Why we chose it: “The Road Median Princess” by Nicole Hebdon
There is a moment early in Nicole Hebdon’s “The Road Median Princess” (Issue 17) in which the story’s central character, Brent, six years old at the time, asks his mother about a girl he glimpses in a road median that’s visible from their living room. Brent’s mother is dismissive. It is “impossible,” she tells him, that anyone could “get there.” In that moment, Brent recalls an earlier conversation in which his mother had attempted to explain the sudden appearance of worms in his supposedly impenetrable terrarium—eggs in the water or dirt, she’d suggested—and he comes away with the understanding that his mother could be wrong.
I stopped short at this moment on my first reading. The succinctness of its rendering—this realization of a parent’s fallibility—struck me for how well it captures the instantaneousness and decisiveness with which certain formative moments occur. In this way, this story is (on at least one level) a coming-of-age narrative, one whose nimble pacing allows it to depict a life from childhood to middle age with remarkable concision.
But “The Road Median Princess” isn’t just about growing up: the notions we imbibe or abandon—or are compelled to imbibe or abandon—along the way. This is in part because Brent, convinced into adulthood of the existence of the magical being who makes the median her home, is himself unusual.
Had his mother been right about the worms in the terrarium? Possibly. Her explanation seems plausible enough. But Brent knows that she is wrong about the girl, and for this reason, it seems, whatever doubts he’d harbored about her credibility after their conversation about the terrarium solidify into a conviction. It is perhaps noteworthy that the first piece of dialogue we get in the story also involves Brent asking his mother for an explanation. It struck me that their talk about the girl in the median is the last moment of vulnerable inquiry that the boy shares with his mother. He grows up dissimulating or suppressing parts of himself, even as visions of the girl haunt him into adulthood. Does Brent’s mother, with her inability to entertain the possibility of that which is unknown, unknowable to her—that which seems, in fact, inconceivable—do a disservice to that which she does know? That which she could know? What do we lose in refusing to consider what lies beyond the realm of the things we deem “real”?
One of the many delights of “The Road Median Princess” is that it invites me to ask questions about knowledge and possibility. About identity. Another is how the story itself refuses to shy away from possibilities. Part coming-of-age (or even anti- “coming-of-age” in its consideration of what it might mean to retain a sense of the magical), part fairy tale (with its many enchanting images—a girl “pale like the underside of a hawk’s wing”; “graves in the shape of weeping angels and lambs”; frozen bodies of deer with “eggs falling from [their] mouths”—), this story stayed with me from the moment I first encountered it.
