Minrose Gwin, a finalist in Narrative’s 2020 Fall Story Contest, is the author of the novels The Accidentals, awarded the Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Fiction Award for 2020; Promise; and The Queen of Palmyra. She has also published a memoir, Wishing for Snow, and the critical work Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement. A native of Tupelo, Mississippi, she has taught at universities around the country, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She lives in Austin, Texas, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Pheasant Hunting

A Story

by Minrose Gwin

He was in the process of getting a divorce. I was married with two teenage children. While getting his divorce, he was dating another woman; in fact, he was living with this other woman. She had blue-black hair that fell below her waist. She was pushing six feet tall and wore rings on all her fingers, including her thumbs. She wrote poetry and claimed Cherokee ancestry. I was making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, driving carpool, teaching three classes, and writing a book for tenure, having delayed graduate school to raise my children. He looked like Robert Redford with a beard; I looked like a regular person.

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