Just One Thing with Victoria Hood

Victoria Hood’s essay “Black Cherry Merlot” runs away and turns back, learns to punch, reaches with open hands, cries out. Here she shares just one thing about the piece:

“It is always an honor to be able to write about my family and celebrate the lives of people I am no longer able to see. Within the year that my collection of short stories My Haunted Home came out, my aunt suddenly passed away. I felt an additional mourning knowing that she wouldn't be in the haunted home with everyone else we had lost and I felt like I was letting her linger away from the home everyone else had entered. Due to this, I wanted to create a story that was putting an addition on this home for her. This story opens with a reference to her death, but the title is actually a reference to the last gift she ever gave me. My aunt was known for picking out Bath and Body Works scents for each of us and she told me black cherry merlot was made for me—which I had coincidentally also bought for myself before she gifted it to me. Every time I smell it I think of her and hope she can smell me wherever she is now, nestled into her haunted home. ‘Black Cherry Merlot’ 'was made for her.”