Friday from the Archives: “Lucky” the 2018 Doris Betts Fiction Prize story by Miriam Herin
with art by Lien Truong in NCLR Online 2019
We pause our regularly scheduled archival pieces in order to pay our respects to North Carolina author Miriam Herin, who passed away at the end of May. Our condolences to her family and friends. May her memory always be a blessing.
Herin resided in Greensboro where she taught for many years. She had published three full-length novels, most recently The Basilisk in 2022, a retelling of the legend of Heloise and Abelard.
For NCLR, she won the 2018 Doris Betts Fiction Prize Contest with her short story, “Lucky,” published in our NCLR Online 2019 issue. Herin wrote about herself, “She spent over six years in inner city Charlotte organizing and directing a program for Southeast Asian teenagers, whose families were refugees from the Vietnam War, the genesis for the story “Lucky.” This is for them.”
The story is of a Cambodian refugee going on an errand from home to the neighborhood convenience store to buy rice, but it is made more difficult by her memories of the Khmer Rouge. “Cursed in silence the chhoeu sattek that had gripped her. Memory Sickness. What they had called it in the evil time. The ghosts in the night, images of home and their lost lives that flew into their minds unbidden, like slashes of lightning in the dark. People died from chhoeu sattek.”
Final judge Stephanie Powell Watts selected Herin’s story, saying “With inventive, deftly rendered scenes ‘Lucky’ tells the story of the protagonist, Sokha’s, epic journey to buy rice and a bottle of cola from a neighborhood store. Sokha is haunted by tragedy, and her memories of the Red Khmer in Cambodia many decades past rise unbidden and unwelcome as she navigates the streets of her American town.” Watts describes “Lucky” as “an intimate, tender story about the loss of community, our mutual fear of our neighbors, and the boundaries of our faith” and says she “will be thinking about this beautiful story for a long time.”
Read the entire story online in our 2019 digital issue.
