Excerpt from The Hill by Harriet Clark, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It was flat, the top of the hill, a flat space for its tiny town, but the new hospital created the sense of a peak. And what was lost: medical tests, checkups, dentist appointments. Even the well had received one ride a year in the medical van, one chance a year to descend the hill, leave the prison, move faster than your own feet could take you. Now for the unreleased there were no more descents. The dentist too hiked up to work hilltop.

Instead it was the babies who began to descend, each carried out by a nun three months after birth. "The thing about babies in prison," Sister Claudine said to me once, "is that they don't know they're in prison, but they know when we force them to leave."

Late that year, the cats also disappeared. It may have been the poison used to root out some weed or rodent, or it may have been the result of a collection effort on the part of some concerned neighbor. Or the cats may have tired, as we did, of the endless construction. But within a matter of years there were very few people waiting in line or working the line who remembered the cats, and it turned out that my own mother had never known these cats. The cats watched over Processing every weekend—not with interest or warmth but watched over us still—yet never made it through the gates or up the hill. I once spent an entire afternoon detailing to my mother the appearance and behavior of each cat I could recall and, when this failed to elicit her disturbance at their disappearance, began to describe cats more interesting and particular, more worth missing, than the ones that had been there. Three-legged cats with a hop in their step, cats with pinched empty eye sockets and stumped twitching tails. Cats so deformed by life and so forbearing in response that I felt a real affection for the brave disabled cats that disappeared before they ever existed.

Even the trees left the hill the year I turned eight. One week I arrived with my grandfather and where there'd been roots now were holes. Normally we hunched over on the hill—because the climb was steep and my grandfather was old and I had learned my body language from the old—but when we saw the holes, we stood up straight. "Look at that," my grandfather said at the edge of a hole running deep and dark into the earth.

To stay or to go, that is a question. But on the hill it wasn't a question. Anyone who could leave left. .

* * *

For eight years my grandfather and I ascended and descended the hill together, and throughout these years he insisted on giving me and my mother privacy, a privacy that began before the visit began. In line he handed me a plastic bag of quarters and smiled if our eyes crossed paths, but that was it. I looked where I looked; he thought what he thought. When the time came, he filled out my form, held it steady while I signed, then knelt down to remove my jacket, my shoes, pulled out my pockets, shook my shoes to show they were empty, busied himself while the officer did the bit with the wand, then knelt down to button me up, tuck in my pockets. All this he did with the tender distance of a tailor, and once I'd been stamped complete, he did the routine for himself. We must have looked far less familiar with each other than we were, and this may explain why the visitors with Bibles often mistook him for a church volunteer. Their approving smiles as he shook my shoes communicated a fellowship that my grandfather's sideways gaze and tuneless humming gently warded off.

Inside Visiting, he went to his table, I went to the Children's Center. We knew how to play stranger to each other and did this for the rest of the day. Between him and my mother a vow of silence had been taken, as binding and vast as the vow my grandmother had sworn—a vow of absence so great she refused to use roads that veered anywhere close to the hill.

Smoking was still allowed inside Visiting and the room was a war zone, that many people huffing and puffing, smoke wafting up and up, until the fluorescent lights looked like moons behind clouds and the whole room appeared set on fire. Appeared more like a boat set on fire, as in pictures I'd seen of boats in battle giving in to sea and smoke. Because the officers' station sat on an elevated platform at the front of Visiting and, at the rear of the room, the Children's Center dropped down two steps, walking into the Center could feel like approaching the sinking end of a sinking ship. To captain this drowned vessel: the nun at the game cabinet, who was deaf, and the nun at the craft table, who was mute. Plus the nun at the door, playing it a little bit blind. "The gang's all here," my mother liked to say when at last she arrived.

Excerpted from The Hill by Harriet Clark. Copyright © 2026 by Harriet Clark. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.