The Longreads Blog

Exploring The Paris Underneath Paris

Peter Kneffel/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

There’s so much to see in Paris that it’s easy to miss the over 200 miles of tunnels, rooms, and dead-ends that lay underneath. For 600 years, the city extracted stone from quarries beneath itself, creating a kind of subterranean mirror-image, or “invisible city,” that provided shelter during WWII, storage for the dead in the famous Catacombs, and that now attracts urban explorers. The New Yorker has an excerpt from Robert Macfarlane‘s book Underland: A Deep Time Journey that takes the author underground for a guided tour of a cramped, terrifying wonderland. His anonymous guides are part of a subculture who respect, explore, and document the catacombs, people Macfarlane calls cataphiles. Loose ceilings, standing water, suffocatingly narrow passage ─ urban exploration is not for the faint of heart. On their first night exploring underground, the group shimmies through a narrow foot-and-a-half-wide hole in a wall and finds a place to spend the night.

I pull through and find myself in a low-ceilinged room, five feet high at its highest, with chisel marks visible on the stone. The main chamber has a stone table thick with white candle wax. In its center stands a plastic bong, bubblegum pink and shaped like a foot-long penis. Oyster shells have been arranged around it. The floor is covered in small spill-heaps of gray powder: the spent waste from carbide lamps. Leading off the chamber is an open doorway to a neighboring room, off which another room leads. We explore the rooms: a dozen or so, roughly organized around a supporting central trunk of stone.

“People will probably come to use the party space later in the night,” Lina says. “If we want any sleep, we should get as far from it as we can.”

So we set up camp in a distant room. Its ceilings are low, three or four feet high at the most. We move about it on hands and knees. The air swirls with rock dust, which I can taste on my tongue and feel on my eyes. The upper city seems very distant. I crawl to the back of the room and find that it extends into a low cave-like space, a couple of feet high and wide enough for a body. I settle down for the night there, oddly comforted by the sense of enclosure. Sixty solid feet of stone extend above me. We talk for a while in the candlelight, struck into closeness by the oddity of our dormitory. Then silence falls as tiredness does, with stealth and force.

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The Brazilian Healer and the Patron Saint of Impossible Causes

Illustration by Aimee Flom

Leigh Hopkins | Longreads | July 2019 | 25 minutes (6,131 words)

 

The roosters started at 4:30 in the pasture behind the inn. On the second crow, I rolled onto my back and blinked at the jalousie window’s slatted light, considering my first day at The Casa. We were allowed to ask three questions, no more. A visit with the world’s most famous spiritual surgeon was like going to see the wizard.

Mariana was silent in the bed next to me, the sleep falling in loose spirals across her face. I pulled back the sheets and slipped inside. “Bom dia.”

“Bom dia, meu amor.” A soft sound from a distant place.

Seven and a half years later, I receive a text from a friend in Rio: “Did you see the news?” She links to a New York Times article: “Celebrity Healer in Brazil Is Accused of Sexually Abusing Followers.”

***

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‘If an Animal Talks, I’m Sold’: An Interview with Ann and Jeff Vandermeer

A Midsummer Night's Dream. Illustration by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939). (Culture Club / Getty Images)

Alan Scherstuhl | Longreads | July 2019 | 19 minutes (5,080 words)

“Hic sunt dracones,” the 500 year-old Hunt-Lenox globe warns travelers off the coast of southeast Asia: Here be dragons. In the half millenium since that mysterious Euro-centric globe’s construction, dracones have evolved, in the popular imagination, from representatives of a dangerous, fantastical unknown to something like just another of the familiar beasts populating what we might call the Fantasy-Industrial Complex. Through big-budget TV and movies, video and pen-and-paper games, and hundreds of novels and short stories each year, fantasy rules like never before. Dragons reign over much of our pop-culture globe, not just one patch.

Diverse and often self-reflexive, today’s fantasy fiction varies wildly in quality and approach. Writers like N.K. Jemisin (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms), Sofia Samatar (A Stranger in Olondria), Ann Leckie (The Raven Tower), Kameron Hurley (The Mirror Empire), Seth Dickinson (The Traitor Baru Cormorant), Marlon James (Black Leopard, Red Wolf), Steven Erikson (the Malazan Book of the Fallen series), and many more have in recent years spun dazzling, forward-thinking variations on a genre that has at times been accused of wallowing in repetitive stories, simplistic good-versus-evil conflicts, and an inherent conservatism.

Now, with the publication of The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (Vintage), anthologists Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (shes a Hugo Award-winning editor; hes the bestselling author of the Southern Reach trilogy; and together theyve edited The Big Book of Science Fiction, The Weird, and other collections) are declaring that fantasy has always been weird and wild, thoughtful and delightful. The Big Book covers a diverse array of fantasy fiction from the mid-nineteenth century through the end of World War II. It opens with a German fairy tale (Bettina von Armin’s “The Queens Son”) about a queen whose son, immediately upon sliding from the womb, is stolen by a she-bear; it closes, fittingly, with J.R.R. Tolkien, whose tale “Leaf by Niggle” concerns nothing less than an artist’s act of world-making. The almost 800 pages between these offer almost 90 stories from around the world, from the expected writers of fantasy (Fritz Lieber, Robert E. Howard, Lord Dunsany, L. Frank Baum), many unexpected fantasists (Zora Neal Hurston, E.M. Forester, W.E.B Du Bois, Edith Wharton), and a host of surprises from lesser-known writers. The Vandermeers approach is expansive. Half the stories in The Big Book are works in translation; fourteen have never before been published in English; few concern monster-slaying. Read more…

Editor’s Roundtable: All Things Being Unequal (Podcast)

The demonstration tunnel approximately 420 meters underground at Onkalo, a spent nuclear fuel repository in Finland. (Antti Yrjonen/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

On our June 28, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Essays Editor Sari Botton, and Culture Columnist Soraya Roberts share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in The Cut, Columbia Review of Journalism, The New York Times, Longreads, and Pacific Standard.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


0:46 Hideous Men (E. Jean Carroll, June 21, 2019, The Cut)

Times Public Editor: Ignoring a scoop that’s not your own. (Gabriel Snyder, June 24, 2019, Columbia Journalism Review

Our Top Editor Revisits How We Handled E. Jean Carroll’s Allegations Against Trump. (Lara Takenaga, June 24, 2019, The New York Times

“You’ve seen it through a bunch of women who come forward, where people almost police the way they come forward, and how they should be reflecting on their own experience.” Soraya Roberts

The team discusses The Cut’s excerpt of E. Jean Carroll’s new memoir What Do We Need Men For? and the way the media handled coverage of this story. The excerpt revealed some of the instances of sexual assault Carroll experienced in her life, including an allegation that Donald Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.

The editors discuss why the New York Times initially buried the story, and how not breaking the story appears to have impacted its coverage. They also question whether where a story is published — in this case, a women’s website — impacts how seriously that story is taken. 

11:55 If I Made $4 a Word, This Article Would be Worth $10,000. (Soraya Roberts, June 2019, Longreads)

“All of us are part of an inequitable system. She just happens to be benefiting from it.” – Soraya Roberts

The team discusses issues of compensation, access, and privilege in journalism. Longreads culture columnist Soraya Roberts shares her reaction to systemic inequality in an industry where most seasoned, talented writers are lucky to get $0.50 per word — a small fraction of what a select few of their peers are making. The team questions why Roberts’ attack on a broken system was misinterpreted as an attack on an individual, and weighs the relative benefits of not rocking a media boat that is clearly sinking. 

34:55 The Hiding Place: Inside The World’s First Long-term Storage Facility for Highly Radioactive Nuclear Waste.  (Robert MacFarlane, June 24, 2019, Pacific Standard)

“How can we be good ancestors?” – Catherine Cusick 

In Pacific Standard, Robert MacFarlane visits a Finnish nuclear waste site and explores the difficulty of communicating its danger to future generations in today’s languages or symbology. 

* * *

Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

The Unstable Business of Higher Education

AP Photo/Toby Talbot

When a college closes, its property gets sold off, employees get paid out, and, as Alia Wong writes at The Atlantic, “customers are told to move on.” But for many students and faculty, personal connections to their college makes losing their school different from losing other businesses. How do they deal with the loss? And how can small colleges avoid this fate? Through the story of 57-year old Newbury College in Massachusetts, which closed this May, Wong explores the threats facing many American liberal arts colleges.

Students I spoke with described a grieving process after hearing the news that went from shock to panic, curiosity to nostalgia, heartbreak to acceptance. Stefan, who’s from the Denver area and had finished her finals early last December, was on a cruise celebrating her 21st birthday when news of the closure broke, oblivious due to her lack of reception. Upon returning to shore, her phone lit up with texts from her friends and bosses. Stefan, who’d held a host of roles on campus during her three years at Newbury—an athlete on three sports teams, an RA, and a work-study employee in admissions, to name a few—started applying to other colleges as soon as she got home. She proceeded to spend her entire winter break obsessing—and often crying—over her next steps. “Every day I was like, Oh my Godwhat am I going to do?!” Stefan recalled. “Newbury was my home away from home.”

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The No. 1 Ladies’ Defrauding Agency

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Rose Eveleth | Longreads | July 2019 | 12 minutes (2,883 words)

Sarah Howe’s early life is mostly a mystery. There are no surviving photographs or sketches of her, so it’s impossible to know what she looked like. She may, at one point, have been married, but by 1877 she was single and working as a fortune-teller in Boston. It was a time of boom and invention in the United States. The country was rebuilding after the Civil War, industrial development was starting to take off, and immigration and urbanization were both increasing steadily. Money was flowing freely (to white people anyway), and men and women alike were putting that money into the nation’s burgeoning banks. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and in 1879 Thomas Edison created the lightbulb. In between those innovations, Sarah Howe opened the Ladies’ Deposit Company, a bank run by women, for women. 

The company’s mission was simple: help white women gain access to the booming world of banking. The bank only accepted deposits from so-called “unprotected females,” women who did not have a husband or guardian handling their money. These women were largely overlooked by banks who saw them — and their smaller pots of money — as a waste of time. In return for their investment, Howe promised incredible results: an 8 percent interest rate. Deposit $100 now, and she promised an additional $96 back by the end of the year. And to sweeten the deal, new depositors got their first three months interest in advance. When skeptics expressed doubts that Howe could really guarantee such high returns, she offered an explanation: The Ladies’ Deposit Company was no ordinary bank, but instead was a charity for women, bankrolled by Quaker philanthropists. 

Word of the bank spread quickly among single women — housekeepers, schoolteachers, widows. Howe, often dressed in the finest clothes, enticed ladies to join, and encouraged them to spread the news among their friends and family. This word-of-mouth marketing strategy worked, Howe’s bank gathered investments from across the country in a time before easy long-distance communication. Money came in from Buffalo, Chicago, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Washington, all without Howe taking out a single newspaper advertisement. She opened a branch of the bank in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and had plans to add offices in Philadelphia and New York to keep up with the demand. Many of the women who deposited with the Ladies’ Deposit Company reinvested their profits back in the bank, putting their faith, and entire life savings, in Howe’s enterprise. All told, the Ladies Deposit would gather at least $250,000 from 800 women — although historians think far more women were involved. Some estimate that Howe collected more like $500,000, the equivalent of about $13 million today. 

It didn’t take long for the press to notice a woman encroaching on a man’s space. And not just any woman, a single woman who had once been a fortune-teller! “Who can believe for a moment that this woman, who a few years ago was picking up a living by clairvoyance and fortune-telling, is now the almoner of one of the greatest charities in the country?” asked the Boston Daily Advertiser. Reporters were particularly put off by their inability to access even the lobby of Howe’s bank, turned away at the door for being men. One particularly intrepid reporter, determined to find out what Howe’s secret was, returned dressed as a woman to gain entry and more information. 


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Then, in 1880, it all came crashing down. On September 25, 1880, the Boston Daily Advertiser began a series of stories that exposed Howe’s bank as a fraud. Her 8 percent returns were too good to be true. Howe was operating what we now know as a Ponzi scheme — 40 years before Ponzi would try his hand at it. 

Here’s how it worked: When a new depositor arrived, Howe would use their money to pay out older clients, so the whole scheme required a constant influx of new depositors to pay out the old ones. Like every other Ponzi fraudster, Howe’s bank would have eventually run out of new money. The run of stories in the Boston Daily Advertiser instilled enough fear in the bank’s investors that they began to withdraw their money, and eventually there was a run on Howe’s bank. 

Sarah Howe was the most unfathomable and outrageous character: a woman villain.

It took two weeks and five days from the first story published in the Advertiser uncovering Howe’s fraud before she was arrested. The press extended her victims a modicum of sympathy, describing their plights while also reminding the reader that they deserved their pain for trusting a woman with their money. “I put every dollar I had into the bank, and if I lose it I am a beggar,” one depositor told the Boston Globe at the time. “I wanted the interest so badly, that I placed a mortgage on my furniture to secure the principal to deposit. Oh! I wish I hadn’t now, for I shall have my goods sold from under my head,” said another. 

Howe, on the other hand, was spared no remorse. The Boston Herald claimed that Howe was “nearly as deaf as a post” and cross-eyed. Banker’s Magazine described Howe as “short, fat, very ugly, and so illiterate as to be unable to write an English sentence, or to speak without making shameful blunders.” This is all untrue, as Howe’s own statements to the press before her downfall suggest that, in fact, she had a sharp wit. In response to one newspaper’s critique of the Ladies’ Deposit Bank, Howe wrote: “The fact is, my dear man, you really know nothing of the basis, means or methods on which our affairs are conducted, and when shut up in the meshes of your savings-bank notions, you attempt an exposition of the impossibility of our existence, you boggle and flounder about like a bat in a fly trap.” 

 Nevertheless, as soon as she was caught, a backstory for Howe emerged in the papers. The Boston Herald published a story with the headline “Mrs. Howe’s Unsavory Record,” claiming she was born out of wedlock and ran away at 15 to marry an “Indian physician,” who they also referred to as “her dark-skinned Othello.” The paper claimed the marriage caused her mother such distress that she wound up dying in an asylum “raving over the heartlessness of her daughter.” The story also alleged that she then left her first husband, married two house painters in quick succession, had been in and out of prison, and even tried to lure a young girl into prostitution. Basically none of this can be confirmed by historians, but it didn’t matter. Sarah Howe was the most unfathomable and outrageous character: a woman villain. As historian George Robb writes in his paper about Sarah Howe, “She had to be ugly, vulgar and immoral.” The only way her story could make sense to readers was if Howe was some kind of abomination — a complete outlier both physically and mentally.  

 “I’m sure she was just a normal-looking person,” Robb told me. “Until the whole thing unraveled, when people talked about her, no one described her as anything other than an ordinary person.” But in Victorian-era Boston, the idea that a woman criminal could be an “ordinary person” was impossible. “People were comfortable with the idea of women as victims,” Robb told me. “The men were the crooks, the men were doing the manipulation. The women were the victims. They needed to be protected by other men.” 

Howe wound up standing trial in Boston, and was ultimately convicted (although not of fraud, but soliciting money under false pretenses — for claiming that a Quaker charity was backing the venture). She spent three years in prison, and when she got out, in classic scammer fashion, she tried the whole thing again.

“I think there’s a similarity between being a fortune-teller and making money on the stock market, making predictions about the future”

Next, Howe opened up a new Woman’s Bank on West Concord Street in Boston. She kept the scheme going from 1884 to 1886, offering depositors 7 percent interest and gathering at least $50,000, although historians think the number might be far higher. This time, however, Howe was never prosecuted. After being caught and closing down her bank, she gave up the game and returned to fortune-telling and doing astrology readings for 25 cents each. She died in 1892, at the age of 65, no longer wealthy, but still notorious enough to warrant an obituary in the New York Times that read: “For three months she had been living in a boarding and lodging house, carefully keeping from those whom she met the knowledge that she was the notorious Mrs. Howe of Woman’s Bank memory.” 

***

Sarah Howe was, in some ways, a product of her time. In the late 1800s, the United States was moving out of a period marked by “free banks,” in which there were very limited rules governing banks, and into a system of national banking more familiar to us today. Money was flowing into the economy, and financial advisers were telling their clients to put their cash in banks that were now more stable than they had been in the past. This advice was often targeted at women, who couldn’t use their money to, say, start their own endeavors. But they could put their money in stocks and banks, and many of them did. In fact, during that time, women were often the majority of depositors and shareholders.

But there were very few regulations on banks. The stock market was relatively new. For women like Howe, it presented an unregulated place where money was changing hands purely on the basis of confidence. And as a fortune-teller, Howe had plenty. “I think there’s a similarity between being a fortune-teller and making money on the stock market, making predictions about the future, and getting people to believe that you know something about how the trends are going to play,” Robb said. 

At the time there was little fear when it came to watchdogs or regulators. Howe could start her own bank with no real procedure or oversight. “Anybody could form a bank!” Robb said, “If you could get people to give you money you could call it a bank. You advertise, you rent a fancy office space, people come and give you money. It was amazing how much money you could make before anybody caught you.” As much as people love to point fingers at Howe, very rarely do people consider the complete lack of oversight that allowed her to prey upon these women. “It’s so much easier to pick individual villains and say, ‘Oh it’s these nasty scheming people who are the problem, the capitalist system can do no wrong, it’s perfect and self-regulating and we don’t want to mess with that. It’s these individual crooks that are the problem.’” 

***

In spite of her crimes, Sarah Howe is not a household name. It’s not called a Howe scheme after all, it’s a Ponzi scheme. When Howe is mentioned at all, it’s as a punchline. She’s forever stuck as a historical fun fact. “She’s become an anecdote in history, but she should be as famous or more famous than Ponzi,” historian Robyn Hulsart told me. “There’s nothing about what she did that doesn’t fit the definition of a Ponzi scheme.” (In fact, Howe wasn’t even the first to execute this type of scam. At least two other women pulled off Ponzi schemes before her — one in Berlin, the other in Madrid.) 

It’s become popular now to say that we’re living through the golden era of the scammer. “We’re living in a scammer’s paradise,” Sarah Jeong told Willamette Week recently about our current era, “not just economic scams, but intellectual scams, too.” Elizabeth Holmes, Anna Delvey, Fyre Fest, Ailey O’Toole, Jennifer Lee, Anna March — the list is long enough that everybody from WIRED to The Cut called 2018 “the year of the scam.” As the United States recovers from the fraud that was that housing market bubble, we’re in another era of deregulation. President Donald Trump and the Republican run Senate, have gone on what has been called a “deregulation spree,” increasing the cap at which banks become subject to more stringent rules from $50 billion in assets to $250 billion. Robb pointed out that we never seem to actually learn. “Whenever there’s a big boom cycle in the economy everybody screams to deregulate,” he told me, and with deregulation comes increased risk for frauds like Howe’s. 

Howe’s case also demonstrates a struggle in feminist circles that persists today: How do you balance the desire to celebrate women with the need to hold bad behavior accountable?

Howe’s legacy could and should be one that we can learn from today in the so-called era of the scam. Howe’s success was one that tells us something not just about fraud, but about economics and the conditions under which fraud can blossom into a $17 million scam. Howe was aided and abetted by the economic conditions, but she was also a wizard at her craft. What Howe mastered, beyond the Ponzi scheme, is what experts call an “affinity fraud” — going after a group of people who have something in common, and most often who the scammer has something in common with too. As an “unprotected” woman herself, Howe understood what might appeal to her clientele. She decorated the bank to create a mood and aesthetic that would appeal to her ideal mark. The Advertiser described the Ladies’ Deposit Bank this way: “The furniture, of which there are many pieces, is upholstered in raw silk of old gold figured patterns, and corresponds in tone and design with the walls. … The carpets are of a deep warm tone, and all the ornaments are rich and in good taste.” She used language that drew women in, talking about her commitment to the “overworked, ill-paid sisterhood.” Hulsart points out that it’s not unlike the language used by multilevel marketing companies like Mary Kay and Amway, which generally advertise to women through  word of mouth. “They really like to say things like ‘we’re in this together,” Hulsart says.  Read more…

Why Bugs Deserve Our Respect

Insect hotel with male Osmia bicornis wild bees. (Getty Images)

Jessica Gross | Longreads | July 2019 | 14 minutes (3,842 words)

The ants arrived with the heat in May, streaming into my bedroom through my air conditioner. My roommate had covered hers in tape earlier that week, and I used her supplies to block any and all points of entry. Me: in. Insects: out. I can imagine the disgusted grimace I wore on my face as I taped and taped. One of the ants got caught underneath, and I remember feeling a perverse sense of retribution.

I thought about this stance a lot while reading ecologist Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson’s new book, Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects, which first came out in her native Norway last year. With a combination of delight and passion, Sverdrup-Thygeson makes the case that, first, insects are fascinating creatures who deserve our curiosity, and, second, they are essential to our survival and deserve our protection. As I considered the multitude of impressive and strange facts she presents (there’s a species of swallowtail butterfly with eyes on its penis, and spiders’ silk is, on a per-weight basis, six times as strong as steel!), I was transported back to childhood. I remembered how, when my parents lay new sod in the backyard, my brother and I peeled it back to find the worms slithering underneath. I remembered plucking cicada shells off trees and storing them in a shoebox, which I kept in my closet for years. Back then, bugs didn’t disgust me — they filled me with a sense of wonder.

When we spoke over the phone in early June, Sverdrup-Thygeson suggested that the disdain for insects that I and so many others have grown into isn’t natural or necessary, but a learned response. Witnessing her awe, as she put it, for these tiny creatures, it was hard not to feel that she was right. I haven’t stripped the tape from my air conditioner, but when I saw a little bug crawling up the wall of my shower a few weeks ago, I let it be, and took a moment to marvel at the way it moved with such delicate grace.

You describe in the book how, when your children were in elementary school, you would turn brown mud over with a metal sieve for them to see all the bugs, and get excited about them. So I wondered if you could start by talking about your own childhood relationship with insects. Was that something your parents instilled in you? When did this fascination begin?

Yes, I think it started when I was a kid. My family spent a lot of time in the outdoors — we picked berries and mushrooms in the fall, and we went skiing and slept out in a snow cave in the winter. We did all these things together. We also had this very simple cabin on a tiny forested island in a lake. There were no other houses on this island, and there was no electricity, so no television, of course. You pretty much had to play with whatever was there, which was nature.

So I got used to having bugs around me. Even if I sat reading, I would still sit in nature: bugs would crawl over me or fly past. When we put fire on the firewood, which was how we kept warm if it was cold, there would always be bugs in these pieces of wood. It was part of life to have bugs around, and it never occurred to me it was supposed to be annoying, or something to fear.

I also had a grandfather who was really good at showing me not insects, really, but other things in nature. He told me the names of flowers; he taught me birdcalls so I could recognize them. And I think that meant something. If someone you love shows you that nature means something to them, that transfers and has a lot of impact on a small kid. Read more…

The Burdens We Carry

Illustration by Homestead

Amy Scheiner | Longreads | July 2019 | 11 minutes (2,695 words)

My mother died carrying water.

She was hauling a 24-pack of Poland Spring to bring to my brother’s new dorm room. She was proud of him because he was finally moving out. She had struggled to raise two children who had themselves struggled immensely along the way. My mother was tireless, indestructible, “high energy” as she described herself, but lately she had seemed worn to me. Aside from a high-powered law career, she spent the last few decades caring for her husband and her children, the community, her grandmother, and her mother. When I learned about God as a child, I remember thinking: He had nothing on Mom.

***

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

E. Jean Carroll. (Eva Deitch for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from E. Jean Carroll, Stephanie Clifford, Robert Macfarlane, Kathryn Miles, and Graphic Staff with Spencer Cliche.

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The Sorrowful Mysteries, or Reasons I’m No Longer Catholic

Kathleen McKitty Harris | Longreads | June 2019 | 10 minutes (2,618 words)

I am in kindergarten and I am kneeling on the seat of my desk chair. So are all of my Catholic school classmates. We are 4 and 5 and 6, and we stare at the crucifix hanging on the wall while our knees burn from the pain of prolonged contact and pressure against the blond, lacquered wood. Our teacher, Miss Judy — who, my father says, is a dead ringer for Jane Russell — knots silk scarves at the hollow of her neck and wears Candie’s sandals that thwack against the soles of her feet while she walks. While we kneel, she talks about the drunk driver who killed her sister many years ago, and says we need to pray for her sister’s departed soul. We don’t pray for the driver. I think, My father smells like whisky when he drives. My father has crashed a car. My father is going to Hell.

Read more…