Holler Song
This piece is an example of narrative point-of-view. Although it’s in the 3rd person (he, she, it), the narrator speaks somewhat the way a character would. Not just bad grammar on my part, that. Growing up in the snowy North, I looked forward to visiting my kinfolk in the hollers of Tennessee, not just for what they said, but for how they said it. Retta has a practical side you can’t fault, especially that fluid morality it sometimes takes to live day to day.
Retta danced the willy-nilly, grabbed at slick branches, then lost both feet and whomped back-end down on the ice. Hit ’em mean like that and 70-year-old bones act scared, then angry, then out for revenge—and they’ll complain bitterly for weeks. It’s not how hard the ground is, makes ’em mad; it’s how brittle the bones h
