DRIFTLESS Excerpts

Before the dark took the last of her, she thought of the river. Not the one that cut states apart, but something older and harder to map—the river under things, the run of whatever it is that moves through seed and soil and men who think they can name it and fence it and sell it by the pound. She wanted to say a thing to that river. She wanted to ask a favor or offer one. But the dark had its own schedule. It pulled her under easy, like it knew her measurements.

*****

Driftless Books doesn’t announce itself.

It waits.

The old tobacco warehouse squats at the edge of town, brick darkened by a century of weather and smoke and hands that worked until their knuckles split. No sign screams for attention. Just a painted door, slightly crooked, and a chalkboard that says:

OPEN.

COME IN ANYWAY.

Inside, the air shifts. Not the musty rot of forgotten paper, but something alive — dust, ink, wood, old glue, faint coffee, and the low animal warmth of a place that has absorbed thousands of people thinking hard in silence.

*****

I turned my attention back to Anna as she headed toward her rundown little office — all peeling paint and mismatched windows and that damn driftless charm everyone worshipped. Hippies, artists, pseudo-intellectuals. The whole region smelled like sage smoke and unresolved trauma.

*****

The Driftless roads were designed by a lunatic. No other explanation. They didn’t wind — they coiled, like some prehistoric snake twisting through the hills just to watch men like me lose their lunch. The sun was dropping behind the bluffs, turning the ridgelines into jagged black knives against a blood-orange sky. Beautiful, I guess, in that smug Wisconsin way. But beauty wasn’t my thing. Beauty was for postcards.

*****

I stood on the front porch, one hand resting on the carved oak baluster, and watched the car ease to a stop. Below, the river curled around the base of the bluffs, a broad, steel-blue ribbon catching the late sun. The Driftless hills rose on either side in layered green, their slopes folded and furrowed like an old man’s knuckles. This land had never felt the ice that scraped everything else flat. It remembered what the rest of the world forgot.

*****