Donna Walker-Nixon, from Volume 4:2

Donna Walker-Nixon was a full professor at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, where she received the distinction of receiving the Mary Stevens Piper award for excellence in teaching. She currently serves as an adjunct lecturer at Baylor. She lists her five primary professional achievements as 1) founding Windhover: A Journal of Christian Literature in 1997, 2) co-editing the Her Texas series with her friend and mentor James Ward Lee, 3) co-founding The Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas 4) publishing her novel Canaan's Oothoon, and 5) serving as lead editor Her Texas, which has jettisoned Donna's faith that the voices of women writers and artists truly mean something to both men and women.

Walker-Nixon contributed her short story "And They Danced" to Volume 4:2. Below is an excerpt:

     Another August, Mr. Ferrill veered Mrs. Joiner's lime-green Dr. Pepper station wagon onto a shadowy gravel path where the Barnetts used to live. Louis Barnett rode the bus with Lizzie, and her oily hair stuck out like strikes of lightening. Mr. Ferrill cut off the engine next to the mustang grape vines where her grandmother took them to pluck fruit that stained their fingers and clothes and caused their hands to itch. Few people ventured onto this abandoned dead-end path. He thrust his lizard tongue between her teeth, and he complained her braces interrupted his sordid pleasures. He whined about his dead first wife, “Willie never understood me. Not a true wife ordained by God.” With his webbed fingers, he pawed at her developing pubic hair until he wrangled her clitoris like a cowboy does a wild horse. Against her will, she breathed in and out. “You want me. I know you do.”

     He pushed her spine into the passenger side of the Dr. Pepper station wagon. Only because his webbed fingers left him unable to control her completely was she able to pry open the door. She tumbled onto the ripe grapes and a sticker bush. The grapes stained her beige blouse, and the bush entangled her legs. She struggled and pulled herself free, but she took no notice of the blood beading in clots on her skinned calves. The hot summer breeze normally would have stifled her breathing. “I must escape,” she chanted as she paced back to Old Decatur Road and past the red brick house where Karen,  her first best friend forever, lived. She stumbled by the Putnam place where in second grade the old man's fierce dogs chased her back to Karen's house.

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Read Walker-Nixon's beautiful tale in full today and open Synesthesia Literary Journal Volume 4:2!