Melinda Ruley

The day they close the Piccadilly Cafeteria I go in for one last plate. I was never a regular, one of the hundreds who made the pilgrimage every Sunday after church. I don’t know the cafeteria ladies’ names by heart, or which day to avoid the macaroni salad. Still, I’ve eaten enough ‘Dilly fried chicken […]

In the nine months it has taken the state of Texas to arrest, try, convict and sentence Andrea Yates for drowning her five children in a bathtub, I’ve been unable to read a single news account of the story. Every front-page article felt like a trip into the pit of Acheron, where ghosts waited around […]

I was thinking the other day about that Nathaniel Hawthorne story, “The Birthmark.” It’s the one, you remember, where beautiful Georgiana grudgingly agrees to let her mad scientist husband, Aylmer, remove a birthmark from her cheek. Aylmer succeeds, but Georgiana dies. I remember discussing the story in a college English class, and how one woman […]

Like every epic saga, the debate over capital punishment has its flashing battles and its unremarkable skirmishes. The battles get the headlines: fights over DNA testing, executing the mentally retarded, moratoria. The skirmishes remain by and large invisible. They are the jousting matches that take place in the background of nearly every capital murder case: […]

I thought I saw this girl I used to know, standing in the Biscuitville parking lot. If it was really her, we went to the same junior high school. Her name was something like Wanda Faye or Ruby, one of those names you still heard in North Raleigh in the early 1970s even though developers […]

The newspaper said they just got the lottery in South Carolina, so I decide to drive on down. Pay my money and take my chances. On account of I’ve never gambled before, a friend hooks me up with her aunt Nancy. Nancy lives at the very bottom of Richmond County, in Hamlet, where you can […]

Several years ago, my husband and I tucked our infant son into his car seat and drove to a state bar conference in the mountains. The first night, over cocktails, a trial lawyer from Charlotte stood in the middle of the floor and entertained a small crowd with the details of his most recent court […]

There are worse things you could do on a wet winter day than get in your car with a travel mug full of hot coffee, slide Johnny Cash into the tape deck and head on up to East Tennessee. Spend the afternoon shopping in Gatlinburg and see a show in Pigeon Forge, have a big […]

For you all who haven’t heard, here’s the skinny from the quaint and curious town of Hillsborough: Prize-winning cartoonist Doug Marlette recently wrote a first novel called The Bridge, set in the fictional North Carolina town of Eno. Eno is really Hillsborough, where Marlette lives and works amid a cluster of neighbors, a dozen or […]