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was a heat that didn’t just melt tangible things like ice, chocolate, Popsicles. It melted all the intangibles too. Fear, faith, anger, and those long-trusted templates of common sense. It melted lives as well, leaving futures to be slung with the dirt of the gravedigger’s shovel.
Fear was a square that decade so it could fit into our homes better, into our neat little four-cornered lives.
that time of panic would always be remembered as the moment when the bright, bright stars could not save the dark, dark sky.
Even more, she was an acutely strange religious woman who used the Bible as a stethoscope to hear the pulse of the devil in the world around her.
smelled a whiff of bleach that he associated not with the janitor in the hallway but rather with the filth trapped by the filter and the world being cleaner for it.
Why, upon hearing the word devil, did I just imagine the monster? Why did I fail to see a lake? A flower growing by that lake? A mantis praying on the very top of a rock? A foolish mistake, it is, to expect the beast, because sometimes, sometimes, it is the flower’s turn to own the name.
where each porch had an orchard of small talk and rocking chairs, where cigarette tongues flapped over glasses of lemonade. They
Particularly that June day in 1984, when the sky seemed to be made on the kitchen counter, the clouds scattering like spilled flour.
“Well, it’s melted. Ain’t that death for chocolate? It ain’t even that hot.”
looks were to be believed, he still was just a boy. Something of my age, though from his solemn quietude, I knew he was old in the soul. A boy whose black crayon would be the shortest in his box.
He knew how to jar and can vegetables the way I knew how to play Mario Bros.
These were the curious ideas of a man that spoke more to the fears of the man himself than to any dietary philosophy.
“Even in hell we get the newspaper. And those obituaries—well, I don’t know who writes them, but they are awfully descriptive, almost terribly so. Sometimes all you want to hear is a name, not the direction their blood took after leaving the vein.”
Seeing her in those dresses made me think of lace and lavender and radio theater.
KNEES KNOW I’m a praying man. The broken dishes, the empty beer bottles, the hole in the wall the size of my fist, all know I am an unanswered man. Why is no one answering me?
There are no kings, there are no queens, there is just the unraveled, trying to live.
It’s a waste of time to live better when you’ve got no one to care for and no one to care for you.
They were both looking at the small snake Dad held in his hands.
But a snake that is no threat will greatly define the man who decides to kill it anyways.”
know now how brief the innocent, how permanent the wicked.
dad was a tall man and I always thought remarkable, like somewhere a stained glass window was missing its center. He
They were the wetlands and his fingers the bulrushes that grew at the edges of them.
write I wanted to see for myself on a pad of paper because his mouth was wired shut.
walls of hell are not like other walls. I tore a picture of the ocean out from a magazine and hung it on my wall once. An ocean is a good life place. Everyone always seems happy there. And for a moment, I was happy with my picture, but then the blue sky turned gray. The waves, once calm, took a turn to rage. Then came the screams. As I looked closer, I saw the screams came from men drowning in the water.
Sal.”
She had a drawl like raw vegetables. Hard. Rooted. Not yet ripe.
With all them tall men, the leader of hell is gonna have to be tall or else all these tall men are gonna be lookin’ down. No one much respects things they look down on.”
Then again, knowing what I know now, maybe it was because his eyes were so like matryoshka dolls, hiding
As far as small town fame goes, my brother was a star. The boy who always did what was expected of him in every aspect of his life. He looked like a heartbreaker, so he broke hearts. He looked like a brain, so he never missed making the honor roll, and he looked like an athlete, so he became the one Breathed pinned its Major League hopes to.
reddish brown staining.
Like Elohim?
snakes
“Folks say I shut myself up, never seein’ the world, but I ask ya how can anyone see as much of the world as I see on a daily basis?” She spun in the middle of Spain.
“I’m fine.” Her whisper crippled her words. “You boys go on, have your fun. Don’t worry ’bout me. I’ve
The sheriff was the type of man who spit aggressively when outdoors. It was a great strain for him to keep from spitting when indoors, and I saw this very strain as he cleared his throat.
“Well, if that’s all, Autopsy, I best be goin’.” The sheriff adjusted his belt, the sweat marks beneath his pits looking like gigantic ponds. “Got a call on the way here about Grayson.”
Next thing ya know, we won’t be able to call people ugly. It’ll be appearance impaired, or somethin’ political like that.”
moment I fell, my wings wilted like roses left too long in the vase. The misery of the bare back is to live after flight, to be the low that will never again rise.
two long scars on the edges of his shoulder blades.
“Has your father ever thrown you up on his shoulders? Carried you around?” “Sure, when I was a cricket.” “Then you’ve felt what it feels like to fly. It is being carried by something that raises you up while at the same time promises to never drop you.”
write my sins on a piece of foil and place it on the ground with a rock on its corner so the foil doesn’t get carried off. Then I go away from it. Go a distance from it because then, from afar, the sins become beautiful silver things that catch the light of the sun so brightly, heaven is left in want.
would no longer suffer in the worst shadow of the snake.
As she looked down on Sal before her, she suddenly stopped chewing the gum. Her thin lips settled like a single bleed across her face. The old acne scars like embedded wreckage. She cleared her throat, and in one easy go of it, she asked, “Is God a nigger too?”
Angered even more, he lowered his head and shook it, trying very carefully not to lose himself. “You listen to me, you ignorant hill rat, you take yourself and your hateful mouth and get out of here.”
On the page a painting of gray, wild waves.
“Sometimes this world is like red fences in the snow. There ain’t no hiding who we really are.”
“Somewhere along the way, I lost that apostrophe and now it’s only Hell. But hidden in that one word is God will forgive me. God will forgive me. That is what is behind my door, you understand. A world of no apostrophes and, therefore, no hope.”
You could feel the sheriff’s anger take over the room. Almost like a whooshing past your face. A sort of entity that felt like it could have peeled the wallpaper off the walls and broken the crystal.
so much about this girl anyways?” “Even a devil’s heart isn’t just for beating.”
“As I dangled there in the sky from His hand, I knew He didn’t want to let me go. But I also knew that if He did not let go, He would be ruined by holding onto me. So in that choice, I let go of Him. I had to, for His sake. I had to fall as the Devil, so He could stay the God.”
Mom had been right. The heat was making people behave on their most terrible side. Maybe it even gave them the confidence to act foolishly, rashly, without real reason. Hands in such heat bloom to fists. Fists are the flora of the mad season.
