Bruce Springsteen knows something about quantum physics. The way he sets up a dichotomy in a song, a divide between squalor and salvation. Then he hits the last chord before you ever hear the end of the story—the hero’s foot on the gas of his ‘54 but you have no way of knowing if he’ll really make it out of New Jersey or not. A Schrödinger’s Cat on the Boardwalk.
One of the best examples is “I’m on Fire.” An earnestly horny track just two and half minutes long. The protagonist wants nothing more than to have this woman, but she’s married, and all we end the song with is that he’s up all night thinking about her. A dull knife cutting a valley through his skull.
I saw the music video the same year three of my grandparents died. I was seven-turning-eight, and we had a VHS of all his music videos that we watched at my great-grandmother’s house, rewinding, fast-forwarding to our favorite performances. Among my siblings, the segment of the tape most crystallized as an example of his cool, late-American demeanor was the video for “I’m on Fire.” It kicks off with a busy garage. Bruce’s legs are dangling out from under a car and he’s cranking something into place when the woman walks her heels over toward his boots to ask if he can fix her perfectly functional car and have it ready by tomorrow.
He’s covered in grease. He smiles, a little timid, saying he can bring it by her place—but he sees the diamond on her finger and she explains they live way the hell out in the hills.
He was so goddamn cool. A working-man rockstar in the face of death all around me. A cowboy sort of masculinity that had something to do with worker’s unions and gambling debts. So I kept rewinding, fast-forwarding to that video, believing that on the other side of all this death was me as a man who was so goddamn cool. Adulthood would find me behind the wheel of a ‘54 with an Atlantic City sign in the sky.
But now I’m thirty-two, and instead of grease on my hands, it’s seething under my skin and it slides the anxiety from one side of my body to the other, and someone along the way has knifed a valley between me and masculinity. I’m in there somewhere, just trying to keep a lid on the feral cat under the boardwalk.
It’s fine. No one really thinks one thing or another about my masculinity, that I can tell, but I’m not real into the idea of being a man. Still, I tell myself I haven’t earned the non-binary title, not enough motor oil sliding through my veins instead of blood. And Jesus fucking Christ, I kinda hate that about myself. My looking less like Bruce and more like the person in the Iron Maiden shirt holding the boom over Bruce’s head behind the scenes for the “I’m on Fire” video shoot. But, I like that about myself, too. Still, I fast-forward, rewind, fast-forward, static.
It’s fine.
As an adult, I watch YouTube videos about gender identity and then I watch the “I’m on Fire” video, and then I read the comments underneath. Half of them sound like “This song always makes me think of my first girlfriend, who became my wife of forty years, and died last week.” And it only takes three or four of these comments before you realize this song about a little sex is a lot about death. And not in a metaphorical way. There’s a gravity to work like this, bringing us back to the first time we wanted someone as we listen after losing them.
And gender might be something like that, a dense, rumbling fucking mystery, a space—or a lack of space—where we lose the shit that once made us who we were. All of us in our high heels rolling under the heavy machinery of a car with a supernova swirling above us. We don’t know whose car it is. We don’t care. We just want to feel so goddamn cool.
It’s fine.
My grandfather, who was the last to go the year I turned eight, had hands strong as hell, his own pre-Springsteen brand of cool—of being a man. And I think of all my grandparents and all the pictures they took of me, the woodworking they gifted me, the souvenirs they brought me from their travels across the country, and I wonder what they would think about their grandkid’s gender confusion. I wonder how we view people from the other side of this death trap. If we get it. If it matters.
I like to think we call our grandchildren non-binary after we die. I like to think it matters.
Caleb Bethea is a writer from the Southeast. They’re the author of DISCO MURDER CITY (Maudlin House ‘25). You can also find their work in HAD, X-R-A-Y, hex, Bruiser, ergot, Modern Alchemy, and elsewhere. But, mostly, they’re just a family ghoul with a wife and four goblins by the ocean. You can say hi on most platforms: @caleb_bethea_
Reminiscing on a Prosperous City You Once Ran Away to
You drank Bellinis at hardware stores with crystal chandeliers and
tried not to get him in your photos,
the gluttony on both your faces,
marked. You had no predecessors,
only ancestors laughing at you,
at your silk scarves from the vintage store,
the cheap wallet, a prop.
A prosperous city, a pseudonym for your socials,
but he’ll find you anyway, you should never worry, he says.
By Cristal and candlelight
you take your steaks medium rare,
the ones that will be his ruin.
You used to come here with your mother, now it’s a hideout.
How did you come to own the shelter, you ask,
the luxury homeless shelter for young girls?
In the Middle of an Impossible Summer
where your gums stick to the roof of your own mouth,
you have a choice.
Don’t tell me about poison
when all the lizards are hiding, when no one
rises in the dark to feed the ocean,
to clean the heaps of trash from her banks.
There are rocking chairs in the swamp
eaten up by the storm and this town was never small.
A sleek slight of hand, our backyards up to our temples.
Tell me this is true in your mind,
tell me you understand, it was never your poison.
Debating on Whether or Not I Should Buy Groceries
on the first of the month when I still haven’t rewired my brain from last month, a spectacle of sleepless eyes like saucers, of oyster dinners on the bay and dry nosebleeds. When you’re living out of a suitcase you have nowhere, nowhere to put your vanity- tracing lipstick on perfect skin, searching for the perfect spot to sit with your shadow, the shades odd and drawn. If I was worried about buying eggs, I didn’t show it, busying my mind with my reflection, burying the rampant gray hairs down, down, down the drain, shards of glass and pulp gathering at the bottom.
LANA VALDEZ is a poetess and thought daughter currently living in New Jersey. Her debut collection, “I Rot,” is available via Filthy Loot, and her work also appears in Spectra, Expat, Dream Boy Book Club, and others.
It costs next to nothing. Who would believe, a little old thing. A cabin, some would call it. A fall down, others. This home cobbled so long ago.
He parks out front and just looks. Takes it in. The driveway is broken rock grown over. A reaching arc through the long yard. The once great paved expanse has succumbed to what may come. He steps out among the sprouts and cracks.
Beyond acres away. Farmland once. Now grains shift and lean after long generations. Remains sit somewhere out there. A chimney rising in the grass. Ancient bricks stacked.
He calls the realtor, it rings and rings. He texts. Where are you, why aren’t you here. More of this. He tucks the phone away.
A dark waits. These first rooms. The walls are caved in places. Rotted all through. He touches, he knocks. Stepping deeper. He turns a knob and a flashlight pops and the dark falls back. He proceeds. Through rooms. On. Dust and flaking. In places falling. All these years.
He talks to himself. Little things, words. Wow or oh. Sometimes phrases. Oh wow. Touching these old walls. He runs a hand along.
Stairs go down. A basement wide and deep, dug beyond the walls above. Old pillars brace against the weight of stone and the world. The floor goes off into the dark. Concrete in places, dirt in others. He pulls at his shirt. A deeper heat here. In the walls, in the ground. Nooks are packed with shelves now empty, dust caked along.
He walks with the phone shined around. Pale flash lens. A rug is green with mold. Old chairs sit rotting. He touches items as if to be assured they are there.
A pair of boards are nailed over damage. Planks warped by years of rain dripping. He gives one a tug and it groans and pulls loose. He yanks the other and it snaps and falls at his feet.
A void exists beyond. He squats and leans and he shines the light. A hole is dug into the earth. A black reaching down. The light won’t touch the bottom, its glow snatched up along the way.
He stands on the basement stairs. He dials and calls and when it doesn’t connect he calls again. He climbs two steps and tries again but nothing changes. He curses aloud.
Down again. Past the stairs and on. He shines the light and he moves close and leans but he does not understand. The hole is still there but the boards are gone.
When he reaches in he feels a step. Some sort of rung. He dangles a foot and he turns and lowers himself in and another step matches the first. A crude ladder going down and down. He climbs hand over hand deep into the sunk shaft, phone light put away now, his being swallowed whole by the hot earth.
He doesn’t think to count. It doesn’t occur to him that it could be so far. When sweat runs into his eyes he wipes away its sting. When his arms begin to shake he tells himself it can’t be far now.
Still he’s shocked when the ground is there. He’d started to think the climb might go on forever. Now he stands flat on dirt floor. He turns and turns. There is a light. A trickle of gleam waving in the far off black. He goes that way, there is no other way to go.
At times he must stoop. Sometimes he touches walls for support. Making his way along. Sweating. More a cave than a hall. The light comes nearer as he moves along but it never seems to grow brighter. He calls out with a hollow want. Hello. Hello. He goes on.
The way ends as it must. A room is there, carved into the ancient stone. A single candle sits on a table, its flicker of flame stirring in a touch of air faint and puzzling. Beyond this there is a man. Bearded and skeletal. Flesh pulls thin across bones with every movement. With long fingers he bends wood and he snaps a piece and this he tosses into a hearth and then he reaches to break apart another.
A step or maybe something more subtle. Maybe just a feeling. But now he is turning, this frail figure. He is straightening as he turns to face this man. His voice is a whisper.
“Oh there you are,” he says.
_____
The realtor steps through the house. Her suit is fine but reserved. No need for pomp in the sticks. She scrolls the phone and calls again. One foot kicks a bucket away.
It rings. Of course it rings. Forever it does. She tucks the phone away. Now she wanders. Through dark rooms and around. The stairs are there leading down.
Her flashlight is military grade. It splashes the basement in daylight bright. Mud bugs curl into shadow. With a loafer she sifts among refuse. The leavings of a century of squatters. In one corner a molding rug has been dragged into a bunch.
She climbs steps back into the light. Phone held high like a trophy. She steps out of the basement and then out of the remains of the structure and she scrolls and calls again, turning and turning still. The phone clicks and the signal connects and now it rings and rings and in time the call goes nowhere. She thinks she might call again but she does not. She puts away the phone and now only stands, eyes falling closed for seconds at a time, feeling the soft presence of air on skin. Not a breeze, something gentler, more slight. She breathes in. Abrasive morning air. She takes it in deep gulps. She smiles, eyes closed. Maybe she laughs, it’s such a morning.
There is a faint air. Just a hint. In that morning freshness only the barest waft of something other does come. Smoke. She opens her eyes. She turns and turns and far off in a spread of open field there stands a chimney ancient and crumbling, some remnant of a once grand estate centuries lost, and from this relic there now trickles gray plume. She takes a step that way and then another, but she finds herself slowing, halting, and now she is sitting in the grass, now she is but an observer as the furnace is ignited once more.
Craig Rodgers is the author of several books, dozens of stories, countless notes, and one convoluted plan to fake his own death.
Chuck was born a long time ago in a far, far away strange land. He began painting at the age of 2 with a site-specific piece titled “I Poop in the Tub and Smear it on the Wall.” Though unpopular, the piece did receive much attention. Less popular than later pieces titled “Pee in the Bed” and “Poop in the Pants” it is still considered a milestone event in Chuck’s artistic career. You can find more of Chuck’s work on Instagram at @chuckagrostudio or his website at ChuckAgroStudio.com
Her cheekbones sat sharp—right up under her water colored eyes. Her cheeks pooled into loose hounddog jowls. Her skin, the rough and tanned leather typical of smokers late in the game.
painting courtesy of Red Danielson (2025)
She wore pink scrubs and an old pair of white tennis shoes. She drank black coffee from a mug printed over with an image of a steamboat chugging up the Mississippi. White steam clouds floated over the boat against a baby blue sky. Her hand was steady as she lowered the cup back to the table.
Folger’s is shit, she thought.
Her legs crossed like stilts at the knees. She sighed and crossed her hands in her lap. She looked across the blank yard. The veinlike limbs of varied hardwoods thicketed grey and tan beyond the tall black iron fence at the bottom of the hill. Them trees are pitiful, she thought.
She checked her black Casio and saw it was 7:07. She pushed into the thin cushions of the plastic lawn love seat. She picked up her cigarettes and lighter from the glass table. The smoke felt dry in her lungs and she wretched wetly before her chest settled into regular albeit ragged breaths.
She reflected back on her thoughts beginning before she crawled out of her bunk into the darkness. She thought about how they started before her spirit had time to orient itself in the black morning room. She hated the thoughts. She thought they were a total nuisance. Thoughts no one normal would ever think.
She drew from the deep background of her mind the knowledge none of these things were true. Yet she found herself unable to let go of this new copy of the old story. Every morning was like starting over in this way. She breathed in through her nose. An old trick learned in the Midwest recovery scene.
Here I am, she thought.
I am alive. I have my Kamels and the lawn is alive and them trees are alive and the Folger’s is shit but it is still black and warm and warmin me and givin me one of the two remainin buzzes. Folger’s and Kamels and the trees and the cardinal just landed there on the feeder. Barnfire’s soul come to see me in the morning.
She slurped her coffee and let her breath out after an eight count. She accepted her and her suicidal brain would dance this dance of breath and neurosis until the end of days. She laughed at them. She imagined their voice was a wooly faced man in a suit in the fetal position sucking his thumb on the membranelike bottom floor of her brain. She imagined brushing his hair and cooing him as he trembled and wept. An old ego vision from the early days.
A breeze washed up from the south across her nose, her crowsfeet, the lines around her mouth as she smoked. A clump of ash fell to the concrete patio as she lowered her hand. Lightbeams played through the leaves. The sky smoky blue.
It all reminded her of the morning in Dixie, Alabama when she’d stolen Deddy’s cigarettes off the Formica counter. She’d stared at them under the yellow light overhead of the stove, where they sat next to his gold keys, for a long minute, before she snatched them up and walked out the back sliding glass door. She’d busted six matches before she got one to stay lit on the front end of the Winston. She’d remained proud for years on account she hadn’t coughed on the first one.
She thought the house they’d grown up in a poor one. All shingles and no roof. The backyard full of beer cans and spent propane tanks—cigarette butts, dog shit and ashes. She still cringed at the thought of it. She thought she’d tried to talk straighter, clearer, whiter—more like some person from New York would talk—on account of the house. The clapboard painted a dark emerald. She always thought the guy who painted it must’ve been drunk or high as hell as the coats were as swirled and thick as Van Gogh’s buttermilk impastos over olive trees.
They lived after a few empty lots at the end of a road at the edge of Dixie. The city came in and turned it from dirt to oystershell in ’68. The houses up the street were mildly better than theirs insofar as their paint jobs were cleaner and their boards were straighter, and their yards were free of the trash so dominant in hers.
She was halfway through the first Winston as she felt hands bury into and grip her shoulders and skin touch cool against her cheek as she smelled a rosy waft from the sweet olive bush near the door.
“Hey!” said a voice like a bell.
A smile wrapped her head. She turned and looked up into the pale diamond eyes, the suddenly strong jaw, the round nose, the dirty blonde hair in loose curls draped around the face of Barnfire. Her warm breath on her breath.
“The hell you doin smokin a cigarette?”
“Bein a man,” Chastity said.
“You a man now?”
“I am today.”
Chastity felt a darkness in the center of the morning as she watched the cardinal hop up on the powerline. She slurped her coffee. Her bestfriend Rebecca Barnfire had come to see her from up the road.
They’d run the town with boys in trucks till they were old enough to leave. The big trees’d all been logged out before they were born. The Service-planted-pines were just starting to grow back once they got older.
Chastity’s father drank Bud heavies and smoked dope on the back porch when he was home in the mornings and nights. He slaughtered cows down at the slaughterhouse. The oystershell ran out by the time the road got to their house and there were big washed out holes in it and he refused to pay for the dirt work.
He, her daddy, Charles Lee, liked to sit with his shirt off and stare at the moon. The FM band was set on 98.5 and the presence of the eternal darkness beckoned across the yard and into the fields which stretched out to the baby pines at the edge of Monroe County. He was not without the loving thoughts any man may have of his child and the universe from which she emerged. His tears ran silent down his crooked face in the moonlight and Charley Pride played on the radio.
Chastity and Rebecca played with the dirt clods and cigarettes until they were old enough to pick up whiskey and pills. Once they’d found those—in Doctor Mellingham’s offices, in the plasticwood cabinetry, in the fields—they relied upon them the way they saw the girls growing up across the street rely on Jesus. The headlights of the old Fords lit the path to the beer joint on Friday nights down at Bill Bleaker’s Creekbed Jamboree.
Rebecca wolfwhistled at the Southern rock four piece from Montgomery. She made her face sparkle and lowered her eyes and picked up her rose patterned cotton dress and spun once she felt the shaggyheaded frontman’s eyes.
Chastity bit the aluminum bar at Bleaker’s with a fury her ancestors would understand. She heard stories of her grandaddy drinking the county dry through the wars—too drunk to report for duty. Back then her face was sharp and clear: like a mirror on fire. Light freckles covered the high cheekbone, the hard jaw and the hawknose. Her eyes the color of some mystic sea water. The boys from the schools the county over didn’t know what to make of her and she and Barnfire bit their heads off at their leisure.
Once they drove west for Orange Beach under the cover of more moonlight. They watched the world turn from pure pine wood to saltwater and sand. The beach was eternal on either side and the sea went on forever in front of them and the beach disappeared into the pines at their backs. Gas lanterns burned from where they hung under the eaves of the fishing huts out on stilts at the end of long and winding piers over the water. They got naked and swum out in the saltwater. They kissed and fell asleep that way in the wet sand under the moon.
There was no evilness between them on the drive back and the air was as clear as Alabama itself. There was a silence between them which was longer and greater than the world. They stopped at bait shop for burgers and made love in the parking lot after running their hands across the neon rainbow of plastic lures, under a canopy of nylon lines. They put more ice in the Playmate and bought another sixer of Miller once they’d toweled down. The beach highway burned under the truck and the sea oats stubbled the sand on the sides of the road.
They left everything behind and moved to Pensacola and lived in the beach bars up and down the coast. Barnfire’s folks wondered where she was. They shot bottles like skeet with twelve gauges on the beach with roughnecks in from the rigs one night. The road hummed under them wherever they went and they gave no care for trouble. Barnfire’s face grew rounder and they got jobs in the kitchens and rented a bungalow. They spent their money on beer and cigarettes and lived for the sight of the beach and night unoccluded by condos or casinos.
Crank broke up the scene in ’78 and she remembered the feeling of the morning she left for the north with no idea where she would stop next. She saw Rebecca crying with her top off on the teal motel comforter—her palms upturned to the ceiling and her blonde hair a darkstreaked beautiful mess of waves. She’d kissed her on the forehead and put the bag in the back of the truck as Magnolia from the Heartbreakers debuted on the radio.
Chicago was a mean city and she’d found a new side of herself called heroin which she hated. It was a total loss of confidence which forced her into the denizened Midwestern nights like black steel burning on the highway. She fought with several men and lost and her face took on a crushed bruisedness in the silver mirrors. You could see the outline of her bones in her arms, and the thin cotton dresses from home she’d once been loved in went grey and ragged.
She flew a sign on the interstate. The mega highway wind would blow her hair back and she remembered crying without tears more than once as she waited for the dollars of strangers.
One night she found herself with enough money to enter under the Christmas lighted ceiling of Robichaux’s in the old Polish part of town. Past a row of clapboard houses not unlike the ones from the street she grew up on. There was a warm brownness to the night air. She’d seen a father and son throw a ball back and forth with a dog in one of the dozens of chainlinked backyards on the walk to the bar. She’d heard about it through her new friend Henry James who was a night thief and a busker in the central city.
She ordered a shift beer and looked up at the lights. A ball game played in the crook of the ceiling and she let her eyes drift past it. She flexed her jaw and felt like she’d been kicked in the mouth. She felt the cold come in from the door and turned to see a man in a black leather jacket and blue jeans brush powder from his shoulders and take off his beanie. She was overcome with the sensation of life having eclipsed her entirely. It was as if the last breath of her childhood self had blown out the door with the man’s entrance. She felt slurried as she nodded her head toward him. He was brickjawed and grey stubbled and he walked past her to the other end of the bar.
She watched him finish his one beer. Magnolia leaves in sunlight against a blue sky blurred in the back of her head as she was overcome with the old desire for Alabama. The depression was a deep navy. There was no one to call in the homestate any longer. There might as well have been no Alabama.
She covered her pint glass with a coaster and put her hat on and walked out to the sound of Bocephus singing notes on fishing from the jukebox. She sat on the cold black iron bench out front and felt nothing as she smoked. A boxtruck pushed through the slush and cast golden beams on the wet black road. She wanted to go to the mission and sleep. She wanted to never have another drink. She cursed the old man with his shirt off in the backyard in the moonlight.
I got what he got. And it’s all I got.
The truck pushed back by going the other direction and she thought of flagging it down for a ride to the mission.
She blew her hands and looked up to the clear black sky. She began to walk toward the mission with the vision of the field beyond the trash of her youth in her mind like a warm spirit guiding her feet in the direction of the sense of a sound mind. Her pulse quickened and her body warmed. She was all of a sudden sure of what was going to happen next. She would walk all the way to the mission: the clear five miles. She would pay the dollar fifty for the bed and ask to borrow one of their towels. She’d get on her knees and pray next to the bunk, her elbows at rest on the baby blue waffle blanket, like she did as a baby in Dixie.
She’d wake up the next morning at six to beat the crowd. She’d pray again, and have another shower, and see if she could get a comb for her hair. If she could, she’d comb it out slow and easy like the rain which then fell on her as she walked. She’d hit the eight o’clock meeting at Southland. She’d make the ten block walk there from the mission. She’d hope to see one of the women she knew there with some time. One of those pure women in the golden light of God—their steely hair healthy, well brushed down to their shoulders and secured by expensive clips.
She’d ask the one which called to her to guide her and she’d call her everyday and do what she said. She’d find a way to get the dollar fifty for the mission and live there the rest of her life if she had to until she found somewhere better. If she never found anywhere better it would be okay as long as she didn’t drink whiskey or get high ever again. She’d fly a sign for an hour or two a day and look for a job the rest of the time. If she had to she’d fly a sign for the rest of her life. She’d try and buy a better shirt as soon as she got the chance.
And it all went as close to this as one could imagine. She stayed at the mission for three months and got a job in one. She sold coffee off a street cart at less than minimum wage and saved up enough in three months to move into an Oxford House further north. She worked the cart for another three months before getting on at the Donton Square McDonald’s where she made manager in two years. She kept her hair pinned back and her hands clean at work. She watched the odd reflective grey towers of the city in the mornings on the train on the way to work. The sun hit the sides of the towers and she felt alive through her muscles and face. Lightbeams fell through the shadows and crossed her face in diagonal lines those mornings on the train.
One morning five years in she was cleaning the windows in the front of the restaurant when her pocket buzzed and she answered her phone.
Her sister’s voice on the other end of the black line asked if she’d “heard the news” about their father.
“No,” she’d said.
“He killed himself this morning with a knife in his bedroom. Stabbed himself in the heart three times and fell back on the bed and died. Dixie police found him stomach up.”
Chastity watched a shirtless man, with a dirty blonde beard, in swimtrunks, cross the street. He knelt on one knee. She heard him cry out like a hurt bear through the plateglass over her sister’s static voice on the line.
She met her sister three days later, down in Dixie, at a grey hotel on Highway Eight. It was a small, sad service. There were only a few Presbyterians the old bastard had long since abandoned. Chastity thought his head was bloated to unreasonably red and wide proportions even for an alcoholic. His hands folded on top of one another like a schoolboy’s on his football field of a chest. His shoulders met the white padding interior of the casket on either side. His mouth drawn in a thin anti-smile and the black holes of his nose erupted in pubic-like hair. She crossed herself at the sight of him and kneeled by his casket. She said the old prayers under her breath and the new ones she’d learned in Chicago.
She couldn’t bring herself to kiss his forehead; the specter of this failure would haunt her for decades. They closed the box and drove him out on Highway Eight to the Dixie Historic Cemetery. She rode with her sister in her silver sedan behind the hearse. The church people only made one more carload. Highway Eight emptied out into the fields past the Sonic and the Advanced Autoparts. The fields were bright green; to Chastity, they looked more alive than all of Chicago combined. Her sister’s car windows were oilstreaked and the clear coat on her hood had come off in two big boils of rust and sunbaked metal.
The cemetery backed up to a soy field. It was encircled by a couple scraggly pines and a half dead cedar in which a couple turkey vultures’d made their roost. The two Hall brothers from Hall Funeral Home brought out the riser cart and set it up for their father. They wore matching auburn and navy check sportscoats, navy slacks, shiny black loafers and salt and pepper hair trimmed down to a neat half inch.
The older brother, James, opened the back of the hearse. “Awlright Miss Chastity, now, let’s gone head and get yah daddy home baby.”
The younger brother, Beau, pulled the casket out of the back and slid it onto the riser, in one precise pull, as James held the riser steady. Chastity turned and watched the two Presbyterians pile out of a big white pickup. The young, skinny one—with his thick brown hair combed over in a quaff—pushed his checkered shirt deeper into the belted waist of his khakis and curled his lip as he squinted. A bald man who drove strowed right up to the casket and patted it like a dog with a pale hand.
“We’re gonna miss ol Charles Lee down at the chewch,” he said. “He was a helluva card, but I believe the man had a good heart. People are gonna say what they say about anybody, but I believe Charles Lee had a good heart.”
Chastity brushed some hair away from her mouth where it’d been caught. A breeze blew through and kicked up dust in their faces. Her sister threw her hand up and guarded her eyes.
They found themselves over by the hole in the ground the Halls dug before dawn. James Hall held his slim, leatherbound copy of the Gospel against his chest with his dark and shining hands. He wore a forlorn look of patronage as he looked over the small crowd with his back to the field. He looked as though he was prepared to deliver a life sentence to a man of equal nobility. He opened his mouth to speak but it was so dry he mashed his tongue against the roof of his mouth before he opened it again and spoke.
“The ribbon of life is cut in the dyin days of a dyin land.”
His tongue felt thick and pasty against the dry roof of his mouth. He gulped what spit he had left down before he spoke again.
“It is through this ribbon we walk, and cross this ribbon we mus live. It is in the mornins, alone fields such as this, where we mus pray and say, ‘I too am a man in this land. I too will cast my seed across the clean of the earth, and ass Gawd to provide whatever providence he may deem suitable to my existence.’”
He took a small step forward. He rocked back on his heels as he lifted his toes and then tapped them down against the dirt.
“’Jesus was a cross maker’ it has been sung. ‘Jesus was a cross maker.’ A man amongst men. A fishermen of men amongst fishermen. The Leaven carryin the secret of the Leaven to the unleaven flock of the world. Charles Lee was one of the other. He was in one of these two camps, and only Christ knows the difference, and Charles Lee of course was made of Christ as we all are. The Brother is at rest now. He has found his heavenly home. He is in the sky of diamonds. He is in the teal pull of the universe. For us, here on earth, there are only the two commandments to remember and practice daily. There is no truth outside of those truths.”
James looked over at Beau where he stood, arms crossed, at the corner of the grave plot, under one of the sickly cedars.
“Amen?”
“Amen,” the small gathering said in broken pieces.
On the car ride home, her sister asked her to come and live with her after the funeral and she was struck by the clarity in which she felt the conviction to agree. She hugged her and flew back. She sold most of her things, swept the floor and bought a car to drive down to Fairhope. She went to the mission and served a meal and thanked the staff there. She visited the grave of the steelhaired woman who helped her and left a gold coin on her headstone.
Her windshield and rear window were clean and clear as she headed south out of the Midwest. A twenty year career in the Fairhope public schools, a turn of the century cottage in a quiet neighborhood drowned in green oaks, a life in the church, her sister’s eventual release in the arms of cancer in hospice care—this was much of all which stood between her and that long drive she made out of Chicago.
The cardinal hopped down from the feeder into the grass. It was preening itself. It twitched its head. It reminded Chastity of a smile. It spread its wings and paused. It flew blackeyed across the yard and into the sky. She touched the coffee. It had gone cold. The birds in the trees had gone quiet. There was no sound but the wind. It was 1976, no 1978. It was her, it was Rebecca Barnfire, it was her sister. All of them in the car. All of them turning the radio up to the right level. The trees burning way to give rise to the rest of the country. She coughed her wet cough and lit her last Kamel. She took three drags and a smile crossed her face in the reverie of the morning. She coughed and she coughed and she laughed as she fell from the chair—arms wide open to all the women of the universe. To Alabama herself.
Dan Duffy is a writer from Gautier, Mississippi. A graduate of Ole Miss and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lives in Gautier.
Red Danielson, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a poet, screenwriter, and painter. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Haiku Journal, CERASUS, Three Lines Poetry, and Subterranean Quarterly, among other publications. This piece, an earlier version of which appeared in Little Village magazine, was adapted from an ongoing project pairing his prose with portraits of poets, writers, and artists.
