I once wrote a short story about a young man named Gary who lived in Graniteville, South Carolina. It's in a notebook somewhere in Chester, Virginia, so I'm not entirely sure what I wrote at the moment. It's also been a couple years as I wrote it in my first semester of graduate school. Gary's family worked in the textile mills that once provided many working class South Carolinians a means of supporting their families, but he of course never had a chance to work in them. The big businesses closed down the factories and moved the jobs overseas.
The small mill towns had seen better days, and Gary made a living drifting between odd jobs. He had a long, complicated romance with a girl named Jessica, but that fell apart anticlimacticly when one day he just didn't call her and a week went by. Then another week went by and he ran into her at the Chicken Shack. They chatted for a minute as she was walking out the door. He gave her a kiss and never saw her again after she walked out the door.
Gary decided it was time to leave Graniteville. He had no prospects elsewhere, but knew that his time there was exhausted, like the dead industry that once drove his hometown. He didn't want to become a ghost lurking about town, like the empty hulks standing as monuments to a lost American dream. He picked Nebraska. he knew Nebraska wasn't a booming place like New York or Los Angeles, but he knew there were people there. There was nothing there, but something had to be there or else nobody would stay. He wanted to see what that was, even if it was just a cornfield. So he packed a couple bags, got in his rusty truck, and left.
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