"Ode to a Girl With Hand on Barbed Wire" by Jill Widner

The Thresholds Short Story Forum on Facebook is an excellent place to learn more about contemporary short story writers.  Not long ago Jill Widner was kind enough to respond illuminatingly to a post I made there on Carson McCullers.  Everyday for four days now I have read her story, "Girl With Hand On Barbed Wire".  Every time I read it, I increase my understanding and admiration for the skill of Widner.  My main purpose in this post is to make sure my readers know of this story (I will provide a link where it can be read online).  

This story very much exemplifies Frank O'Coonor's assertion that short stories are marvelous vehicles for giving voice to forgotten, marginalized people, isolates.  As the story opens, Letty, a state of Nebraska child protective services is on her way to investigate a child of migrant farm workers who has been placed in a foster home. Letty's job is to make sure she is being properly cared for. You can sense Letty has a deep feeling for children but she does not relish having to do interviews with sherrifs and such.  I love Widner's beautiful very poignant description of Letty's first sight of the girl:

"Her bare feet scuffed at the powdery dust beneath the bottom strand of the barbed wire fence. Her shirtwaist dress was unbuttoned at the collar.  The design was flowers.  Dark-centered, round-petaled flowers. And though the collar was white, and the sleeves were trimmed in white, the front of the dress was smeared with grime, as if she’d been inching her way beneath the front porch or lying face down on the back of a horse."

Letty can find no  concrete evidence of abuse but she senses something is wrong.  She gradually gets to know the girl but the girl is very reticent to talk and seems afraid of her foster mother. 

The story ends on a note which combines pain, loneliness and hope beautifully.  As you read the story we sense great pain and a deep underlying frustration.  

You can read this story here

http://shenandoahliterary.org/621/ode-to-girl-with-hand-on-barbed-wire/

I think any lover of the short story, perhaps especially devotees of Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers will great appreciate this story.  I will be reading more of Widner's work in 2014.

The prose style is marvelous and there are below the surface mysteries to ponder

Jill Widner...

Jill Widner’s fiction has appeared in The Good Men Project, American Short Fiction (web exclusives), where she was the March 2011 featured author; and Short Fiction (University of Plymouth Press, UK).  She is the recipient of a 2012 fellowship at the Hawthornden Retreat for Writers.  She was shortlisted for both the 2011 and 2012 David T. K. Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  Widner is a fiction reader for Narrative Magazine.