The Doctor's Heart: Huntington, 1932
The Victory Garden
In the Garden of the We-Owna Motel
A Web del Sol Featured Writer
J. Clark Hansbarger
Raised in Gap Mills, West Virginia, Hansbarger is a recipient of a creative
writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a PEN Syndicated
Fiction Award, and a grant from UVA's Center for the Liberal Arts. He teaches
writing at The American University and lives now in northern Virginia with his wife Leslie, and two children, Paul and Kara.
The pieces featured here are from his collection of linked stories
titled The Victory Garden.
The black sky alive with starlight appeared to swirl out from them; and for a moment, as he felt her fragile weight, Shim believed that all was well with the world, that there had been
neither loss nor death, and that all that had ever happened to him and all that he had ever known was little more than a dream.
J. Clark Hansbarger's fiction and non-fiction have been published in such journals
as Shenandoah, Witness, The Gettysburg Review, and English Journal. His story
The Second Baseman was featured on National Public Radio's The Sound of
Writing and in Sports in America, an anthology of literature about sport published by Wayne State University.
J. Clark Hansbarger, from In the Garden of the We-Owna Motel
He had not made love to a woman since his wife left. That last time had been in the
Howard Johnsons along Interstate 81 in Harrisonburg, after they dropped Annie off at school. In
the room next to them a young couple were banging the headboard against the wall like a hammer. He and Doris had laughed about this, though the noise and the attention
they paid to it ended their own lovemaking and instead they listened. Their laughter turned to
words and something was said that he or she-- he could not remember now-- had taken as an accusation, a judgement, and they had turned away from each other.
When they rolled back over and spoke a few minutes later, they resumed the love making, but
the humor was gone and their movements felt mechanical and humiliating, requisite steps in this last dance they were taking.