Section Six – Kim Church
“Do you want to tell me about it?” I ask.
Her eyes lower to the table and something begins to unwind in her shoulders. She sighs, but it’s not sad or resigned. There is a release there.
“I’m all out of people. I don’t have anyone I can really talk to. Not in the way I used to be able to talk to you.”
“You can tell me anything,” I say. I’m not convinced it’s true, but I say it.
She begins with the discovery of the lump and the first doctor. Sitting in the waiting room, alternating between dread and calm. She remembers the magazine with photos of a celebrity wedding. She remembers sitting on the crisp paper of the examining table in the baggy gown, staring down at her feet dangling above the floor.
The doctor prodded her for a moment, asked a few questions, frowned over her open chart, then sent her to the emergency room for an MRI. “Quickest way to get this taken care of. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait a week or so for an appointment and I’d really like to see what this looks like now.”
Use the Back Door by Kim Church
Written and performed by Kim Church
Lap Steel: Steve Sollod
Produced by Steve Sollod
Photo: Donnie Roberts
Kim Church writes fiction, essays, poems, and songs. Her debut novel, Byrd (Dzanc Books, 2014), won the Crook’s Corner Book Prize, was a Chautauqua Prize finalist, and was longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction. Her short work has appeared in the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward, The Sun, Shenandoah, Painted Bride Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council and residencies at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, and Vermont Studio Center. She has taught workshops in diverse settings, from conferences to classrooms to death row. She lives in Raleigh with her husband, artist Anthony Ulinski.
Kim’s parents bought her her first guitar with S&H Green Stamps. In this recording of “Use the Back Door” she plays a 000 12-fret guitar built by Steve Sollod, who accompanies her on a 1937 Epiphone lap steel.
The Cloud Diary Music Project
We sent musicians a synopsis of Cloud Diary and a randomly chosen scene from among 12 scattered throughout the novel and asked them to respond to the scene, musically or aurally. The piece could be of any genre and any duration. It could be music already recorded, adapted, or written specifically for the scene. Find more information here.
Click here for the full Music Project playlist.