"The Four Winds" / Blackbird Journal of Literature and the Arts

A strange intimacy between care and harm.

You’ll be drawn in right from the start of Grace Spulak’s “The Four Winds” in the current issue (Flight v24n2) of Blackbird Journal (8,100 words). The journal’s foreword rightly prepares us to “confront the costs of devotion…and the strange intimacy between care and harm.”

In the opening, two women, Martha and Susan, are forced to stop driving so they can get gas in the dark of night. They wind up between two filling stations in a small New Mexico town, both of which are inoperable because of a power outage.

The pair quickly get under each other’s skin and we learn that their longstanding relationship is at an end. The trip they’re on—a “mission, really”—once completed, will allow them to go their separate ways.

But the random, powerful violence of a lightning strike has caused the power outage. And Martha and Susan are no strangers to random, powerful violence.

They are compelled to stay the night at the Four Winds motel, which is lit up in the distance down the road. But not before they spend another half-hour sitting in the dark and cold, believing that if they wait long enough, the gas pumps will re-illuminate themselves. Their hope, considering what we learn of their histories, borders on the religious.

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Spulak’s prose is stark, unadorned, and it’s perfect for where the story takes us. To scenes filled with harsh realities that pile up, one upon another, until we feel the full weight of Martha and Susan’s pasts—both together and when coming up as children. They’ve suffered at the hands of others and are left to contend with each other, torn between raging anger and complete vulnerability.

In the story’s most dramatic scenes, Spulak sketches out a triangle of despair between Susan, Martha and a third—a younger and similarly traumatized person who is on the same path. They’re all victims who are in dire need of support but are wary, also, of how at risk they are for pursuing that support.

The dramatic dynamic in those scenes (there are two of them) feels explosive, like the lighting of fireworks in a closed room filled with even more fireworks, a potential mushroom cloud in the making. The dramatic invention feels bold and fresh; three characters that are both heroic and villainous, that we both feel for and fear, facing each other down.

Spulak also outfits Martha and Susan with weighty props. A small pocketknife, soft-tipped and so harmless, carried for protection but useless in dangerous situations and known to be useless by Martha, who none-the-less keeps it close at hand—a reflection of her inability to provide the safety she needs for herself. And a plastic bag that might hold evidence of a murder; A bag that could easily be thrown away, which would be an appropriate unburdening, but one the women can’t allow themselves.

The point-of-view shifts between Martha and Susan throughout the story until the close, when Spulak makes another bold choice; she hands the POV to a secondary character who moves away from Martha and Susan, but carries their legacy. We get the hope we’ve been craving in that character’s ability to throw out that legacy, as “it’s light enough for the wind to carry away.”

“The Four Winds” is a fraught journey down a long and winding road, but you’ll be on the edge of your seat throughout. It’s well worth the trip.

Blackbird Journal, out of Virginia Commonwealth University, aspires to “publish the best poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and art from established and emerging writers and to celebrate our local literary community and heritage.”

Blackbird now publishes four issues—short, thoughtfully curated collections they call “Blackbird Flights”—every year, two in the fall and two in the spring.

They’re currently open for submissions, but will close when they reach the number of works that their staff can accommodate. They’ll consider stories up to 8,000 words (query first if planning on submitting something longer). They do accept simultaneous submissions, and pay $200 per story. Their Submittable fee is $3.

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