October in the Earth

by Olivia Hawker

They were riding a couple of Kalamazoos—you know, those little carts that run along the train tracks; the kind you power with your arms.”

I found this interesting as I grew up in Kalamazoo Mi and never heard this term used before.

The day I met Louisa Trout, it was June in the sky but October in the earth.

I love when I find references to the title of the book embedded in the narrative.

hands, the angular joints of machinery, the wheels of freight trains rolling with pitiless speed. I dreamed of a hundred steel mouths that opened and shut and belched a thick, black smoke, and all the while inhuman hands shoveled children into those mouths, faster and faster while the gears and pistons worked and the jaws rent flesh from bone, and the automatic rhythm of industry was so loud around me, I couldn’t even hear the little ones crying. I woke

wasn’t all right. None of us were. I knew somehow that I had looked into the future, just as Skipjack had done. I had seen the new world we were building, right over the ashes of the world that had burned—and the ashes weren’t even cold.

“Times like these—the hardship, the doing what a fellow must to get by—it can change a person. But Louisa’s still her old self. She wouldn’t be herself, after all that time on the rails, if she hadn’t had someone to love her. It’s love that reminds us who we really are. It’s love that holds the world together, even when everything tries

Favorite passage in this book, holds true in any time period.

its best to fall apart.”