Backwoods 

“How can you come back now?” A girl with a low southern drawl holds a baby close to her chest. Across from her, a man twice her age sips at a Bud Light while staring into space.  

In Virginia, the word ‘backwoods’ is an adjective. It twists before the wind, bending and snapping in a harsh staccato march. It stigmatizes and explains a lifestyle filled with hardships and loyalty.  It is a word that is spoken quietly, off handed, in relation to only the bleakest of situations. Back. As if stuck in a time before electricity. Woods. Like the shady area where all foreign people are intruders.  

Rednecked with incestuous pride for language, words blur together. One blends into the next with a smooth slickness that makes a southern twang feel both friendly and lethal.    

“Where else would I go?” He asks. His mouth, like hers, is a sliver of chapped lips. The answer remains choked like the very word that got him there.  

Backwoods doesn’t roll off the tongue. It gets stuck. Sucked in on the inhale and caught on the way out; there is no escape. 

Rebecca Lee