Here Where We Stand
The Shawnee Springs Stories by
Ed Davis
ISBN: 978-1-964277-81-3, 206 pages, $17.95 (+ shipping)
Projected Release Date: April 2026
The Advance Sale discount price on this title has expired. For those who prefer to pay by check, the price is $23/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.
PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.
Ed Davis retired from teaching college and finds inspiration from his walks in Glen Helen, the nature preserve at the edge of the bucolic village of Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three cats. His poetry collection, The Time of the Light, was released by Main Street Rag in 2013. His novel The Psalms of Israel Jones (West Virginia University Press 2014) won the Hackney Award for an unpublished novel in 2010. Recently, he’s been publishing flash fiction at venues such as Flash Fiction Magazine, Sky Island Journal, Every Day Fiction and Literally Stories.
The characters in Here We Stand: The Shawnee Springs Stories are quirky and caring, fearless and flawed; they care deeply about their village, the world and each other. Author Ed Davis clearly has a soft spot for all of them, as he brings them to life and their lives intersect in heartfelt and surprising ways, true to the richness of small-town life. These stories will warm you. ~Diane Chiddister, Author of One More Day
With compassion and grace, Ed Davis delivers us characters that are fully rendered and fleshed out with a palpable interior life in a town that is as much a character in the story as the people themselves. A lovely novel that you will want to come back to again and again. ~Joseph Downing, author of The Abundant Bohemian
In the linked stories of Ed Davis’ Here, Where We Stand, lonely people seek community in Shawnee Springs, Ohio. Visiting the town’s 1,000-acre Nature preserve almost magically connects them to the spiritual insights they need, Faulkner’s “eternal verities.” What one character says of another applies to most of the characters: “He’s just being here, belonging to this place like the sun in the sky, the sycamores upon the bank.” ~Bill Vernon
ARTEMIS
Marla
Marla hadn’t been home five minutes before the doorbell rang. Shit. She would’ve ignored it except she was expecting a package. Tossing the frozen dinner back into the freezer she walked to the door and threw it open on a woman wearing a baseball cap, thick white hair leaking beneath it. Quickly she drew the door back, leaving only a crack.
“Can I help you?”
The woman grinned as if Marla had said something funny. The mutt behind her, leashed at least, glanced away guiltily when Marla glared. The beast was all black except for a big white spot on his side, like a child’s spread fingers. She’d seen the mongrel leading the woman down the other side of Ambrosia Lane when she’d put the trash at the curb for the first time yesterday.
“I was wondering how you liked the gazpacho—and if I might have my bowl back. I wouldn’t bother you but I sort of need it.”
Wrong house! was Marla’s first reaction. Then she remembered the object lying on the top step last night.
“Gazpacho?” she stalled.
“Yep. Left it right here on your step. Todd—the mailman—told me you’d moved in. Sorry it took me a couple days to get over here. I’m usually faster getting to newbies in the ‘hood.”
Shouldn’t it be illegal for government employees to divulge private information like who lives where? Looking down, she saw the woman wore black and red cowboy boots with pointy toes. Holy hell.
“Wait here.”
On autopilot, Marla sped to the kitchen, opened the fridge and removed the bowl where she’d stuffed it behind the Chardonnay. She strode back to the door, where Bootsie peered nosily through the crack. You’ll get in here when Hell hosts the Winter Olympics. When Marla handed her the bowl, the intruder pulled back.
“Oh, that’s all right. You haven’t had time to eat it yet.”
“I don’t want it,” Marla said.
The woman accepted the bowl, looking neither hurt nor shocked. “Okay then,” she said, turned and pulled Muttsie away, the hand on his side waving goodbye.
Marla slammed the door and stomped back to the kitchen before the lingering odor of garlic hit her: homemade gazpacho! What if Bootsie were a gourmet? But food was bait. Next thing she’d want Marla to dog-sit. Reopening the freezer, she plucked out a frozen dinner: country-fried-steak-green-beans-mashed-potatoes-vanilla-pudding. But now she was imagining tomatoes, glistening wetly in summer sunlight, cucumbers, peppers, onions. She slammed the fridge as if it were her front door. Shit.
Out on the sun porch, things felt better. This house was not a bit like the quaint old two-story farmhouse on four acres that she and Matthew bought when she was still pregnant with Sam—ten years before pancreatic cancer killed her husband and son’s father. This house was as far as you could get from those high ceilings and tall windows that had saturated the downstairs rooms with light. She’d bought this place because it was not that one. Less than ten years old, it had low ceilings and few windows, reducing the inside to a dark cavern. Plus, this porch—all glass, surrounded by tall arborvitaes on one side, rhododendron and honeysuckle tangle on the other—permitted an illusion of solitude. And it was inside the village of Shawnee Springs, at the edge of which sprawled the nature preserve her son had so loved and which she hoped to visit often. She and her son had history in those woods.
She hadn’t been sitting in her sanctuary five minutes before bursts of laughter reached her, the sound amplified between her house and the neighbor’s on the arborvitae side. “She’s reclusive,” the realtor had said. Well, the neighbor didn’t sound reclusive tonight.
Getting up to close the windows she’d opened earlier, Marla was clobbered by memory: Sam stomping on the back porch to get the mud off his boots before entering the house after biking to Glenora and hiking alone for hours. She’d always fretted herself into a frenzy imagining him unconscious, even dead, after a fall from the limestone cliffs. But that was nothing compared to her worry after he started driving. Before she could close the last window, she fell back into the chair just as the laugh track repeated next door. Closing her eyes, she resisted the image of that lonely country road where, a high school senior, her boy had smashed his little red Mazda 323 into a tree. Now voices from next door rose like an audience watching dolphins leap. Bootsie’s high-pitched voice cut through the others:
“She could be socialized if she’d only come out from behind the door.”
It cut Marla quick—one sure stroke, parting flesh that would quickly bleed if she didn’t apply pressure instantly. Rising on the same shaky legs that got her through two viewings, funerals and burials, plus all manner of boardroom bullshit, she staggered to the open window.
“Go to hell!” she screamed, though in such close quarters a shout would’ve sufficed. Utter silence ensued. Tonight would undoubtedly require several flutes of Chardonnay. So be it. At least battle lines were now drawn.
Two days later, Marla was heaving groceries out of the Mercedes when Bootsie and Muttsie materialized as if they’d been hiding in the honeysuckle. They grinned like pet food actors in the commercial from hell.
“Give you a hand?” the woman said, her smile a mere 400 lumens today compared to 900 the day she’d retrieved her bowl. Marla’s explosion the other night had required a full bottle of wine to extinguish the resulting blaze. Rising late and hungover the next morning, she’d barely made an 8:15 meeting. Now Marla eyed her visitor up and down. Her boots were alligator skin this time.
“What do you want?” It was the pre-emptive tone she used on subordinates with one foot inside her office. Oblivious, the woman continued to grin.
“We wonder if you might want to adopt a kitten.”
It was so unexpected that Marla lowered her bag back to the trunk. So that’s what all the racket had been about over there at Ms. Reclusive’s. Not about her after all.
The dog owner bobbed her head toward the arborvitaes. “Since August, me and Vivienne have been taking care of two adorable kittens who came from a stray. Now they need a forever home real bad. They’re nearly two months old and as lively as squirrels on speed. Viv’s keeping them on her screened porch ‘cause she already has three indoor cats. And Handsome here has self-esteem issues that a cat might make even worse. You oughta come and meet ‘em. The little boy, Apollo, jumps like he’s got springs for legs and Aphrodite, the girl, is a fuzzball that—”
“Stop!”
Marla stepped forward, invading the woman’s personal space. “There are people who like animals and there are people like me who do not.”
Bootsie’s face became grave. “Oh no. There are only people who think they don’t.”
Did the imbecile think she, a Corporate Communications Director, would debate such an issue here in her driveway? With the wine growing tepid?
“No kittens. No drop-ins. No more food. I want to be left alone.”
Marla stepped back and lifted the bag from the trunk, shocked to find her hands shook—she who gave press conferences announcing imminent layoffs with a slow, steady pulse. She must be exhausted. She glanced back to find Bootsie bent over, doing something to the dog’s leash. The beast looked as mournful as Matthew’s elderly father had at his son’s funeral.
“And if that dog ever shits on my lawn, I’m calling the cops.”
“No worries. Always carry one of these. Come on, Handsome.” Waving a blue newspaper bag, the woman led her dog down the street.
Hand-some. Pathetic.
If you’d like to see how this story ends and read others, order your copy now
and have it delivered to your door when the book is published in May 2026.
