Varina

by Charles Frazier

The black of the mourning bands around their hats blacker than a moonless night sky. Blacker than a hundred-year-old mojo hand, blacker than the bottom of a Welsh coal pit, blacker than the iris of the devil’s right eye.

A deep belief that your moment in time is the pinnacle, the only standard of judgment extending from the creation of light until the black apocalypse, that what you believe right now is eternal truth because you believe it so fervently—those deep beliefs so crucial at the moment but none of them more permanent than a puff of air across a palmful of dry talcum.

she and Jeff and the culture at large—had made bad choices one by one, spaced out over time so that they felt individual. But actually they accumulated. Choices of convenience and conviction, choices coincident with the people they lived among, following the general culture and the overriding matter of economics, money and its distribution, fair or not. Never acknowledging that the general culture is often stupid or evil and would vote out God in favor of the devil if he fed them back their hate and fear in a way that made them feel righteous. After years of loss and reflection, your old deluded decisions click together like the works of a watch packed tight within its case—many tiny, turning, interlocking wheels, each one bristling sharp-toothed with machine-cut gears. The force of every decision transferring gear to gear, wheel to wheel, each one motivating a larger energy going in no direction but steep downward to darkness at an increasing pitch. And then one morning the world resembles the wake of Noah’s flood, stretching unrecognizable to the horizon, and you wonder how you got there. One thing for sure, it wasn’t from a bad throw of dice or runes or an unfavorable turn of cards. Not luck or chance. Blame falls hard and can’t be dodged by the guilty.