Ohio

by Stephen Markley

It’s hard to say where any of this ends or how it ever began, because what you eventually learn is that there is no such thing as linear. There is only this wild, fucked-up flamethrower of a collective dream in which we were all born and traveled and died.

Meanwhile, Bill felt like he had to ingest everything he could to counter this jingoism suddenly ejaculating from his best friend’s mouth. His favorite album became Let’s Get Free by Dead Prez, while he checked off all the required reading of a young radical struggling to make sense of history and the social order: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Manufacturing Consent, A People’s History of the United States. The bug gestated, and when he began to see the way the world is—not the way the corporate media presented it, not the way his parents and teachers told it, not the way he wished it was so he wouldn’t have to feel guilt—once he saw the way the world is in its most gritty, tactile, overwhelming sadness and injustice—well, he could never unsee it.

That’s how teenagedness works: everyone lives in a bubble of their own terrifying insecurities oblivious to the possibility that so does everyone else.

Simultaneously, she was “losing her faith,” not even realizing it was happening until she was deep within the throes of an antireligious conversion, understanding the infantile reasoning behind the fairy tales that girded the dogma of her ancestors.

never thought to try to scrape her nails against the ceiling of her imagination and then claw past it.

J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Amy Goldstein’s Janesville are nonfiction accounts on many of the same themes as Ohio: deindustrialization, the economics of the Rust Belt, the cultural and political challenges faced by the Midwestern working class in the post-9/11 era—and more.

The cover photograph of Ohio is one image from a photo series by Harlan Erskine. Take a look at the rest of series on Erskine’s website: http://www.harlanerskine.com/ten-convenient-stores/tencstores-3.