He Tried

   He tried to write stories about the South. But he couldn't. He didn't feel like it belonged to him, that the places he had lived and the places he had seen were places he had only passed through. He'd spent half his life in the deepest parts of it, in places where the land was all hills and hollers and little creeks woven through, but it felt like only the city was his. And everyone knows even Southern cities aren't the South. So he couldn't, so he didn't and he left for the woods again, to write stories about the city. And they all sounded a little like the way the South was supposed to sound.