“When the song ended, there was a moment of quiet humiliation as we stopped and looked around. Then, a love ballad came on that I couldn’t remember the name of. Lily walked over to me and grabbed my hand, pulling me into her. She smelled clean, like new rain bouncing off hot grass.”
— Get The Blood Out By All Means
Pushcart Nominated.
Highlights:
King Ludd’s Rag / The Malarker
Revolution John
Cowboy Jamboree
JMWW
HAD & HAD again
Barnstorm Journal
Back Patio Press
The Dead Mule
JAKE
Carolina Muse
Read the rest to the right ————>
More to come soon in A Common Well Journal.
Click here to listen to my conversation about writing with Dan Russell on The Fair to Middlin’ Podcast.
“I sit down on our empty street. I turn the microphone on in my hand. I hear the wind come through its tiny speaker. I imagine he is here with me, leaning over my shoulder and whispering into my ear “Will you sing with me?” It is the best version of him. Not the one that lied and cheated and died in an ambulance. He is here with me and we are singing the song together and his hand is reaching out and it is touching me and the hurt runs off my shoulders.”
— Will You Sing With Me?
Published in JMWW
-
The young man stared out at the cotton field, where at least twenty-five doe and small bucks were grazing on weeds. The sun was setting low on the field and the pines.
All was quiet except for his and the old man’s breathing. He stared out of the open window hole and tried to focus on each individual deer.
“I thought they’d be bigger,” he whispered.
“You thought they’d be what?”
“Bigger.”
-
As they merged into the busy highway of white folks, the vision of a mighty Ferris wheel came before them in the distance, just behind and sticking out above a wooden fence. It was yellow with little lightly swing cars attached that amounted to 2-seater metal benches with rain covers and bars to keep you from falling off and a red base. All along its bars and poles, green lights shimmered and danced as it spun slowly. It was as if the sun had come down off its pedestal in the sky to Jackson, Mississippi.
-
His mama called him Skeeter Hawk because his daddy had called him Skeeter Hawk because when he was an even littler boy he liked to put his arms up like they were wings and make a buzzing noise with his mouth and run around in the yard like he was flying and one time when his daddy asked him what he was doing he said he was being like them dragonflies and his daddy told him that he called them by their country name – skeeter hawks.
-
“Write that down, write that down,” he’d say. “I think that’s my latest hit.”
Then he’d keep singing the song while I transcribed it. His voice was loud and not perfect, but it made me happy. Afterwards, he’d ask me to read the lines in my head a few times and then I’d have to perform it back to him.
“We’re going to make you a crooner. A regular old Bing.”
-
“I ask my mom if she remembers the days before the high five and she looks at me as if I just walked into her hospital room with a monkey on my shoulder and he’s wearing a diaper and playing his way through Kenny G’s Greatest Hits.”
-
“Do you remember when we were eight?” My twin sister asked me.
“Do I want to?”
“Eight, I think.”
“Do I have to?”
“Have to what?”
“Yes, I remember when I was eight. When we were eight.”
-
Hello, said the toaster.
Jack pointed at his chest with his left hand as if to say “Me?” but he immediately found himself silly. He was the only person in the room. With the bread in his not pointing hand, he popped it into the toaster’s slots and pressed the appropriate levers down. Then he said hello back.
Depending on her mood, she used settings four or five, the toaster said. She never bothered to ask anyone what the numbers mean. I found her quite silly in that way. She thought four was a little too undone. Five, a bit too cooked. Yet she never ventured in between. Silly lady. For you, I’d recommend six.
“Silly, indeed,” Jack replied, before remembering common courtesy. “And thank you.”
-
Jimmy Kelley sat in his beat-up-and-down leather recliner, still in jeans and his working boots, watching the evening news. On the walls around him were medals and pictures of men and women in astronaut suits. Most of them included him. The newscaster was talking about the latest private rocket take-off when his phone rang.
“Hello?” he spoke into it.
The voice that answered back was that of a young girl.
“Um, hi. Is this Mr. Kelley?”
“You can call me Jimmy.”
-
Adam sang folk songs every day at school, not the good ones from the 60s and 70s but the songs from new bands with city folk front men dressed up as farmers. He’d sit outside on a bench with his grandfather’s beat-up Yamaha acoustic – the kind that was made in America – and bang away some four-chord song for a few onlookers.
-
I stop at Fran Kowaslki’s grave for a moment and straighten the flowerpot left behind from the last time her granddaughter, Lisa, visited. It’s been months and there are a few weeds growing from the soil that hasn’t been washed out of the pot. I leave them because they’re violets and I refuse to call something that pretty a weed.
When I tell folks I’m a cemetery attendant, and I don’t normally tell them, they usually look curious and full of questions, but then are afraid to ask.
-
“Mr. Smiles looks at me, standing there in the parking lot of the combination KFC-Taco Bell in a magician’s outfit, because he is a magician, in the hottest part of an eastern North Carolina summer day, with a frown on his sun-worn face that is shadowed by a bowler hat.
He’s upset at me because I’ve turned down his game. It’s the kind of game you’d find at a carnival. Here – why don’t I just rewind the tape for you?”
-
“My wife texts me that she is on the way home from the grocery store. Or, her phone texts me this, automatically. It also texted me when she was on the way there and when she was halfway through shopping. This is just the way it is now.”
-
“In apartment 2B, Jack watched his father amble outside in his underwear. The old man, his hair gray from worry, knelt and began praying for rain.
Jack’s mom has asked him to put pants on, or even just a shirt. But, cold or warm, he was there in the courtyard of their complex, on his knees, asking God for droplets to fall from the sky. For whatever reason, maybe a sick joke from the Man himself, it hadn’t rained in weeks. “
-
“On Saturday night, I was visited. He was six foot eight, at least, and he wore the regular old get-up, but it was all brand-new clothes. No dirt on them. He told me his name was Parth, shortened and translated from something that sounded like Parthenaugamon. After learning he was not of this world, I recognized his face as some amalgam of all the cowboys I’d ever seen on the big screen. I offered him whiskey, but he said he could not digest it. This form was only for my comfort.”
-
“Maybe that’s the reason why I read and watch all of this stuff, I realize. It’s not about them, or the falling man, specifically. I just want to have that for imagination’s sake. I just like to make everything about myself.”
-
“My mother was killed by someone committing suicide. Someone else. The details are difficult to explain simply, both verbally and in writing.”
-
“My father was a corporate lawyer. He taught me multiplication tables poorly and the history of the Supreme Court well. He is a comedian now, at 63. Last week he sent me the link for his Saturday night show. He told me to buy tickets for my friends. He didn’t ask. They’ll love it, he said.”
-
“Roy had already started walking towards the scene, so we sprinted to catch up.
It was hellish. That is how I described it, almost as if the words just spilled out my mouth when we turned and looked in the store.
“You got that goddamn right,” Roy said. Lily walked straight in ahead of us, as if she wanted a closer view. “
-
“I slide on my back, down the mountainside to the riverbank below my parents’ house. The ground is wet, making walking too dangerous on the hill’s slippery leaves. But they’ll be dry by noon with the cloudless sky and the North Carolina autumn sun. I wear short sleeves and pants because my arms sweat more than my legs do, just how I’ve always been, and a thorn cuts my left forearm slightly on the slide down. It bleeds more than I thought it would and I stick the wet leaves to it.
I should say, it was my parents’ house. Now it’s just my parent’s. My dad was, and is, still here, but my mom’s name was taken off the mortgage payment letters eventually. They never asked my dad, so he never found out how they found out.”