All the Sinners Bleed

by S.A. Cosby

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. —JOSEPH CONRAD

“The South doesn’t change. You can try to hide the past, but it comes back in ways worse than the way it was before. Terrible ways.”

“The South doesn’t change … just the names and the dates and the faces. And sometimes even those don’t change, not really. Sometimes it’s the same day and the same faces waiting for you when you close your eyes.

“God can be everywhere at the same time if he wants, but he ain’t in every building that calls itself a church. You can stand in a pulpit and call yourself a minister. I can roll around in mud and call myself a pig too. Don’t mean you was called to preach, and it don’t mean I was meant to be pork chops,”

If a man decides you aren’t his friend, then you look like a fool trying to hang on to that title.

an i oop :0

He knew from firsthand experience how coming within kissing distance of the Grim Reaper can change you. What annoyed him about Top Cat was the overabundance of self-righteousness he now possessed. It was a trait common to the recently saved. Especially if one suffered from some form of dependency in their previous unsaved life. It was like they traded a secular addiction for a sanctified one.

“Even the finest sword plunged into saltwater will eventually rust.”

The ability of one human to visit depravity upon another was as boundless as the sea and as varied as there were grains of sand on a beach.

Waiting for the world to shed tears for your pain was like waiting for a statue to speak.

“Terrible people can do good things sometimes. But they like doing the terrible things more.

Black boys who may not have been able to truly articulate how seeing that statue every day on their way to school made them feel but knew without a shadow of a doubt what that statue meant.

images of what Jeff Spearman had on his phone and made his statement a lie. Darlene stood up from the table and moved past Albert to encircle him in her arms. She was shorter than his daddy and her head came to rest on his chest. “I hate this. Every day I’m so scared something is going to happen to

“Think of the worst thing you’ve ever seen. Now imagine seeing it dozens of times. See it and hear the screams that come with it and the cries for mercy or for God or for mama and knowing that there will be no mercy, no rescue, no divine hand of God coming down to smite the devils. Think of seeing that and knowing that it will stain you forever like the fucking mark of Cain.”

Sometimes grief is love unexpressed. Other times it’s regret made flesh.

“She died at forty years old and the world just moved on. So, when you tell me it was God’s plan for them boys and girls to end up under that weeping willow tree, I have to ask myself, which one of us is the bigger fool? You for saying it or me for listening to it?”

“I prayed for you. Because I know you’re hurting. She was my wife. She was the best woman I’ve ever known. So I know how much you’re hurting, because I’m feeling it too. But, son, faith is never foolish,” Albert said.

“Pop,” Titus said as he brushed past his father and went into the house, “faith broke my fucking heart.”

“‘This is what the Lord says: Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed,’” Jamal said. “Jeremiah, twenty-second chapter, third verse,” Titus said.

It made him ask himself, who was at fault here? The man or the folks?

“Evil is rarely complicated. It’s just fucking bold.” Titus touched the brim of his hat and left.

The Word is perfect, but the way men interpret it is corrupt. And your teacher is full of shit.”

Later, after his

mother was in the ground, he realized the Word was just as corrupt as the men who read it. Old Testament, New Testament, it was just words with a little w, written by zealots as PR for their new cult founded in the memory of a dead carpenter.

“Our salvation is his s...

A tradition of watchmen who had turned a blind eye to the suffering of anyone who didn’t look like them. Each one had passed through the world, generation after generation leaving the pieces of their broken county for the next man to try to repair.

He was about to shatter their fantasies of safety and security. He was set to smash one of their idols. He was going to have to drag them into a new reality where people they knew, people they’d known all their lives, were monsters with human faces.

They often ended up hating the messenger too.

You showed fear, and you’d find yourself without a throat.

Memories, charged like electrons, ran along the phone line like nerve impulses.

Either we all matter or no one matters. Everyone deserves to have someone speak for them,”

Just a janitor tasked with picking up the pieces of someone’s broken life.

“You can demand respect. You can treat them with it too. You can save their children. You can find their wandering grandparents. You can judge the goddamn pie contest. But sometimes you still have to remind them you’re not to be fucked with. It’s the only thing some people understand.”

“God loves the believer and the nonbeliever all the same.”

“A man who don’t look you in the eye when you talk to him is a man that don’t respect you,”

‘For they shall take up serpents and not be bitten, and they shall drink poison and it will not harm them,’”

“Pastor, I’m not here to pass judgment on your congregation. I’m looking for a killer. A killer who took the lives of young boys and girls. And just for the record, Mark, chapter sixteen, verse eighteen doesn’t say anything about not being bitten or not being harmed by poison. You fixed that to say what you wanted it to. And since that’s a king snake, not a coral snake, a bite from him won’t mean much,” Titus said.

He ate his ass up. Go Titus Go!!! :)

Elias’s face bloomed scarlet.

His ass got ate up :)

He had that befuddled look most self-righteous people got when someone they considered a heathen could quote the Bibl...

“But only the sinners bleed, Sheriff,” Elias said.

“Pastor, like I said, I’m not here to judge you. But you come any closer to me with that snake, I’m going to send him to hell on a bullet,” Titus said.

Titus left him among his serpents.

When a snowflake becomes an avalanche dragging the men and women who were dedicating their lives, however briefly, to the case down into a crevasse as cold and lonely as Dante’s final circle.

“Faith is a fragile thing, Sheriff. Do you know that? They like to talk about mustard seeds and not walking by sight and all that shit, but the truth is it don’t take much to break your faith. Get sick, get broke, or lose your only son. Your faith will run out of town faster than a deadbeat daddy,” Yasmin said. Tears rolled down her smooth brown cheeks.

Yet it was those shards, the pieces of her heart, that cut into his

own broken covenant of faith and made those words bleed from his mouth.

“A lie can be halfway around the world while the truth is still pulling up his britches,” Helen Crown was fond of saying. Another piece of wisdom from his mother that time had borne out to be terribly true.

He trusted himself more than he trusted anyone. That included God in heaven, the state police, and even the members of his own department. Titus had learned through trial and error and circumstances beyond his control that when the long black veil came down, he could only really depend on himself. It made for a long, lonely life.

It does :(

“Daddy getting those shells ain’t like him saying he don’t think you gonna catch this guy, Titus. But this is Charon. Stuff like this doesn’t happen a lot. People don’t know what to do,” Darlene said.

Gurl

“I’m so sick of people saying ‘this is Charon’ like everyone around here is a goddamn virgin and no one has ever stepped on a sidewalk crack or stole a grape from the Safeway. Let me tell you something I learned in the Bureau. Doesn’t matter where you are from or where you live, people are people. They can be jealous or hateful or twisted and sick. They steal and they lie, and lie about stealing. They fuck each other’s husbands and wives or sons and daughters. They go to church every Sunday and hoot and holler about brotherhood and living in Christ, then they come right out and call you or me a porch monkey before they go home to beat their kids. Then have the nerve, the unmitigated audacity, to point at somebody else, at some other

town, and say, ‘No, those are the sinners, those are freaks, n...