Survived By

For thirty-one years, Maren Vance has written the obituaries for the Bellhollow Sentinel. Four thousand of them, composed at the same desk in the hour before dawn, in a coal town at the bottom of a bowl of mountains. The summer the paper is sold, finished obituaries begin to appear in her basket, in her own hand, for people who are still alive. Every date comes true. One page sends her into the newspaper's basement vault, into the ten years the 1977 flood drowned, and to six men killed in a mine fall the company paper recorded as having moved away. Then a page arrives with the name Vance at the top. Maren has one summer, an old pressman, and a daughter six hours north who stopped speaking to her four years ago.

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