In her old age, the Virgin Mary moves to your town in the North Carolina backwoods, buys a fixer-upper and takes walks on the side of the freeway. As she walks, she hums — a song by Lennon, or Handel’s Messiah....
Tollbooth Madonna
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Kayla Rutledge
Kayla Rutledge is a fiction candidate in the MFA program at NC State University. She is the recipient of the 2019 James Hurst Prize for Fiction from NC State and the 2020 Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Prize in Creative Writing from UNC-Chapel Hill. Her work has appeared in places like the Santa Ana River Review, Peatsmoke Journal, and Waxwing. She is currently working on a Southern gothic novel set in the Blue Ridge Mountains.