SPUR

About the Book

Wes Rusk found the tooth reaching for cigarettes he'd already quit twice. Shirt pocket. Not his tooth. A little red string still clung to the root, and it dried against his palm under the porch light while laughter came through the open front door. That particular family laugh. The one that's already gone too far.

Maw Rusk did not leave doors open. She locked screen doors, back doors, shed doors, jar lids, conversations, and anything that a person might slip through unbidden. An open door meant either Maw was dead or the house had gotten too crowded for caution. Wes stepped through and found a plastic grocery bag tied around something wet sitting beside her recliner. Too heavy for trash. Too warm. He picked it up when she told him to. The heat came through the plastic against his knuckles and he nearly set it back down on the floor.

"Careful," Maw said, turning her good side. "That's family."

The Rusks have been absorbing damage for so long they have learned to call it structure. Ray wearing his funeral shirt at the table on a Tuesday. Tessa's last voicemail twelve seconds of nothing, then a scrape, then little Lottie in the background: Mama, don't let him under me. Eli, who Wes came home for, who the family won't describe past the word worse because all the words past that one are the wrong shape for a mouth.

What's in the cellar has been down there long enough that it stopped being a problem and became a condition of the house. This is how the Rusks work. This is how they love. You hold what you are handed and you do not ask what it was before you got it, and if the warmth is wrong and the weight is wrong and the smell is wrong, you carry it anyway, because Maw said so, and because you learned before you could read that in this family carry it anyway is what love sounds like.

SPUR is 139 pages of Southern Gothic horror that knows exactly how much silence a family can use as load-bearing material before the whole thing comes down. The house burns. Everything that was in it burns with it. Not all of it was worth saving.