Page 110 - NS 2024

The Mind of Min Keller McGowan
Min walked alone. The outline of the covenant was behind her, but its shadow seemed to leak out ahead of her current steps, leading her to the edge of Drake Woods. No one from the surrounding crowd seemed to see her in the flashing lights. What would to most seem an uninviting tangle of brambles and long-dead foliage could be seen as no less than heavenly to her; for with each passing stride, she felt further from the sins of her past and closer to the freedom of her future. Her face, thick with mud, blood, and tears, boasted a strained smile.
You’re almost there, poor thing. Almost.
~~~
If one were to see this moment within the larger context of Min’s life, it may better prepare them. Min’s mother, a woman well respected by those who had known her, had taken her own life when Min was but six. She had thus been left with her father Barry—someone brimming with good intentions but often lacking the assertion to bring them to fruition—and his mother, Jeanne.
“You live with the consequences, you die with the consequences,” Min had once heard her grandmother spit at her son, sick of the grown man’s sympathies towards his wife.
“Who’s that punishing, Ma?” He had blurted back loudly enough that Min could hear the tears in his voice from the stairwell where she was eavesdropping. “You want Minny thinking that her mother did something wrong?”