as Millbrook, some people achieved a peculiar kind of anti-celebrity—a notoriety that stemmed not from what they did but from what was done to them. Naomi Blackwood was one such person, a walking reminder of the town's most lurid tragedy.
Sixteen years ago, when Naomi was just fourteen, her parents had died in what the police report described as a "domestic incident with fatal outcomes" but what everyone in town knew was a murder-suicide of exceptional brutality. Her father, a pharmacist with a gambling problem that had metastasized into something much worse, had shot her mother four times before turning the gun on himself. Naomi, who had been at a school choir concert, came home to find them splayed across the living room carpet. She had gone to live with her maternal grandmother, finished high school without distinction, and then vanished to college somewhere out of state. She had returned to Millbrook three years ago when her grandmother became ill, and had remained after the old woman died. Now she worked at the town library, lived in her grandmother's house, and was the subject of more speculative conversation than anyone else in Millbrook.
People said she wrote poetry. People said she rarely spoke above a whisper. People said she had tried to kill herself in college. People said she collected taxidermied birds. People said she harbored more secrets than this town held in its entire century or so of existence. People said a lot of things about Naomi Blackwood, none of which Corrine knew to be true because she had never exchanged more than a dozen words with the woman, and those had been about overdue book notices.
"Dennis, I'm not going to cold-call the town's resident trauma case and ask her to submit poetry to fill our pages."
Dennis paused in the doorway. "Fine," he said. "But that space needs to be filled by 3 p.m., and I don't care how you do it."
After he left, Corrine sat staring at her computer screen. The cursor blinked accusingly in her empty document. Her inbox contained seventeen unread messages, at least half of which were probably questions for her column, but she couldn't summon the energy to open them. Instead, she reached for her purse, extracted her car keys, and decided that what she needed was a very large cup of coffee that she hadn't made herself—preferably somewhere other than the claustrophobic confines of the Messenger office, with its musty carpet and flickering fluorescent lights.
The Millbrook Café took up the corner of Main and Chestnut, its large windows offering a panoramic view of the town's ever-present state of decline. The scent of stale grease mingled with the sharp tang of cheap disinfectant, clear evidence of a kitchen crisis hastily masked. Corrine pushed through the door, the bell above jangling a lonely greeting. At ten in the morning on a Wednesday, the place was a sparse scattering of souls: Two retirees held court at their usual window table, their chess pieces clicking intermittently against each other. A young mother, her face etched with exhaustion, battled a squirming toddler into a high chair, a sleeping infant a bundle at her feet.
And at the corner table, hunched over a notebook, sat Naomi Blackwood.
Corrine nearly turned around and left. It seemed too coincidental, too much like the universe was pushing her toward an awkward interaction. But the barista had already seen her, and retreat would require explanation. So she ordered her coffee—a large black eye—and while waiting for it to be prepared, she found herself studying the woman in the corner.
Naomi Blackwood was thirty now, though she looked both younger and older than her age; younger in her slender frame and delicate features, older in the premature threads of gray in her dark hair and the vigilant set of her shoulders. She wrote in a composition notebook with a fountain pen, an affectation that would have seemed pretentious on anyone else but on her looked like self-preservation, a deliberate retreat into anachronism. Her handwriting appeared microscopic, as if she were trying to fit an entire world onto a single page.
Corrine's coffee arrived, and she discovered that she was walking toward Naomi's table before she had consciously decided to do so. The younger woman looked up as Corrine's shadow fell across her notebook, and Corrine was struck by the extraordinary color of her eyes—a pale, translucent gray that reminded her of lake water in winter.
"Ms. Blackwood," Corrine started, feeling suddenly awkward. "I'm Corrine Weber. From the Messenger."
Naomi's notebook closed with a flutter. "I know who you are, Ms. Weber. Everyone in town does."
Her voice was not the whisper of local legend, but it was quiet, with a carefulness to each word, as if speech were a limited resource she couldn't afford to waste.
"May I sit?" Corrine asked, then immediately regretted the presumption. "Actually, I apologize for interrupting. I'll leave you to your writing."
"You can sit." Here, Naomi gestured to the empty chair across from her. "I'm curious what the town's moral compass wants with me."
The description startled a laugh out of Corrine. "I've been called many things, but ‘moral compass’ is a new one. And possibly libelous."
The faintest suggestion of a smile crossed Naomi's face. "What would you prefer? ‘Dispenser of hard truths’? ‘Professional pragmatist’?"
"‘Tired middle-aged woman who answers strangers' questions for a living’ would be accurate, if not particularly catchy." Corrine took a sip of her coffee, which was, as expected, superior to what she made in the office's ancient Mr. Coffee. "I'm actually here by coincidence, but Dennis, my editor, mentioned that you write poetry."
Naomi's almost-smile vanished. "People in this town say a lot of things about me."
"So I've heard. I try not to listen to most of it."
"But you listen to some of it?"
Corrine considered lying but decided against it. "It's hard not to hear things in a town this size. Especially when you work for the newspaper."
Naomi nodded, acknowledging the truth of this. "I do write poetry, Ms. Weber. But I don't share it."
"Not even with an audience as discerning as the Millbrook Messenger's readership?" Corrine ventured, trying for humor.
"Especially not with such people." Naomi reopened her notebook, a clear signal that the conversation was nearing its end. "Was there something specific you wanted to ask me?"
The direct question caught Corrine off guard. She had been prepared to ease into the topic, to build some rapport before making her request. But Naomi Blackwood apparently had no patience for the social niceties that governed small-town interactions.
"Marjorie Sutter died," Corrine suddenly blurted out.
"I'm aware. I helped her find large-print mystery novels every Tuesday for the past two years."
"She also wrote a poetry column for the paper."
"I know that as well. It was terrible." Naomi looked up from her notebook, her gray eyes suddenly intent. "Are you asking me to replace her?"
"I'm not sure what I'm asking," admitted Corrine. "Dennis wants me to fill the space, and I don't have enough interesting questions for my column this week. I thought perhaps... but it doesn't matter. I can see you're not interested."
Naomi was silent for a long moment, her pen poised above the paper but not moving. Finally, she said, "I'll consider it. On one condition."
"Which is?"
"Answer my question first. In your column."
Corrine blinked in surprise. "You want to submit a question to 'Ask Corry'?"
"I already have. Three weeks ago. You didn't publish it."
The accusation breathed as the ensuing silence stretched on. Corrine felt a pang of guilt. She received eight to ten questions each week and only answered three or four in her column. Some she passed on to Dennis for future issues; others she discarded as inappropriate or plain uninteresting. She had no memory of receiving a question from Naomi Blackwood.
"What was the question?" she ventured.
Naomi's gaze dropped to the floor before meeting Corrine. "Why does a town remember what it should forget and forget what it should remember?"
It was not the type of question Corrine typically answered. Her column dealt in practicalities—how to confront a cheating spouse, whether to lend money to a financially irresponsible sibling, how to endure a thankless job until retirement, where to buy the best meatloaf in town. Philosophical ruminations on collective memory weren't her usual fare.
"That's not really the kind of—"
"I know," Naomi interrupted. "That's why you didn't publish it. But that's my condition. Answer my question, and I'll give you a poem for this week's paper."
Corrine considered refusing. She could expand her column with evergreen advice about summer lawn care disputes or the etiquette of funeral attendance. But she found herself intrigued by the challenge—and by Naomi Blackwood herself, this woman who had endured the town's most persistent tragedy and emerged with a fountain pen and a question that had no easy answer.
"I'll answer it," Corrine decided. "In tomorrow's paper."
Naomi nodded once, a brief acknowledgment of the agreement. "I'll email you the poem tonight."
Corrine recognized a dismissal when she heard one. She stood, gathered her coffee cup, and hesitated a moment longer. "Did you, by any chance, sign your question ‘Forgotten Dreamer’?"
Naomi looked genuinely confused. "No, I did not. I signed it with my name."
"Oh, I see..." A pause, then: "There must have been some mix-up. Someone else used that signature last week."
"Perhaps great minds think alike," Naomi said, her voice dry. "Or perhaps everyone in this town feels forgotten in one way or another."
As Corrine walked back to the office, she tried to recall the question from "Forgotten Dreamer" that she had answered in last week's column. Something about feeling stuck, feeling left behind. Her response had been characteristically blunt: Stop romanticizing your own suffering. That's the quickest path to ensuring nothing ever changes.
Now she wondered if it had been Naomi who had written that question, if she had somehow misremembered the signature. The thought made her uneasy. Had she been inadvertently harsh to a woman whose suffering was far from romantic?
Back at her desk, Corrine opened her email and searched for messages from Naomi Blackwood. There was indeed one from three weeks ago, with the subject line "Question for Ask Corry." It contained exactly the question Naomi had recited in the café, signed with her full name.
There was also, to Corrine's surprise, a second email from Naomi, sent just five minutes ago. The subject line read "The Poetry You Requested." Corrine opened it hastily.
The email contained no message, just an attachment titled "For the Messenger.docx." Corrine opened it and found a single poem:
THE CARTOGRAPHY OF ABSENCE
In this town, every map marks what is gone:
The pharmacy where my father counted pills,
The kitchen where my mother last spoke my name,
The bedroom where their blood painted what was once a life
That no amount of bleach can fully erase.
The neighbors drew new borders after it happened—
Six feet of careful distance on all sides,
As if tragedy might be contagious,
As if the daughter might carry the father's violence
Like a recessive gene.
Sixteen years later, they still cross the street,
Still lower their voices, still watch me
With that wary blend of fascination and fear
Reserved for living monuments to catastrophe.
They know everything about that night
But nothing about any morning after.
They remember precisely how my parents died
But cannot recall a single poem I've written.
This is how a town curates its memory:
Selectively, superstitiously, with one eye always
On what makes the better story—
The bloodstain, not the hand that scrubbed it clean;
The scream, not the silence that followed;
The tragedy, not the girl who survived it.
Corrine read the poem three times in succession, each reading revealing new layers of controlled rage beneath the measured lines. It was undeniably powerful, but it was also undeniably unpublishable, at least in the Millbrook Messenger, where readers expected gentle reflections on nature and grandchildren, not raw accusations of collective voyeurism and selective memory. Corrine imagined the outrage that would erupt if this appeared in tomorrow's paper; the phone calls from advertisers threatening to pull their meager support, the church ladies canceling their subscriptions in scandalized droves.
She was still staring at the screen, trying to decide how to respond, when a new email arrived from Naomi:
Ms. Weber,
I realized after sending that the poem I provided may not be suitable for our newspaper. Small towns prefer their poetry like they prefer their tragedies: at a comfortable distance. Attached is an alternative that should meet your needs without disturbing anyone's breakfast.
—N.B.
The alternative poem was titled "Spring in Millbrook." It was a competent but deliberately bland description of flowers blooming along Main Street, birds returning to the town square, and hope renewing itself in predictable seasonal patterns. It was exactly the kind of poem Marjorie Sutter would have written, if Marjorie had possessed actual talent—safe, inoffensive, and utterly forgettable.
Corrine sat back in her chair, staring at the two poems on her screen. One was honest but unpublishable; the other was publishable but dishonest. She felt as if she were being tested, though she wasn't sure by whom or for what purpose.
After a moment, she closed both documents and began to compose her response to the original question Naomi had submitted to her column. As she wrote, she found herself addressing not just Naomi but the entire town of Millbrook... and perhaps herself as well.
Dear Naomi,
You asked why towns remember what they should forget and forget what they should remember. The answer is both simple and complicated: convenience.
It's convenient to remember tragedies because they give us a sense of perspective ("At least my life isn't that bad") and a false sense of community ("We all lived through this together"). It's convenient to forget the human beings at the center of those tragedies because acknowledging them would require acknowledging our own complicity in their ongoing pain.
It's convenient to remember that something terrible happened in the pharmacy on Elm Street. It's convenient to forget that a fourteen-year-old girl came home from singing in a choir concert and found her world shattered.
Towns, like people, choose the easiest version of history to carry. The version that requires the least of us. The version that allows us to feel simultaneously informed and innocent.
But here's what I've learned in twenty-seven years of writing this column: What we remember shapes who we become. A town that remembers only tragedies and forgets the resilience that follows them will always see itself as a victim of circumstance. A town that remembers only its glory days and forgets its failures will never build a future worthier than its past.
So what should we remember? I would suggest we remember the poems, not just the bloodstains. The quiet heroism of survival, not just the spectacular horror of loss. The people who are still here, still creating, still insisting on being more than the worst thing that ever happened to them.
That kind of remembering is harder. It requires attention and engagement. It requires seeing our neighbors as full human beings rather than as characters in the town's ongoing drama. But it's the only kind of remembering that leads to real community—the kind where we hold each other's stories with care instead of curiosity.
—Corry
She read over what she had written, knowing it would likely be the most controversial column she had ever published. Dennis would object to its length, its directness, its calling out of the town's worst tendencies. But for once, Corrine didn't care what Dennis thought. She had grown weary of being the town's moral compass, of dispensing the same pragmatic advice to people who never seemed to heed it. Perhaps it was time for "Ask Corry" to address the questions no one was willing to ask.
Then, she composed a brief email to Naomi:
Ms. Blackwood,
Thank you for both poems. I'll be running "The Cartography of Absence" in tomorrow's paper, alongside my answer to your question. Dennis will probably fire me, but after twenty-seven years, I'm due for a career change anyway.
I'd be interested in discussing a regular poetry feature, if you're open to it. Perhaps we could meet at the café again next week?
—Corrine Weber
She sent the email, then immediately forwarded both the poem and her column response to Dennis with a brief note: "This is what's going in tomorrow's paper. It's non-negotiable." Then she turned off her computer, collected her purse, and left the office without waiting for Dennis's inevitable eruption.
Outside, Millbrook looked the same as it always had—the same faded storefronts, the same town square with its obsolete war memorial, the same sense of having been bypassed by whatever forces shaped the modern world. But as Corrine walked to her car, she found herself noticing details she usually overlooked: the new mural on the side of the hardware store, painted by high school students as part of a revitalization project; the community garden taking shape in what had once been a vacant lot, its raised beds already sprouting tentative green shoots; the "Help Wanted" sign in the window of the café, a small but significant indication of economic optimism.
Small signs of life, of continuation, of refusal to be defined by what had been lost. Perhaps the town wasn't trapped in a perpetual January after all. Perhaps it was finally, fitfully, reaching toward February; not quite spring, not yet, but no longer winter either. A transitional month, full of mud and uncertainty and the possibility of growth.
As she drove home, Corrine found herself wondering about the author of the anonymous "Forgotten Dreamer" letter that had prompted her harsh response last week. She wondered if they would see her answer to Naomi and recognize themselves in it. She wondered if it would make a difference.
She wondered, too, what would happen when "The Cartography of Absence" appeared in tomorrow's paper. She could imagine the reactions already—the shock, the discomfort, the rush to condemn either the poem or the poet or both. But she could also imagine the handful of readers who would recognize the truth in those lines, who would perhaps even see themselves indicted and decide to change.
Most of all, she wondered what Naomi Blackwood would make of her published answer—whether she would recognize it as an olive branch, a professional gesture, or something more personal. Whether she would agree to meet again, to discuss that poetry feature that Corrine had just invented as a chance to maybe learn more about the young woman...
For the first time in years, Corrine found herself looking forward to tomorrow's edition of the Millbrook Messenger, not as something to get through, another week's work completed, but as the beginning of something she couldn't yet define. A conversation, perhaps. Or a reckoning. Or even, most improbable of all, a friendship between two women who had lived in the same small town for years without ever truly seeing each other.