Caroline Hayduk

April 2026 | nonfiction

The Valley

The roads were full of craters, little divots grown wide by snow melt and balding tires clunk-clunk-clunking. There was a gravity to the town felt in even the smallest of valleys. This gravity kept feet planted behind the counter of one of the many Pizza Bellas. Even when teachers used the word “brainiac”, even when there were AP classes on the books and a brain that could remember, down to the millisecond, when someone important was assassinated.

Large pie special with two XL liters of Pepsi, $19.99, 45 minutes to an hour,

delivery or pickup, wings by the half-pound or pound.

A slew of Kennedy’s had come and gone, but this became the language of being, the real memorization in milligrams (Percocet), slices, minutes, pounds.

Some went to college. Counselors had pamphlets and muffins for a few quarters. It was a relief if they didn’t OD or drop out. There were a few moments when gravity would unclasp the youngest and brightest, long enough for them to go to one of the two colleges down the street for something like business or education. They absorbed their parents’ businesses or their old classrooms. The two who were suspected to become lawyers did. Some moved away, some never really arrived.

A high school built to stand two hundred years only makes it one hundred and eight. The chips each year took out now clearest in the rubble of what was an auditorium, classrooms, a few gargoyles on the perch. There was a champion team time and time again, in a century of sweat and shouts.

There was another option. It involved the military or the police, either recruited or disrupted by.  Then, somehow, back at the pizza shop. There’s one on every corner.

A little dream dying the second it’s born, a rubberband snapping back to form.

Caroline Hayduk

Caroline Hayduk is a poet, editor, and educator. She holds an MA and MFA in Poetry from Wilkes University. She has been published in The Penn Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Santa Fe Writers Project, and others. Night Bones is her debut chapbook. She is a full-time instructor of Writing at Luzerne County Community College and lives with her boyfriend/book designer, Eric, their two cats, and millions of trinkets.