A little time before I’d see my sweet wife Ellamae at death’s door, trapped in our burning house surrounded by leaping flames and black smoke, this bluesman they call Ol’ Boy walked into Joogee’s wielding a guitar. Joogee’s is a small juke joint way back in the woods. It’s just an old shack. Bullet holes here and there. Blood stains smeared across the floor. The smell of liquor oozing from the walls. You’d miss it if you didn’t know where to find it. But Joogee’s got the best damn blues in all of Mississippi.

A slash ripped open the night sky, like a great sleeping black eye had blinked open. A gust of wind blew out and rippled around the globe, then as if the black hole was inhaling, the wind blew backwards off the earth sucking anything not grounded into the tear in space.
Colossal lenticular fingers appeared on the top and bottom of the void lifting the eye open wider. Out stepped garnished Mycelia, illuminated by brilliant quasar beams.

Benny was at the window again, watching the new family across the street crawling around the property like wild animals. Not literally crawling. Just… everywhere. He looked on, annoyed, as an indeterminate number of children occupied themselves with balls, bats, jump ropes, skateboards, trikes and bikes, and even small cars. One was Pepto Bismol pink and branded after the ever-popular Barbie, and a red one was painted in a fire engine theme. Horrible.

A good deal happened after the fire devoured half the mountainside. People whose homes were now ash and rubble fought with their insurance companies over replacement or hired lawyers to litigate on their behalf. I had my own ideas about how these professionals operated: quietly evaluating how much each house was worth, talking in four-syllable words they thought their client wouldn’t understand, which they mostly didn’t, and throwing in some Latin.

I now see everything through the prism of my own destruction. As I lie here in the hospital room without my recently amputated leg, I realize that my life will also be amputated in a similar macabre manner. The past and the future are forever riven asunder by a simple and irrefutable fact: my body is now incomplete, and my soul is soon to follow. I write because the circumstances require my sincerity even if it pains you.

Years pass and the path of one’s life can look as simple and straight as a draftsman’s ruler. A sudden movement and the pencil is jarred away leaving a dark streak across the paper. Even if one tries to erase the mark, there will always be a faint memory of the event.

I reckon I’d been in line a full hour when I got close enough to see the recruiting officer, and damn if it wasn’t the same lieutenant as in Elizabethtown three days ago. It surprised me that one recruiter would cover so large a territory. Of course, I didn’t really know how recruitment was done, and since Washington had only recently issued quotas to the states, probably no one else did either.

In the five years Jason and I have been together, never once has he said, “I love you.” Still, I know that he does love me even if he won’t say it in those words. It’s just not how he grew up, and he’d rather lovingly stroke my hair as I’m falling asleep, he’d rather surprise me with my favorite iced coffee…

‘Lasagne. It’s already in the oven, Mom,’ Cissy said. ‘And then I have a lot of papers to mark tonight.’ One and a half lies in that answer, but they were only white lies.
‘Don’t eat too much of it, honey,’ her mother said. ‘I know how rich your lasagne is. You can freeze the rest.’
‘Yes, Mom.’
‘Your father had a good week. The Chess Team reached the Third Round.’

Lorrie Blue has been widowed for five years. She is bathed in sadness—a trigger to a relentless, dark hole, a vacuum of emptiness that won’t, can’t leave her. She is freshly arrived in Austin, Texas, where she will deliver a paper on a panel on the work of an obscure Russian poet, an émigré who writes in English, not Russian. She’s hoping simply being here in this city where she met her husband twenty-five years ago in the mid-seventies will somehow diminish the emptiness, fill the vacuum.