All the Sinners Bleed

by S.A. Cosby

set fire to the last remaining indigenous village on the teardrop-shaped peninsula that would become Charon County.

Blood and tears. Violence and mayhem. Love and hate. These were the rocks upon which the South was built. They were the foundation upon which Charon County stood.

“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.”

But, Titus thought, not until Mama had been in the ground and you’d finally found Jesus.

He didn’t refer to his everyday clothes as his “civilian” wardrobe. That gave his uniforms a level of militarization he didn’t like.

This was the other half of the tradition born from chaos that resembles order. Guns drawn, men and women walking toward a man, it’s almost always a man, with his own gun drawn, the barrel still hot from spraying a classroom or a theater or an office full of cubicles with chunks of lead in steel jackets moving at twenty-six hundred feet per second.

“Evidence makes convictions, your gut gets you to the heart of the case,” Ezekiel Wiggins, the only other Black agent in the Indiana Field Office, was fond of saying. Titus thought the truth was somewhere in the middle. Evidence could be tainted. Your gut could lead you astray. You had to find a balance between technique, intuition, and the truth.

Men like Scott, men consumed by their egos and their desire to assert dominance at the top of hierarchies only they could see, didn’t have the capacity to set aside their petty aspirations even in the face of death.

He’d seen what the width of the thin blue line could hide, and it sickened him.

That reality was as simple as it was traumatic. They were now the latest locality that had to add “site of a school shooting” to their town’s history.

and partly because he craved a new type of religion. The one based on blood and wine magic had failed them, in Titus’s opinion. Structure became his religion. Discipline was his crucifix against chaos.

She’d taught Sunday school until her illness forced her to step down, then it forced her to lie down, then it made her go still.

No one knows the hidden rivers of a man’s spirit like his mama.

People who said facts don’t care about your feelings had never had to tell a father his son was dead and before he died he’d become a killer.

Didn’t matter that Titus was a Black man who had run on a platform of reform. To a lot of Black folks, including Jamal, he was now blue instead of Black.

he was going to be a sheriff who was Black, not the Black community’s sheriff.

The moment he announced his candidacy he had made a choice to live in a no-man’s-land between people who believed in him, people who hated him because of his skin color, and people who believed he was a traitor to his race.

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

was being challenged by a man who six months ago was selling more Oxy and molly to his own people than he sold to the Tylers and Madisons of the county.

Titus put on his sunglasses. “I try not to dream,” he said as he walked into the house.

Twenty years removed from the last time since he willingly attended a church service, and he still found himself using the jargon of the devout. It never left you, not completely.

Scott was the type of man who complained about the world being too sensitive these days without ever acknowledging the irony of his own fragility or privilege.

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

He wondered why her hands had retained their power and his father’s had become distorted. They both had worked with their hands. But only Gilby owned her time. She could rest whenever she wanted. Albert’s hands had been tethered to another man’s whims.

Titus hoped he lived long enough to say whatever was the first thing that came to his mind without fear of reproach.

He wondered if this was how they were processing their ordeal. If the impermanent nature of social media was a refuge from the finality of death.

He could despise Latrell’s actions without reveling in his death. Those two things were not mutually exclusive.

suppose so, but I think it might be nice to finish up my career working for a sheriff who ain’t meaner than a rabid weasel. One who keeps his white sheets on his bed,” Pip had said.

Person like that, well, if they think there’s a pair of eyes on them that might be taking note of the things they doing, it might give them pause,”

Not a litany of threats but a promise of consequences.

The words PROTECT AND SERVE were inscribed on his badge, but in moments like this, it felt like INTIMIDATE AND FRIGHTEN should replace them.

Righteousness. The kind of righteousness that made you feel above petty things like laws and amendments. The kind of righteousness that came from the barrel of a gun. He knew now it was a false piousness. A lying piety that seduced you into believing the end justified the means.

“Evil is rarely complicated. It’s just fucking bold.”

The Word is perfect, but the way men interpret it is corrupt.

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.

If Darlene was sunny days and lemonade, Kellie Stoner was moonshine and a sky gone full dark with no stars … but he was happy living in the light.

“You a real detective. I thought that ol’ boy ain’t had no neck, but you found it,” he said.

“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.”

“We’ve seen each other five or six times in the last seven years. You really think you know me, know what I want?” Titus said. His voice was tight as a drum. Marquis got up off his cot and walked over to the bars of the cell. He gripped them with his wide ax-head hands and leaned forward. His tightly coiled dreads fell into his face. “Better than anybody who’s still breathing, big brother,” Marquis said.

“Who was the dumbass that let them hang up?” Douglas said. This was followed by a smattering of chuckles. “I was the dumbass,” Titus said. The chuckles ceased immediately.

“Reverend, if you’ve seen the things I have, you’d realize the devil is just the name we give to the terrible things we do to each other,” Titus said.

“God loves the believer and the nonbeliever all the same.” Yeah, but I don’t love him back. I left that abusive relationship a long time ago, Titus thought.

Elias’s face bloomed scarlet. He had that befuddled look most self-righteous people got when someone they considered a heathen could quote the Bible more accurately than they could.

That everyone was making it up as they went along and religion was just another crutch, like liquor or weed.

“He talks an awful lot about God and the Bible, but my mama always said the devil can quote the Good Book as well as any angel.

“Davy, if your cousin ain’t a racist, he is mighty goddamn comfortable with being around racists. That’s a distinction without a difference.

I wish Jesus was real so he could chase you down the aisle with a goddamn whip,”

“This isn’t your church. You just stand in the pulpit,” Titus said.

The Church is what you and Gene was doing. I might not believe in it, but I can recognize it. Don’t you ever let that con man convince you otherwise, Pop.”

He was glad for their concern, but he was still alive. The dead needed their full attention.