Go Shout at the Sky

“It was the night before the wedding. Late.… Mama sat behind me brushing my hair. The brush was soft and the strokes slow, calming me down, making me all sleepy and forgetful, the most relaxed I’d been in days. That’s when she let slip her own secret for marriage happiness. None of this frippery matters she said. What matters is this: From tomorrow night onwards, you treat him like a king. Honest to goodness, that’s what she told me. Flatter, she said. Obey. Succumb. And always, always, keep your temper. There’ll be times when you want to scream and shout, that’s normal, she said. But when those times come, you don’t go shouting at him. No. Go shout at the sky, ‘cos the sky, that’s the only thing that’s listening.”

Erin Clarkson lives an exile in the South Carolina Lowcountry, the mesh of marshes and sea islands that straddles the Atlantic seaboard. She spends her days self medicating, getting drunk with her cousin and lamenting the loss of her five-year old daughter and her TV career to her abusive ex-husband. Her only escape, the freedom to sail the swamps and inlets of her island home and on, out into the ocean.

On one of these trips, deep in the reeds, Erin retrieves a charm bracelet, the property of an intern who worked at the same TV station. As Erin tries to return the keepsake she enters a world where everything she thought she knew about her life starts to unravel, forcing her to confront a sickening new reality of abuse and control. 

As she seeks answers, past transgressions engulf her and her fragile mental state begins to deteriorate. The storms, both literal and figurative, close in. Caught in a terrifying hurricane, Erin is thrown into a life or death struggle not only to save her own life but that of her daughter, too.