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“Mother once said I’d marry a quarryman. She looked at me as we washed clothes in the giant steel washtub, two pairs of water-wrinkled hands scrubbing and soaking other people’s laundry. We were elbow-deep in dirty suds and our fingers brushed under the foamy mounds.
“Some mistakes are bound to be repeated,� she murmured
We lived in Stony Creek, a granite town at a time when granite was going out of fashion. There were only three types of men here: Cottagers, rich, paunchy vacationers who swooped into our little Connecticut town in May and wiled away time on their sailboats through August; townsmen, small-time merchants and business owners who dreamed of becoming Cottagers; and quarrymen, men like my father, who worked with no thought to the future.
The quarrymen toiled twelve hours a day, six days a week. They didn’t care that they smelled of granite dust and horses, grease and putty powder. They didn’t care about cleaning the crescents of grime from underneath their fingernails. Even when they heard the foreman’s emergency signal, three sharp shrieks of steam, they scarcely looked up from their work. In the face of a black powder explosion gone awry or the crushing finality of a wrongly cleaved stone, they remained undaunted.
I knew why they lived this way. They did it for the granite. Nowhere else on earth did such stone exist—mesmerizing collages of white quartz, pink and gray feldspar, black lodestone, winking glints of mica. Stony Creek granite was so striking, it graced the most majestic of architecture: the Battle Monument at West Point, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Fulton Building in Pittsburgh, the foundations of the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. The quarrymen of Stony Creek would wither and fall before the Cottagers, before the townsmen. But the fruits of their labor tethered them to a history that would stand forever.
“You’ll marry one, Adele—I’m sure of it. His hands will be tough as buckskin, but you’ll love him regardless,� Mother told me, her breath warm in my ear as the steam of the wastewater rose around us.
I didn’t say that she was wrong, that she couldn’t know what would happen. I’d learned that from the quarry. Pa was a stonecutter and he cut the granite according to rift and grain, to what he could feel with his fingertips and see with his eyes. But there were cracks below the surface, cracks that betrayed the careful placement of a chisel and the pounding of a mallet. The most beautiful piece of stone could shatter into a pile of riprap. It all depended on where those cracks teased and wound, on where the stone would fracture when forced apart.
“Keep your eyes open, Adele. I don’t know who it will be—a steam driller, boxer, derrickman, powderman? Maybe a stonecutter like your father?�
I turned away from her, feigning disinterest. “There’s no predicting, I told her.”
― Chandra Prasad

“The scents bring us back. That’s what Mr. Agrawal says. He says the scents of summer are the most potent, the most enduring.

The sun beats hard in Duxton, Massachusetts, in late July. It shrivels soft things: flower petals, the worms that struggle up through the ground after a midday shower. The sun here cares nothing for exteriors. It is interested only in essences, the soft middles. Mr. Agrawal doesn’t bother to pick the ripening tomatoes in the garden, infested with rangy weeds and fat iridescent beetles. He says he likes the smell of the flesh once the heat has sizzled the peel.


--from "Wayward," a short story by Chandra Prasad in MIXED: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience”
― Chandra Prasad

“Desperately, I looked in all directions. What struck me immediately was the violence. Everything seemed to be choking something else: Creepers twisted around brambles, brambles around vines, vines around trees. Every plant vied for space and the thin shafts of light that pushed through the greenery overhead. But there wasn’t enough space for all of them.

“Mel,� I screamed again, my throat scratchy and raw. My brown school oxfords made sucking sounds as I walked. I felt as if I were being pulled down, like the jungle might consume me.

From DAMSELFLY”
― Chandra Prasad

“Through a chink in my fingers, I watched Mel react. She fished around in her sock, producing a switchblade. She clicked it open and whipped it through the air. The steel blade caught the sunlight, and flashed. Then she tore after the creature, squealing and hoofing as it had. It looked up at her in dismay, and I partially pitied it, pitied the terror on its homely face. She swiped the blade across its side as it attempted to turn around, its legs scrabbling, its pudgy body squirming and twitching, trying in vain to push through the dense tangle. Mel had a chance to knife it again—I could see her debating whether she should, but she wiped the bloody blade against her sock instead. The injured creature finally made headway into the creepers. Another squeal, and then its backside and tufted tail disappeared into the undergrowth.

Shuddering, I moved my hands from my face. I stared at Mel. I tried to breathe. The pig’s blood looked bright and alarming against the grimy cotton of her sock.

FROM DAMSELFLY
“Will it die?� I whispered.

“I didn’t get it very deep. I should have killed it. Killed it before it killed you.”
― Chandra Prasad

“Mother once said I’d marry a quarryman. She looked at me as we washed clothes in the giant steel washtub, two pairs of water-wrinkled hands scrubbing and soaking other people’s laundry. We were elbow-deep in dirty suds and our fingers brushed under the foamy mounds.

“Some mistakes are bound to be repeated,� she murmured

We lived in Stony Creek, a granite town at a time when granite was going out of fashion. There were only three types of men here: Cottagers, rich, paunchy vacationers who swooped into our little Connecticut town in May and wiled away time on their sailboats through August; townsmen, small-time merchants and business owners who dreamed of becoming Cottagers; and quarrymen, men like my father, who worked with no thought to the future.

The quarrymen toiled twelve hours a day, six days a week. They didn’t care that they smelled of granite dust and horses, grease and putty powder. They didn’t care about cleaning the crescents of grime from underneath their fingernails. Even when they heard the foreman’s emergency signal, three sharp shrieks of steam, they scarcely looked up from their work. In the face of a black powder explosion gone awry or the crushing finality of a wrongly cleaved stone, they remained undaunted.

I knew why they lived this way. They did it for the granite. Nowhere else on earth did such stone exist—mesmerizing collages of white quartz, pink and gray feldspar, black lodestone, winking glints of mica. Stony Creek granite was so striking, it graced the most majestic of architecture: the Battle Monument at West Point, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Fulton Building in Pittsburgh, the foundations of the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. The quarrymen of Stony Creek would wither and fall before the Cottagers, before the townsmen. But the fruits of their labor tethered them to a history that would stand forever.

“You’ll marry one, Adele—I’m sure of it. His hands will be tough as buckskin, but you’ll love him regardless,� Mother told me, her breath warm in my ear as the steam of the wastewater rose around us.

I didn’t say that she was wrong, that she couldn’t know what would happen. I’d learned that from the quarry. Pa was a stonecutter and he cut the granite according to rift and grain, to what he could feel with his fingertips and see with his eyes. But there were cracks below the surface, cracks that betrayed the careful placement of a chisel and the pounding of a mallet. The most beautiful piece of stone could shatter into a pile of riprap. It all depended on where those cracks teased and wound, on where the stone would fracture when forced apart.

“Keep your eyes open, Adele. I don’t know who it will be—a steam driller, boxer, derrickman, powderman? Maybe a stonecutter like your father?�

I turned away from her, feigning disinterest. “There’s no predicting, I told her.”
― Chandra Prasad, On Borrowed Wings