Just One Thing with Noley Reid

Noley’s 13-year-old son, Tolen 

Noley Reid’s June issue story “Coming Back” features some unnerving kindergarten games. Here she shares just one thing about the piece:

“I wrote ‘Coming Back’ in February of this year, just a month and a half before the coronavirus really hit the U.S. and we, here in Indiana, went into lockdown. After I finished the story, I remember vividly, everywhere I went when I saw kindergarten-aged children, I imagined them faking their own suicides. Maybe there was a garden hose coiled up in the mulch when I was at a nursery to buy petunias. Or a restaurant left out a bucket of dirty mop water and a family’s kindergarten-aged twins eyed it on their way to a table. Or even once, there was a child hiding on the lowest shelf at the grocery store; she’d inserted herself, toes in first longwise, as if already in a morgue drawer. Whether that was prophetic or not, we are certainly now living in a time of death and destruction. Not chosen by the children, no, but a fire gleefully fanned by the president, those who elected him, and those Republican politicians who stand in lockstep with him. Without drastic changes at the polls this November—in how police departments are trained, funded, equipped, and held accountable, and in dismantling systemic racism and sexism in our society—the trauma and killing will continue, right on down to the littlest people among us: our own children. And those deaths, whether by hunger by Covid-19 with no healthcare by racist police on the street or by heartbreak suicide—they’re all the same: they’re a child's death. And that’s something truly no one wants to see.”