RACHELE SALVINI

Rachele Salvini is the winner of the 2026 Subnivean Fiction Award selected by Megan Mayhew Bergman. She is an Italian woman based in the US. She spent most of her life in Italy, and she writes both in English and Italian. Her chapbook "Oklahoma Bestiary" was the runner-up for the 2023 Quarterly West Chapbook Award and came out in early 2025. She is the winner of the Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment Honey Prize 2026, and her work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Moon City Review, and others. She currently lives in Kansas, where she's the Director of Writing at Ottawa University, and she earned her PhD in Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. You can find out more at rachelesalvini.com.  

"Bottom Dwellers" moves deftly between tenderness and menace, between the intimacy of first love and the slow recognition of danger. From its opening—“On the night of my first baseball game ever, Garrett told me he heard voices”—it establishes a voice that is clear-eyed, wry, and quietly self-protective, even as the narrator is pulled into Garrett’s orbit.

The writing is richly textured, grounded in a rural physical world—catfish, red clay, gas stations—while also carrying a strong emotional undercurrent, reminiscent of the stories of Breece d'j Pancake. The metaphor of the “bottom dweller” is especially well-handled, accruing meaning across the story until it becomes a lens for understanding character, inheritance, and environment. The details linger, and the ending resists easy resolution, allowing love and harm to coexist in a way that feels both unsettling and true.

-Megan Mayhew Bergman

2026 Subnivean Fiction Award FinalJudge

BOTTOM DWELLERS

On the night of my first baseball game ever, Garrett told me he heard voices.

This happened later, though, a couple of hours after he showed me his collection of baseballs signed by old players — mostly Drillers, but also some big ones. His dad had given them to him, which meant that Garrett’s relationship with baseball was obviously way deeper and more complex than my own. One of the baseballs was signed by his favorite of all time, Catfish Hunter. He kept the collection under his bed, next to his rifle and his doomsday prep kit. 

Garrett grabbed the Catfish Hunter ball and started telling me why he got that weird name, but, like most of his stories, it ended up being about his dad. I’m not sure how he got there; I was too busy looking at him. He sure was a tall drink of sweet tea. 

“He worked like a goddamn slave, so one night he fell asleep on I-40, his truck rolled over, and, you know. His face got basically torn off. He became such a piece of shit after that,” to which all I could do was stroke him with the same tenderness he had for that baseball.  

I always wanted to offer a few stories of my own, maybe distract him a little. But somehow, after every story about his dad, all I could say was, “That’s horrible, Garrett, I’m sorry.” This one was no exception. 

When he was done, he threw the ball at my face. It didn’t hurt much. He smiled. “At least I have you now,” he said. That sure did shut me up. 

In my defense, Garrett had excellent dimples; plus, on our first date he had told me that his dad had punched one of his upper molars right out of his mouth, so when he spoke in his honeyed country drawl, smiled, or winced, the gap between his teeth showed, like he was telling me a secret. 

With all that going on, Garrett could lie straight to Jesus; of course he could get up suddenly, shove all the baseballs under his bed, grab me, make me twirl, and convince me to drive to Tulsa right then, in the middle of the night. His plan was to stay at a hotel just a few hours before going to the Drillers’ game in the morning. I said yes without even wondering if it was a good idea. It wasn’t. He slid the Catfish Hunter baseball into the pocket of his jeans. 

Later that night, I would also find out that he could tell me that he heard voices with little to no consequence. We just kept zipping through rural Oklahoma like we were the only two people on earth. Because he had shoved a couple of beers into my hands and dared me to a shotgunning challenge, we were both pretty tipsy, fueled by gas station coffee and the utmost certainty that we’d make love as soon as we got to our hotel room. 

So the highway didn’t even seem to exist beneath our wheels, and the plains between Perry and Tulsa faded out, so much so that the occasional mall or Indian casino shone like a miracle — and never like Garrett’s dimples anyway, I’ll tell you that much. 

“It’s okay, though,” he said before I could react to the voices thing. “I don’t really listen to ‘em. I just focus on something else. For example, how I can’t wait to get into bed with you.” 

I guess he wasn’t lying about focusing on other things, because then he went on to tell me the story behind Catfish Hunter’s name. As a kid, Hunter often ran away from home to go fishing, with a predilection for catfish, and that’s about it. His real name was James Augustus or something.

“It’s bullshit,” Garrett said. “But it’s a good story to hear. It makes you feel lovable.” 

That was a strange word for stories, but Garrett often used strange words anyway. I wasn’t sure stories made me feel lovable, but then again, I wasn’t sure what made me feel lovable in the first place.

Most of the time, stories made me feel sad for whoever was telling them. Other times, I didn’t get them, and that made me feel even worse. 

When I was little and my mom got locked up for selling fentanyl, Uncle Julian came to get me in his ‘83 Chevy truck, and we rattled off into the sunset. He would take me fishing and tell me all about Jesus. His hair was so dark it looked black when wet with muddy river water or, more often, with beer from the cans he tried to shotgun even though he was too drunk to stand up. We drove along the Cimarron River until he found a spot and jumped out of his truck. There was something about the way he dug the heels of his cowboy boots into the red, doughy clay that told me this was gonna be the place. He fished catfish for local Indian gas stations and casinos around Perry and the surrounding counties. He’d get his reels and lines and hooks, open a couple of folding chairs and plant them deep in the mud, then stand up and say, “let’s pray.” 

I followed his orders. 

“Please give us an abundant bounty today.” He’d sit back down, crack open a beer, and slap my butt gently to send me off. “Go get me some good bait.”

I ran around looking for worms and bugs while he watched me and drank. I split grasshoppers in half, and sometimes he’d get irritated when I chose bugs that were too small. 

“That’s a life wasted right there,” he said. “If you kill animals, you gotta do it for a damn good reason.”

I did wonder if feeding shitty fried catfish to the teenagers who hung around gas stations and threw chips at girls, or to old ladies with their oxygen tanks in tow chain-smoking in front of slot machines was a damn good reason to kill fish in the first place. But I tossed the dead bugs into the river, sure some bottom dweller would be waiting for a gift from the sky. 

Very much like Garrett, Uncle Julian told stories. When I got bored because we hadn’t caught anything for hours, he’d tell me about how Peter threw himself at Jesus’ feet, lamenting his own unworthiness after a whole night of scarcity; then, when he followed Jesus’ instructions, he caught so many fish that the net broke and he needed another boat. 

“You just gotta believe,” Uncle Julian told me, crumpling yet another beer can and tossing it onto a growing pile next to his chair. 

“Are you saying that I’m Peter and you’re Jesus?” I asked once, and never asked again. 

He laughed. “No,” he said. “Not even close.”

“The river is like Jesus?”

“No, little girl,” he said. “You don’t get it. But it’s okay, you will. Go get me some bait.”

So I did. A second later, as I was splitting a worm in half, Uncle Julian jumped up, grabbed his fishing rod, and started reeling. “Hell yeah, brother!” he screamed when the catfish came out of the water, flapping like a flag in the wind. 

Garrett cracked one open and sprang up from the bed as soon as we were done, as if someone had summoned him. He stood pale and tall by the window for a while as I lay in the humid sheets. “I wish we could see the stadium from here,” he said. 

“Come back to bed,” I whispered, but he didn’t. He kept looking for something out there. I didn’t know where he went exactly. Down his spine, in the middle of his wide, freckled shoulders, ran a tattoo of the red stitches of a baseball. It was tacky and heavy-handed. I loved it. It reminded me of the thick tattoos my mom had learned to make in prison, which later became her side hustle so she wouldn’t have to sell fentanyl anymore: giving shitty tattoos to rednecks.

Garrett turned to me. “Do you wanna go to the roof?” he asked. 

I really didn’t. I was tired and naked, and I just wanted to fall asleep next to him, to the soft hum of the ceiling fan, the lights of Tulsa’s skyscrapers drawing lines across the curtains.

“Come on,” he said, approaching the bed and holding out his hand. “You don’t want to go on an adventure with me?” He smiled, punching me in the gut with that damn hole between his teeth. So I got up, picked up his t-shirt up off the floor, and put it on. “Let’s go, let’s go,” he urged, pushing me toward the door. He slid into his jeans. 

Before we left the room, he turned around. “Do you want a beer?” he asked. He was still holding his.

“No, it’s okay,” I said. 

“Square,” he replied, and walked out. 

The hallway was quiet; it must have been three in the morning. Garrett was stumbling lightly, beer spilling from his can. When we turned the corner to get to the fire escape, the elevator doors opened and we bumped into a couple of guys who looked like college students — they wore Drillers gear over button-ups and khakis, their hair soft and neat. 

“Hey, shit-asses,” Garrett greeted them, flashing that big smile of his. 

“Garrett, please,” I whispered. He kept walking, smirking like a bratty kid.  

“What did you say, hillbilly?” one of them shot back.

Garrett snorted with laughter, then pushed me toward the end of the corridor. 

“Hey, girl,” one of the college kids called after me. “Are you okay?” 

Garrett didn’t stop walking, his palm flat against my back, but his smile was gone. “Mind your own business,” he snapped, then called him a slur between gritted teeth.

“What did you say to me?” the college kid asked.  

Garrett turned around. “You really think you can get out of this a winner?” he asked the kid. “I’m fucking crazy.” 

The two college guys shook their heads and walked off, as if Garrett and I were two cockroaches caught under the light in the middle of the kitchen, then skittering under a closet, too much of a hassle to stomp on. 

“Garrett, let’s just go back to bed,” I said. 

But the emergency exit leading to the fire escape was right in front of us, and Garrett walked on like someone was calling him and he couldn’t hear me over all that noise.

Here’s a story I never told Garrett: when I was in second grade and Elizabeth Halsey had just started picking on me because her dad was a judge and had told her about my mom getting locked up, a very tall man with blue eyes and a heavy accent showed up during PE. His name was Renato, I still remember it vividly, like he was a character from a good movie.

He had a tiny baseball bat, a rolled-up sock, and what I would later learn was a T-ball stand. He placed it in a corner of what our public school teachers optimistically called a basketball court — a square of cement surrounded by dry grass. The boys started elbowing and pushing each other to go first, but Renato placed the rolled-up sock on top of the stand, then handed the bat to me. “Okay, little lady,” he said, his accent heavy — maybe Italian, or Mexican, I couldn’t really tell. There weren’t many foreigners in Perry at the time. “Hit it as hard as you can. Then run to every corner of the court as fast as you can.” 

I sure did hit it hard. I still remember how it felt: like that rolled-up sock was Elizabeth Halsey’s face. Or my mom when she couldn’t get her shit together. I did good, and I’d discover later that I was good at pitching too, and I am still good at it, even though now all I throw are darts at the bar. Even when I am buzzed, old men and country boys tell me I throw like a madman, and I would have made a mean pitcher. 

When I hit that rolled-up sock, everybody went absolutely nuts. It traced an arc right above everyone’s head, even Chuck Smith, the corn-fed kid who grew up on a ranch in Kansas and was inexplicably already five foot two. 

And I ran. I ran so hard that it seemed like I had never stopped running when I got home that afternoon to ask Uncle Julian if I could join the baseball team Renato was recruiting for. 

Uncle Julian was skinning catfish on the counter of his trailer, but when I walked in, out of breath, he threw a can of Bud Light on top of a pile of empties by the stove with his left hand. He was holding the antler-made handle of his knife with his right, so the can hit the others a little off. “Goddammit,” he said, when they all collapsed and rolled on the floor. 

I should have known better than to ask him now. The catfish on the counter didn’t look too good either. It was a gruesome scene, enormous fillets lying there between beer cans and jars of the pickled okra that Uncle Julian liked nibbling on when he drank. I had learned to recognize bad catfish because it smelled awful, but also because the meat was a little flimsy, darker in the middle.

“You what?” he asked when I told him about Renato, how good I had been at T-ball, and how the rolled-up sock had flown over Chuck Smith’s head. 

“I would like to join the baseball team,” I said. 

He leaned over the counter, and his skin slipped on the grease from the fish. He watched the fillets for a while. “Goddammit,” he repeated. “This fish sucks. I can’t keep getting this muddy shit. Look. Look how dirty it is,” and pointed at the meat. “No one’s gonna buy it.”

“Maybe you could fish bass,” I said, determined to impress him by flexing some of the fishing knowledge he had given me. “Not a bottom dweller.”

He set his knife down. “Bass is a bottom dweller. Catfish are bottom feeders. That’s different,” he said. “But remember this,” he grabbed one of the unskinned fillets and held it in my face. It smelled foul. “There’s nothing wrong with bottom feeders or dwellers. They’re not dirty, they’re just opportunistic fish that eat whatever they find. How they come out —” he grabbed his knife and started skinning the fish right there, only to reveal more greyish, flimsy meat. “It only depends on the quality of the water where they grow. That’s why the fancy ones from farms are all nice, no contaminants, no grimy taste. If the river is particularly muddy, they come out shitty. Like these ones.” He slapped the fillet back on the counter. “Well, shit. I’ll try selling them to the gas station in Perkins, I guess.” He took a long sip of beer, closing his eyes. I’m not sure what he was thinking about, but when he opened them, he looked surprised that I was there, as if he’d been talking to himself the whole time. “Oh,” he said. “What?”

“Can I join the baseball team?” I asked. 

“That shit’s for dudes and lesbians,” he said. “You wanna get all queer?” Then he grinned and quoted his favorite movie, Sling Blade. “Not funny, ha-ha. Funny, queer.” 

I knew it was over when he started quoting Sling Blade and laughing to himself. I wasn’t even sure what he meant, and what Jesus thought about queers, but I sure preferred it when Uncle Julian told me stories from the Bible instead. He kept sniggering, skinning fish, and crushing Bud Light cans, and I never asked anything about baseball again.

When we opened the door to the roof, we found ourselves in front of Tulsa’s skyline and I had to admit that it was better to be right there, at the top, than watching the lights through the curtains of our room. You could see a little bit of the stadium too. It was already lit for the game.

Garrett grabbed my hand. “This is nice,” he said, and it was. But then, of course, he headed straight for the edge of the roof. “Come on,” he said when I hesitated. He pulled harder. “No good thing is easy to earn,” he continued, and maybe he was right. 

I took a step forward; Garrett smiled a little. I took another. I caught the glint of his missing tooth in the dark. He got closer to the edge. I felt the familiar hiss of Oklahoma’s wind on my cheeks. “Come on,” he repeated. 

I stopped. His smile vanished.

“Garrett, you’re drunk,” I said. 

He let go of my hand. Then, serious as death, he crushed his beer can, tossed it somewhere, and started skipping along the edge. “Yeah?” he asked. “You think I’m gonna kill myself?” He did a couple of jumping jacks. He looked like a real lunatic. 

“Garrett, please stop,” I said. The wind pinched the corner of my eyes. 

That’s when he fished that damn Catfish Hunter baseball from his pocket. I had forgotten it was there. He stopped right by the edge, held the ball above the emptiness and turned to me. The light from a skyscraper hit his pearly whites and the hole where his tooth was supposed to be.

“Please don’t throw the ball,” I said. I didn’t really wonder what the worst that could happen was. I just knew what he was doing wasn’t good. 

He grinned like Uncle Julian did when he quoted Sling Blade. Like he was actually listening to some other voices in his head that I could never reach. Like there was no way he would ever really listen to what I wanted for once. 

So I said it again: “Please, don’t throw it.” 

But the truth was, I hated being the person who had to tell him not to do it. I had always wished I could have been surrounded by people who told me to do things, because being myself and doing what I wanted was good, and what I wanted mattered. I think Garrett needed a little bit of both: someone who let him do what he wanted, and someone who dared to stop him.

So he let the ball go for a second, leaning over the edge — “no!” I cried, but then he caught it immediately and groaned with laughter. It was a good save, as if he had been doing it his entire life. I wondered how many times he had grabbed that ball like that, and how his dad had told him, “good catch!”, only to punch him in the face a few hours later. 

That’s why I hated stories. They always made you feel bad for everybody, and then you ended up not seeing things clearly. You just believed people were good, and if they weren’t, there was always a reason. 

Garrett was still laughing, having the time of his life. “Did you see that?” 

“Yeah, good for you. Good catch,” I replied, exhausted, and only caught the sarcasm in my own voice too late.  

Garrett caught it immediately. He raised his hand, aimed, and threw the ball at me. He sure did, full-force, like he wanted to erase me from earth. 

But I shot my left hand in the air. The Oklahoma wind went quiet around us. The hard ball hit my palm; it didn't even smack my fingers or break a nail. I caught it right in the middle of my hand. 

None of us said anything for a while. 

Then Garrett gave me the biggest, sweetest smile I’d ever seen. “Good catch,” he said, and finally followed me downstairs. Inside, he stroked my face, and I gave his baseball back. 

The next day we woke up late for the game. Garrett was hungover. Because we bought tickets right there, I thought we’d have bad seats, but apparently the Drillers were pretty awful and the game wasn’t that important, so we managed to get decent ones. I’d never been at a baseball game in my life. As we waited for it to start, they played a bunch of pretty terrible pop songs while the mascot, a blue bull who looked incredibly dumb, shot t-shirts at people’s faces with a cannon. 

“Ugh, this sucks,” Garrett said, his head on my shoulder. “My head is pounding.” 

The game wasn’t starting anytime soon. More shitty songs. More people around us laughing, eating hot dogs, and spilling light beer. Garrett rested his cheek on my arm.

“Did you come here with your dad a lot?” I asked him. 

“Before the incident, yes,” he said, his voice thick with slumber. “Afterwards, he was always so mad. One time we planned on going, then he flaked. He sat there on the couch while I stood by the door, all ready to go, and he told me, ‘you know, Garrett, people like me will never get anything good done. And you won’t either.’ And that was it. I was just a kid.” He nestled his blonde hair between my shoulder and neck. 

I looked at the field in front of me. The blue bull started skipping around, and the players emerged. The crowd cheered.

“There they go,” Garrett said, but I knew his eyes were closed. He fell asleep soon after. 

As for me, I watched the entire game. It was much quieter than I thought, nothing dramatic, no fanfare or anything. The players ran around the field, but they didn’t seem to run as fast as they could or hit the balls as hard as they could. It was almost a relief to see they weren’t really good or under pressure, and I didn’t regret never doing what they were doing now. They were, all in all, a crap team. 

At some point, Garrett started snoring lightly, his Catfish Hunter ball tucked safely in the pocket of his jeans. But in the middle of the game, after the Drillers won an inning, he grabbed my hand, slid the ball between my fingers, and squeezed it. He never opened his eyes.

I sat there, the ball in my hand, the warmth of Garrett’s body next to mine, the blue bull

shooting a t-shirt at someone’s face a few seats below us, a bad song blasting in the speakers. 

I should have told Garrett the story of Uncle Julian taking me and my mom to Frontier City the day she got out, how he insisted on doing the craziest rides, how everyone around us seemed happy, even though my mom didn’t really talk at all, other than to tell me that my pigtails actually made me look like a pig. But Garrett was asleep, his long fingers still wrapped around my hand and Catfish Hunter’s ball, and stories like that didn’t really do much good anyway. 

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