Gasoline
Blame’s got little to do with how he proves his mettle tonight in the back parking lot of the Holiday Inn. It’s not the pot, his exhausted parents, the sagging small town on the brink. Stark prospects alone can’t say what praise and only praise knows: his obeisance stoked by the jumpy gods to seethe by day and drag the night. In stacks and frayed bell-bottomed denim he ducks behind the rear bumper of a ’73 Cadillac Coupe Deville: chrome rocker molding; soft Ray tinted glass—the same late model and make his father vowed just last week he’d one day bygod own. In the moonlight a...
Read MoreLater
The summer our knack for Kick the Can arcs to Spin the Bottle, we rush supper to fling ourselves into orbit with Angela and her sisters. Delight declares itself in the rank Delta night, draws us out after dark to that lit knoll beneath the streetlight, where we vie with the prior whir and winged havoc of beetle, mosquito and moth. We tease and pick the mown grass, damp already with July’s early dewfall. It grabs hold at the ankles, clings to bare feet, shinnies up tanned legs and skirts under the fringe of cut-off blue jeans. We pluck the green stems of Bermuda, lift them slender to our...
Read MoreAn Early Exit
My eyes grow weary with gazing upward. —Isaiah 38:14 ~I~ “We don’t get out much anymore.” That’s how she puts it, trying to swat a fly and finish telling her pastor why her Coley keeps holed up in his shop out back with this hankering to put life in a headlock and squeeze until there’s a pop and blood from the nose, why there’s no more church, not with those Holy Rollers leapfrogging in tongues to impress. God? Sure, but even so. “His knees ain’t what they used to be.” I nod. Either...
Read MoreDifficult, Tennessee
In memory of Tom Logue One day Tom and Ethel dropped their baby Louise by Ethel’s brother’s while driving through Tennessee. Making their way back to I-40, Pastor Tom saw a road sign for two nearby towns: Difficult 2 Defeated 4 Being a Baptist, he knew without ever visiting that somewhere there was bound to be a Difficult Baptist Church, a Defeated Baptist Church. He’d seen both, and being young, smart, and in love with all things ironic, he smiled and drove on. That was before muscular dystrophy claimed his oldest son Tommy at 18, before schizophrenia came to...
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