Dana Crum - Poet and Writer
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Here’s a Short Story of Mine That Was Published Years Ago

12/20/2010

2 Comments

 
My Heavenly Father
by Dana Crum

This story was published in Gumbo: An Anthology of African American Writing in 2002 and in 64 Magazine in 2000.

Picture
It's the evening after I sinned against God, and the heat so bad it seem like somebody done wrapped a coat round my shoulders even though I don't need one. I start thinking about Hell. If I go there when I die, the Devil he gon' be waiting for me and he gon' poke me with that big pitchfork he got.

I'm sitting on the steps of the porch, looking over at the houses across the street. Old people is out on their porches too, rocking in rocking chairs, fanning theyselves to keep cool. Every now and then one of 'em call across the street to somebody and ask how they doing. Them crickets done just started up their racket, and I'm thinking about what I did at church earlier today. That's when my grandma call me.

"An-DRE!" she say, her voice getting high at the end.

I put them quarters back in my pocket real fast like and look over my shoulder. "Mam?"

Read the entire story.
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This Excerpt from My Novel Was Published Years Ago

9/12/2010

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On the Playground, On the Block
by Dana Crum

This excerpt from my novel At the Cross was published in African Voices in 2001.

Picture
After Sidney and his mom moved to D.C., he passed the first few weeks pouting and sweating. Fans rattled in the windows but blew in only heat, which compounded the heat seeping in through the walls and rising from the floor. It was worse inside than out, making that first summer in D.C., even worse than those he'd experienced in Alabama. There he and his mom had lived in his grandmother's bungalow, where hot air couldn't rise and gather at the highest of several floors as it did now in the cramped, top-floor apartment that was his new home. To escape the heat, as well as the equally stifling boredom, he began going out on the block for more than an RC cola and a bag of corn chips.

On one such evening he sat alone on a parked rusting Pontiac and, scowling, recalled what he'd accidentally stepped on on his way downstairs a few minutes ago. He'd heard a snap! and then a crunch! and had lifted his shoe only to see the thick, white guts of a cockroach splattered over the floor and over both his sneakers. The glossy, black-and-brown shell was cracked and flattened. The wiry antennae and thorny legs fluttered for a moment, then stopped altogether. Nauseous, he feverishly scraped his shoes against the floor to clean them. And now, outside, he gazed at the redbrick tenements, broken sidewalks and slanted dirt yards besieging him and longed for the waving arms of trees, nodding heads of flowers and lush pools of grass around his grandmother's small but clean, white-and-green house. He wondered what the friends he'd left in Birmingham were doing at that moment. Probably, they were riding their bikes down the street, every now and then one of them popping a wheelie while the rest sat crouched over their handlebars in the position their mothers warned would ruin their posture. Sidney was staring at the foot of the hill, wondering what they would do later on when he noticed, less than a second away, a football zipping toward him in a tight spiral. "Catch the ball, man!" someone shouted, and Sidney threw up his hands, his usually reliable hands, but the ball bounced off them and spun in the air before clattering to the ground like a clumsy bird.

Read the rest of this novel excerpt.
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