Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

A few days later the professor with the white hair tufting out of his ears and nose passes back the map quizzes. As he suspected, many of the best and brightest Americans have failed, do not know the precise location of the country we are about to invade. But your map has an A on it, even though you forgot the existence of Qatar and Bahrain. You have never done this well in school. You have never made this much money. You have never received so many compliments on your appearance, for your body is shrinking into a landless skeletal border, and a landless skeletal border is your nation’s preferred female shape. You have never been so close to killing yourself, not with drugs, which are merely a symptom, but with overwork—your real disease. It’s a disease you were born with, fertilized with mountain fog—the desire to flee small-town Appalachia, the guilt of doing so, the suspicion that you are, at your core, a fraud. The only cure is to work more. Work harder than anyone else.