THE REMOVED

It's been twenty-five years since the Echota's teenaged son Ray-Ray was killed in a car accident, but his death has left each surviving member of the Cherokee family suspended in private grief. The mother, Maria, increasingly struggles to manage the onset of her husband Ernest's Alzheimer's and tries to organize her heartache through writing. Their daughter, Sonja, lives in isolation close to her parents, her solitude punctuated only by spells of dizzying romantic obsession. Their son, Edgar, having fled home along ago, increasingly mutes his feelings of alienation with drugs and alcohol. The family has a tradition of coming together over a bonfire to celebrate Ray-Ray's birthday—one of the few moments in which they openly talk about his death—though Edgar hasn't returned for the occasion in years.

As Ray-Ray's birthday again approaches and Maria attempts to call the family together from their physical and emotional distances, each family member separately begins to experience a strange unraveling of the boundary between the world of the living and the spirit world. Maria and Ernest take in a foster child named Wyatt, who seems to almost miraculously keep Ernest's mental fog at bay, and who Maria increasingly suspects may have a spiritual connection to their lost Ray-Ray. Sonja becomes dangerously fixated on a man named Vin, despite—or perhaps because of—his ties to traumas both in her lifetime and lifetimes before. And Edgar, having attempted suicide after his girlfriend's sudden departure, finds himself stuck in the Darkening Land: a place between the living and the dead, and a land where old atrocities echo.

Watching over the family is their ancestor, Tsala, who died along with his son on the Trail of Tears, and who has his own narrative of grief and attempted healing. Through stories and images he steers Maria, Sonja, and Edgar as each walks the blurring edge between reality and myth. Ultimately, it is their own family, both living and dead, who will guide the Echotas back from private and generational darkness and light the path to home.

Drawing deeply on Cherokee folklore, THE REMOVED is a meditation on family, grief, home, and the power of stories on both a personal and ancestral level.

BRANDON HOBSON is the author of four books including WHERE THE DEAD SIT TALKING, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has won a Pushcart Prize, and his stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, NOON, and elsewhere. He is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.