Excerpt:

Impression, Nightfall

by Jéanpaul Ferro

Elijah Ransom stood at the edge of his family compound along the bluffs and dunes of Matunuck, R.I. He stared up at this bow of cable television wire hanging loosely between two poles that he was about to splice into, not to steal it, mind you, but to “share” a cable feed that was already being paid for by Clifford Brown his next door neighbor right across the street.

Elijah had known the Brown family for several decades. Clifford Brown was a Narragansett Indian who his people called Lightfoot, because he used to run track barefoot back in high school. The name of the village, Matunuck, was also an Indian name, meaning “look out,” as the Narragansett Indian tribe once kept their summer encampment along these coastal plains before they sold it all to the colonists in 1657 as a part of the Pettaquamscutt purchase.

If Elijah had something to sell on that warm Sunday afternoon in May he would have sold it already. Times had been tough in Rhode Island. The 2008 financial crisis on Wall Street had trickled all the way down to Main Street now. Unemployment hovered in the double-digits, Americans were getting laid off left and right, and everyone, including Elijah, had clinched up their buttocks and wallets and no one was spending a dime that they had.