Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

She’s danced on water in life’s late hours.

You meet someone and everything goes warm inside you and when they put their hand in yours, you can feel every inch of their body, like dipping your finger into a river and being able to feel the whole ocean.

“Everything you’re saying is true and real, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s impossible to care about everyone. So you pick your battles. You limit how much you invest into the world and into people. It’s a type of emotional triage.”

That’s what I call “Now-stalgia.” When you know a time in your life is gonna last forever, even before the moment is over.

But only certain tax brackets get the luxury of knowing something’ll kill you and being able to choose not to do it.

My old man is as tall as they come. Six-foot-six. Skinny as a bank account after Christmas.

when I look over at the tables placed around the restaurant I see her: the reason I write, the reason Hell of a Book handed me all my dreams and wrapped them in pain at the same time.

was as if the death of his father was too much for his mind to hold on to, and so it gave it up, little by little, in the hopes of saving itself.

The irony is enough to fill me to the gills and beyond. So my stomach does all it can: it vomits up all of the chocolate, all the Twizzlers, all the lynched dreams, the redlined hopes, the color-blind promises that got Stopped-and-Frisked, the brutal, melanin-driven epigenetically inherited Americana that nobody—not even me—wants to talk about . . . it all comes erupting out of me faster than the red glare of those famous rockets bursting in air.

know for sure that I’m back in North Carolina. I know all the smells: humidity, pine trees, thinly veiled racism. It’s what home feels like for me.

Yeah, the South is America’s longest-running crime scene.

Bolton Town Hall also doubles as a church because there is no separation of church and state in southern Black towns. God is everywhere, especially in the law.

The oldest memory I have is of my mother’s hands. It’s a disjointed recollection, like a flash of light in the back of my heart. Her hands are large in my memory, large enough to hold all of me. Her hands radiate warmth. They smell of raw earth dug up from her vegetable garden.