eBookBreak Away Book Club Edition (Break Away Book Club Edition)
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Overview
On April 27, 2011, just days after learning of their pregnancy, B. J. Hollars, his wife, and their future son endured the onslaught of an EF-4 tornado. There, while huddled in a bathtub in their Alabama home, mortality flashed before their eyes. With the last of his computer battery, Hollars began recounting the experience, and would continue to do so in the following years, writing his way out of one disaster only to find himself caught up in another.
In this collection of personal essays, Hollars faces tornadoes, drownings, and nuclear catastrophes. These experiences force him to acknowledge the inexplicable while he attempts to overcome his greatest fear—the impossibility of protecting his newborn son from the world’s cruelties. Through his and others’ stories, Hollars creates a constellation of grief, tapping into the rarely acknowledged intersection between fatherhood and fear, sacrifice and safety, and the humbling effect of losing control of our lives.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253018212 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/04/2020 |
| Series: | Break Away Book Club Edition |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 180 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
This is Only a Test
By B. J. Hollars
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2016 B. J. HollarsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01821-2
CHAPTER 1
Goodbye, Tuscaloosa
BEFORE
Let me tell you about my wife and my dog and our bathtub. How just minutes prior to the storm — minutes prior to peeling the cushions from the couch and positioning them over our heads — my dog and I stood barefoot in the grass staring up at a swirling sky.
She began to bark at it.
"Quiet," I hissed. "No barking at tornadoes."
I pulled the dog back inside, checked the television, but it wasn't until the power cut out that we were prompted to enter the tub. The meteorologist — who would become a god that day — had just switched from radar screen to video feed, and in those final seconds before we were plunged into darkness, the TV revealed a single gray cloud narrowing as if sucked toward the ground through a straw.
Flashback to the tornado drills of my youth — folded face-to- butt in the bowels of Lindley Elementary in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Face down and neck covered, in the rare moments when the drills turned real, I'd steal a glance at our lion mascot painted on the school's cinderblock walls, hoping he might protect us.
Just days before, during a pep rally, our principal had made one thing clear: "Nobody messes with the Lions!"
Not even tornadoes? I wondered.
Back in the tub now, and there are no lions anywhere, just a dog that for the first time in her life is subdued. We are all humbled that day, but she is the first, her quivering head tucked tightly beneath my knee.
Here, in the bathtub, our privacy is on display: my dandruff shampoo, my wife's pink disposable razor. To the left of these things sits our mango mandarin body wash, which I wonder if we'll ever use again.
My wife's voice overpowers this wondering, overpowers the sound of the tree limbs scraping the bathroom window as well.
"I had to interview a Vietnam vet once," she says from her place beneath a couch cushion. "Back in high school. For social studies. I drove all the way out to his house, and it was when we were having all those really big storms, remember? And so I got there and he said he'd forgotten I was coming. He said his son's home had just gotten blown away and our meeting had slipped his mind."
She'd never found the proper time to tell me this story, but that late afternoon, trapped in a tub, I've at last become a perfect audience.
"We rode around in his golf cart," she continues. "He told me of the destruction he'd seen."
My wife, dog, and I pull closer into our bunker, awaiting what will later be called the second most deadly weather outbreak in recorded history.
Yet somehow, through some luck, we are the glass eye in the storm that sees nothing. And we are the deaf ear, too, hearing only the drip, drip, drip of the rusted showerhead.
A moment passes. Then another.
"Is it over yet?" my wife asks, peeking beneath her cushion. I'm not sure it's even begun.
AFTER
I will spare you the destruction.
You can imagine, I'm sure, what a tree looks like [begin strikethrough]horizontal[end strikethrough], or a house [begin strikethrough]turned inside out[end strikethrough]. You can imagine also what it means when people say "leveled." What it means when they say "[begin strikethrough]vanished[end strikethrough]."
Stories of [begin strikethrough]legs in[end strikethrough] the front yard, of [begin strikethrough]victims[end strikethrough] wrapped in trees [begin strikethrough]like tangled kites[end strikethrough]. Stories of how all that people have left [begin strikethrough]in the world[end strikethrough] now fits neatly in a grocery cart.
Do not read this too closely. I am trying to spare you [begin strikethrough]the broken glass and the blood[end strikethrough].
What I can't spare you is the strangeness of living in a tornado-torn town amid writers who, much like myself, have a tendency to turn everything poetic.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black[cloud].
In the [Emergency] Waiting Room
Our poet hands are softer than cream cheese, and though we hardly know how to swing an axe, this doesn't keep us from trying. But eventually we grow tired, sore, and return to our more familiar tools — paper and pen — as we rebuild our town word by word.
But before all that — before the axes and the paper and the pen — my wife, dog, and I wake early to retrace the tornado's path. It's the morning after, and with each step, we try to make sense of our shifted landscape.
But the cars used to be here, I think, running my eyes the length of the empty lot, so why are they now there?
Along the route I pick up a newspaper and listen for the prosody in the reports.
Read the repetition: "[begin strikethrough]unrelenting[end strikethrough]," "[begin strikethrough]unprecedented[end strikethrough]," "[begin strikethrough]devastating[end strikethrough]."
And hear the cadence in the quotes: "[begin strikethrough]digging with their hands[end strikethrough]," "[begin strikethrough]sifted through the remains[end strikethrough]," "[begin strikethrough]First responders didn't attend to the dead ...[end strikethrough]"
Every headline displays the word [begin strikethrough]RAVAGED[end strikethrough] or [begin strikethrough]RUBBLE[end strikethrough], and regardless of which story you read, you're told to turn to page 7A.
But not before making a choice:
[begin strikethrough]SEE DEATH[end strikethrough]
or
[begin strikethrough]SEE SURVIVORS[end strikethrough]
The morning after, we see a bit of both.
We join the city's pilgrimage, shuffling directionless down the center lane of 15th Avenue as the sun begins to rise. We are a tailgate without a football game, a processional without a funeral. Through it all, my dog pulls hard on her leash. She doesn't like the sound of [begin strikethrough]chainsaws or shouting or[end strikethrough] silence, and she is overwhelmed with far too much to sniff — the bolt of cloth flung a hundred yards from Hobby Lobby, the milk bottles still upright in the shell of a Krispy Kreme.
All of this seems like a dream, which is the closest we've come to dreaming in twenty-four hours. We hadn't slept well the previous night, mostly due to the students partying in the apartments behind our house. They'd blared their music louder than the warning sirens, allowing every sound to float down from their balconies, infiltrating our half sleep with shouts for Ping-Pong balls and Solo cups.
But we were kept awake also by the whispers we repeated beneath the sheets — "If we'd died," my wife said, staring at the plus sign on her pregnancy test, "then no one would've known about you."
So many lost so much that day, but we still kept our secret.
CHAPTER 2A Test of the Emergency Alert System
Directions:
To the best of your ability, please answer the following questions.
1.) Which of the following is not currently found in my bathtub?
a.) My wife
b.) My dog
c.) My unborn child
d.) Tornado
2.) Which of the following activities are best performed while enduring a disaster in your bathtub?
a.) Secret sharing
b.) Secret keeping
c.) Dog petting
d.) Scrubbing the tub
e.) All of the above
3.) Which of the following is the proper response in the immediate aftermath of a disaster?
a.) Calling family
b.) Calling friends
c.) Waiting for the cell phone signal
d.) Continuing to wait for the cell phone signal
e.) Leashing your dog
f.) Unleashing your dog
g.) Introducing yourself to God
h.) Introducing God to your wife and dog and unborn child
i.) Living up to your part of the bargain
j.) Exiting your house
k.) Wondering how your plant didn't tip
l.) Drinking a beer
m.) Drinking two beers
n.) Drinking zero beers and remembering your part of the bargain
o.) Drinking four beers and remembering your part of the bargain
p.) Pouring your beer in the sink
q.) In the grass
r.) In the plant that didn't tip
s.) Telling your wife the words that got stuck in your throat in that bathtub
t.) Writing your wife a note — it'll last longer
u.) Taking a photo — it'll last longer
v.) Crumbling that note, that photo, and cracking that beer instead
w.) Unleashing yourself to God
x.) All of the above
y.) Some of the above
z.) None
4.) True or False: You were just a little scared.
5.) Which of the following newspaper quotations has been fabricated?
a.) "We saw it spinning across the street ..."
b.) "I was standing at the door and saw it coming."
c.) "... I looked out the window and saw it hovering over the lake ..."
d.) "I was just trying to get my grandkids something to eat."
e.) "It just sat there too. Like it was chilling."
f.) "I have a shell of a home; just four walls."
g.) "I pulled two dead bodies from a ..."
h.) "I found an elderly lady and a three-year-old ..."
i.) "People laid blankets over the bodies of neighbors ..."
j.) "First responders didn't attend to the dead."
k.) "It happened too fast to be scared."
l.) "This just can't be true."
m.) None
6.) Which of the following tools most effectively removes debris?
a.) Chainsaw
b.) Axe
c.) Bow saw
d.) Poem
7.) Where is the silver lining?
8.) In what ways did your students respond to your attempts to contact them?
a.) With kind assurances of his safety
b.) With concern for your safety
c.) By writing you a poem
d.) By writing you an email
e.) By asking you for her final grade
f.) By thanking you for an "awesome" semester
g.) By wishing you the best of luck in your new job
h.) By wishing you no ill will (despite the B–)
i.) By apologizing for the late paper — "The tornado ate it."
j.) By asking for extra credit
k.) By asking "pretty please" for extra credit
l.) By asking you for your story
m.) By asking you what she's supposed to do now
n.) By asking you "Where is the silver lining?"
o.) By asking you if he'll seriously never see you again
p.) By telling you she'll Facebook you
q.) By telling you that composition class taught him little of survival
r.) By telling you that African American literature taught him little of survival
s.) By writing "The nightmares won't quit coming, will they?"
t.) By writing "TTYL"
u.) By writing
v.) By not writing
w.) With silence
x.) All of the above
y.) Some of the above
z.) None
9.) In the space below, please draw a picture of anything but this.
Essay:
In the space below, please write whatever you must. You can understand, I'm sure, the necessity of writing, even in the dark. Of re-inhabiting a space you'd just as soon forget. I'm asking you not to forget. I'm asking you to remember. To recall the relief you felt in waking up the morning after. And the frustration you felt while mummy-wrapped in the sweat-soaked sheets. Please take a moment to remember the way your foot crunched the cockroach on your walk to the bathroom that night.
Consider the loss of life and all you didn't lose. All you had to lose. All you might've lost had the wind recalculated its route.
Consider infrastructure, pregnancy tests.
Reconsider question #4.
Please, I'm begging you; do not provide specific examples in the space provided below. ___________________________________________________
___________________________________________________
___________________________________________________
CHAPTER 3Epistle to an Embryo
May 8, 2011
Dear Future Child,
I write to you today so that you might have some account of our first disaster endured as a family. You see, you were there, too, as the tornado swirled overhead.
This is the part of the story we don't tell people because you are not here yet — just some tiny embryo — and the world is too unstable. There are still far too many factors left unaccounted for, too many variables.
Only sometimes, I'm told, does X + Y = BABY.
This morning, while cruising the cereal aisle in the grocery store, your mother nearly gave our secret away. There she was, mulling over the mini-wheats, when confronted by a cereal stocker named Al.
"Happy Mother's Day," he told her.
"Thank you."
"Are you a mother?" Al inquired, and after a moment's hesitation — after weighing the unforeseen consequences of confiding in a stranger — your mother whispered, "No, but maybe one day."
Al nodded, returning his attention to the toasted oats and filing away the only clue we've yet to offer of your existence.
Now, I admit, Future Child, I know as much of growing babies as Al does. However, in the past few days, I've become accustomed to a new vocabulary — "fallopian," "ovum," "folic acid" — a great flurry of words now left fluttering around our unscathed house.
This is your father's attempt at using his new vocabulary in a sentence:
HOW MANY PLACENTAS DOES IT TAKE TO SCREW IN A LIGHT BULB?
And:
IS IT TIME TO CHANGE THE AMNIOTIC FLUID YET?
I am a poor student, though at least I know the one word we are never to say: [begin strikethrough]miscarry[end strikethrough], which to me sounds suspiciously like a football snafu, some ill-fated effort in which the ball was not properly tucked in the crook of one's arm.
Let me try another sentence:
I HOPE THAT WE DON'T [begin strikethrough]MISCARRY[end strikethrough].
You're probably wondering, Future Child, what might lead one to [begin strikethrough]miscarry[end strikethrough]. Is it dependent on the stress of the mother, the split of the cells, the tornado overhead?
All of these things, likely.
I wonder if you could feel our heat as we gathered tight around you. If you had an inkling of what we were learning for the very first time — that your protection suddenly seemed far more important than ours.
And trust me, Bucko, in your current state as an unstable embryo, protecting you is no easy feat. Just imagine holding tight to a poppy seed while on a roller coaster. You are as precarious as the water droplet clinging to our rusted showerhead, as uncertain as the small-clawed squirrel teetering atop the wire outside our house. You are the siren, the silence, the funnel and the cloud. But this is just the start of who you are.
While huddled in our bathtub, I thought, You are an I, or an almost I, and was reminded of a poem I taught last spring to a class that hardly cared.
Of the many ways I think of you, I most enjoy imagining you as the almost I; not yet a "he" or a "she" but an "almost." And maybe, if we are lucky, a "soon-to-be." A "person-in-progress." A bucko. My bucko. One whose future will be determined by weather and coin flip and fate.
What, I wonder, will the universe decide for you?
Which you will you be?
Will you buy the corsage or the boutonniere?
Which talks shall I reserve for your mother?
Though perhaps since your conception occurred so close to the tornado's birth, you will come out half tornado, instead; a crosspollination of sorts, your abnormality invisible on one Doppler screen, but wholly visible on another.
Let's pretend, for argument's sake, that you do leave the womb spinning. What are we to do with you then? How do we swaddle your swirling shape? How do we confine you to a crib?
Fatherhood, I'm told, is hard enough without the convergence of cumulonimbus and vapor, though perhaps this is the unique challenge with which we've been blessed. Our penance for survival.
And let's not even discuss your adolescence where, just for spite, when I say "Don't you even think about blowing down the neighbor's mailbox!" you'll blow down his gazebo instead.
Or his tree. Or all of our trees.
Have I told you about the time your mother and I dreamed up an alternative ending to our lives? How from our place beneath that rusted showerhead, we whispered prophecies?
If we die here nobody will ever know about ...
We barely even knew of you ourselves. Just three days removed from the plus sign on the pregnancy test, the new world stretched before us still seemed unfathomable.
We could not conceive that we had conceived.
What universe, we wondered, would allow for such a thing?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from This is Only a Test by B. J. Hollars. Copyright © 2016 B. J. Hollars. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
<P>Acknowledgments</P><P>I. Dizzied<BR>Goodbye, Tuscaloosa<BR>A Test of the Emergency Alert System<BR>Epistle to an Embryo<BR>To the Good People of Joplin<BR>Fifty Ways of Looking at Tornadoes<BR>The Longest Wait</P><P>II. Drowned<BR>The Girl in the Surf<BR>Dispatches from the Drownings<BR>Buckethead<BR>The Changing<BR>Death by Refrigerator</P><P>III. Dropped<BR>Fabricating Fear<BR>Fort Wayne Is Still Seventh on Hitler's List<BR>The Year of the Great Forgetting<BR>Hirofukushima<BR>Punch Line<BR>Bedtime Story</P><P>Works Consulted<BR>Credits<BR>Book Club Guide</P>What People are Saying About This
"This Is Only a Test is an immediate read. I don't only mean you should read it immediately, though I do mean that deeply. I mean the act of reading this wonderful new collection is close, personal and compelling. The book is nearly alive in your hands as each story, and then each implication, each idea unfolds. In one section, a tornado falls from the sky and the family—husband, wife, dog and unborn child—seek shelter in a bathroom tub. But what do you say, think, wonder about and do when the event is over? What do you tell your future child? How do you talk to anyone else? Whether it's storms, or drowning, lake monsters, incendiary bombs or a child's fever, these events, present and historical and intimate, seep into every later moment. This is an elegantly written book about how we love each other in a terrifying world. "
"There's plenty of room aboard the Hollars bandwagon and here's your chance to experience what his growing audience already knows and loves—his warm intelligence, his companionable voice, and the how-does-he-do-it trick of spinning terror into tenderness."
"In the face of disaster, of childbirth, of fatherhood, Hollars finds the perfect middle-ground in the strange void between loss and gain: that the center, despite what the numbers tell you, isn't zero, but something greater than that—a souvenir to say that we are here and we are answering impossible questions the best and only way that we know how."
"This Is Only a Test exposes our fears—real and fake, invented and imbedded—of disasters. Through Hollars's own experiences, research, and rememberings, he examines how our fears are often unfounded or inflated, even created. B. J. Hollars is in a field all of his own."
"In these quirky, inventive stories, B.J. Hollars depicts a world both dangerous and unreasonable, a place where the local TV meteorologist assumes the quality of a god. Character may not be fate in This Is Only A Test but the reverse is always true—we reveal ourselves by our response to the random cruelties of the universe, from errant meteor strikes to a small child's fever rising in the night."
"Through spare, haunting, and heart-wrenching prose, Hollars deftly guides the reader from the tornado-torn streets of Tuscaloosa to the lakes and rivers of Wisconsin, from his backyard to nuclear Japan, and ultimately into those tiny intimate moments of fear that shape a new father's consciousness. Combining a novelist's ear for dialogue and drama with a poet's eye for detail, Hollars's essays delve into the hard spaces, mapping out a place for hope, or at least some small moments of happiness."