The Song of the Blue Bottle Tree

by India Hayford

Some people need someone to taunt the way other folks need someone to love.

Mercer tilted the bottle to his mouth and began the grim process of drinking the dead back to death.

Most people think hearing voices is the equivalent of being crazy. Despite what the doctors and social workers at the hospital tried to tell me, it isn’t true. Some of us just naturally hear what’s out there to hear. It can be disconcerting if you aren’t used to it, and sometimes even when you are. People who were mean in life are just as mean in death. Some of the things dead people say to the living who have no defense against them is enough to make me wish they were alive so I could kill them again.

No one orders flowers for mental illness. No one sends cards saying, Don’t dwell on thoughts of suicide, hope you’ll be back on your feet real soon.

When I was learning to jump my horse, my daddy told me to throw my heart over the jump and all else would follow.

believe in this wrathful god of the Christians and Hebrews, too. I just don’t believe he’s as all powerful as he’d like to be, and that some greater spirit somewhere keeps the God of Wrath from destroying the world.

“He couldn’t save me,” Bigger said. “Couldn’t save a bunch of us. And now he cain’t let us go.”