AN EXCERPT:

I was still hearing Great-grandpa's voice. Grandma and I were sitting on the gray porch, though it only made us think of dying.

"Grass under my head," he'd said, "When I was a boy, grass at my feet, grass in my hands. The baking, prairie-smell inside," he'd said.

There was nothing but grass in the yard to look at, and grass on the other side of the low fence, and farther than we could see.

"It was sure quiet when I was a girl. Hardly any folks came by."

"That's the same as it is now, Grandma."

"Things don't change much, outside of telephones, and plumbing," she said.

"And people," I added.

"No. Not people."

"Yes they do. They die," I said.

"That's not changing."

We weren't changing anyway. The two of us had looked the same our whole lives. If you painted garnet earrings into my grandmother's baby picture it would look just like she does now. 

My grandma doesn't understand exaggeration, and doesn't use it either. That's why the summer I was seventeen, as soon as she picked me up at the train station in Sidney I knew something was wrong. She wore her yellow-and brown-checkered house dress and didn't say a word. When she hugged me I felt the bones of her wrists press against my spine. We climbed into her green pickup, and she waited until we'd crossed over the border into North Dakota before she would speak. Grandma doesn't like discussing important matters out of state, although half her cousins live in Montana. 

"Your great-grandfather sat down on the porch four days ago and hasn't moved or eaten since,” she told me.

I watched her brownish lips pause before saying four, hesitating to make sure she was correct. I didn't ask a lot of questions. I just looked out the clean windows of her pickup, out and out, and every once in awhile I saw a low house behind a windbreak, or some dusty cows huddled in a heap like one of my brother's chummy sports teams. 

When we walked around the house to the backyard porch I saw my great grandpa still as a museum mannequin on the blue paint-chipped chair, one hand on each whitened knee of his jeans. He had all his hair; it was so dark it looked nearly black. He never spent a whole day indoors, and the skin of his face was tan and red. He was Norwegian, but people around Skar called him Chief. Under his sleeve, the skin of his shoulder was as white as an oyster shell. Great grandpa didn't twitch or budge when Grandma and I walked up the porch steps, but I trailed my fingertips against the back of his hand when I walked by, to see if he'd notice. His thumb lifted and lowered back down to its place on his leg.

"Come on in, Claire," Grandma called from the kitchen...

First Place in the Wordstock Short Fiction Competition

• October 2010  
• Judged by Charles D’Ambrosio

Portland Monthly Magazine  (Publishes the 1st place story from the Wordstock Short Fiction Competition)

The Wordstock 10  (An anthology for the finalists of the Wordstock Short Fiction Competition)

• October 2010

"It was the atavistic quality of this story that won me over, the ancient layer of fairy tale in it. 'Grass at My Feet' finds simplicity and depth by saying yes to every juncture in the narrative and in doing so affirms our darkest imaginings. Only in that dark place, beyond the reach of rules, would such a dreamy romance survive, and as you read I believe you can feel the story fall for its own haunted song. It seems to me that short story writers are too often tempted away from what’s common to us all, confusing the freakish for singularity, but Duggan captures a plainness and oddness that feels just right.  Sometimes, as Gaston Bachelard wrote, the simpler the image, the vaster the dream. Enjoy this mysterious lullaby."-judge, Charles D'Ambrosio