Tiny Doors

It’s been twenty years now, and you’re still somewhere in the air of that September. Still a rope of smoke frozen mid-curl over the mountains. 

Upon impact, the galactic mass of an asteroid makes small work of nature’s bounty. Species of flora and fauna eons old give way to a vaporous mist in seconds, victims of friction. Rapid excavation etches a surface scar, radiating a further life-flattening blast of wind from its center. Megatons of force ravage entire ecologies, mere consequences of catastrophe. 

Lydia Copeland Gwyn’s  Tiny Doors  surveys aftermath on a smaller scale, offering glimpses of a family as its members find themselves navigating impossible situations and experiencing unexpected violence. Against a backdrop of Appalachian tranquility, characters wrestle with the after-effects of suicide, the trauma of birth, and the dark spaces of parenting and childhood. Idyllic times give way to calamitous moments of domestic devastation, leaving survivors with “histories that rise and sink and shift in bed with you at night, . . . a mood in the air, a slow evaporation lifting like a veil.”