I sit here on the steps of the old baptist church, crying a little bit.
Th sun is so bright that it hurts to look at the white of my dress and so I close my eyes and let the hot burn right through my lids. The heat presses down on our city like an clothing iron and turns our nice sunday dresses and such into white little cocoons that slurp around our bodies with sweat. My skin is all sticky. Everything melts and slides around, like butter on top of a stack of flapjacks. Cars sweat and pant in the shade of skinny, tortured trees and people walk by with their mouths open and their flesh hanging on their bones. When you step on it, the grass crinkles under your feet, their glass spines snapping, grey as metal shavings swept away in a machineshop.
I try my best to suck up my tears, like papa always tells me to, but Bobby Daniels was so mean! I want so bad to pop him in the mouth, smush that knobby face until all his meanness runs in between my fingers like overripe peach-juice. I couldn't bear to stay in sunday school after he said that about my hair, I just couldn't. It didnt matter what old Mrs Kotter had to say, I wasnt going to sit around and let everyone laugh at me.
I reach up and touch my lint-fuzz hair, short and rough and black. It aint all that bad. Papa doesn't always give a good haircut, it's true. He just brings out that electric razor, oiling and buzzing like a cicada and sheers everything off. He sits me on his lap and whittles my head down and I can feel his banjo gut against my body, jiggling and warm. But it aint all that bad. I just look like every other nigger child, dark and measly and skinnychested in the mirror.
A man on the street with a sickleback and old, slag-metal skin gives me a howdy and a smile, full of empty black holes, like a tin can used for gun practice. He walks with his feet angled and his neck pushed out and his hands rolled up. I can hear people singing songs in the church behind me. Singing about God and forgiveness and mercy and glory. I think about what the preacher was saying earlier, about how Lord Jesus always forgave everyone, no matter what they did to him, even when he was dying on the cross, filled with so many holes and bleeding all over. Then I think about Bobby Daniels and punching his lights out.
I notice some white men across the street, with their faces dusty and squat, like cans in the pantry. They're staring at me. I squint and look away.
Amazin' Grace, how sweet the sound!
They're smoking cigarettes and they have their hands in their pockets. Every once in a while, they pinch the cigarette between their sidewalk-chalk fingers and spit on the ground.
That saved a WRETCH like me!
I realize that they're not looking at me, actually, because when one of them sees me, he winks at me like he hasnt seen me before, his face splitting into a toothy smile. I smile back.
He waves and the others laugh.
I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I –
The whole earth seems to freeze up for a second. Stuttering, breathless. And then I hear the church behind me let out a sigh, delicate as a flightless bird, and I feel something scoop me up, firey and scalding, bending the air around me and cupping all my breath in its hands. Flames. A popping sound, like someone snapping their gum and I fall flat on my face on the sidewalk, thrown, skinning up my knees. Everything wheels. Cant focus. Ears bleeding. Dab my hands against the side of my head. Struggle. Struggle for air. Sky is overexposed. I say something. Cant hear it. Mighty ringing. Schoolbells. Try to get to my feet, fall back down. Repeat. The street buckles and sags like the gullied back of an old horse. Turn over on my back. Heat on my face. Try again to stand. Legs shaky. Prop my bloody hands against my knees and pant. Look up. Look at the church. On fire and blasted out in the middle, blackened and burnt. Papers and prayers fluttering in the air. The doors are shucked clear off their hinges, leaving an open, ashy mouth. Everything tinkles and poofs, like those old-fashioned flashbulbs.
They blew it up.
They blew the whole godforsaken church up.
I straighten up and command my legs to walk me closer.
People are screaming and people are bleeding, laid out black and twisted as stumps pulled out of the earth. I see Old Man Koehn and Mrs Holden lying there on the front steps, small and gutless, and I see a bunch of little shilling-eyed black kids just around the corner of the church. They are still. Stagnating and poison and muddied. People who live on the streets are coming out of their homes and holding their hands to their mouths and walking over and standing around the burning church like someone might stand around a preacher damning on the streets.
The white men across the street are gone.
God in heaven.
Saw it coming, Mack. Saw it coming a mile away.
Look at em! Do something! Call the police!
Shame. What a godawful shame.
Prob'ly hear that blast all the way in Bessemer.
The men have their hands in their pockets and they're shaking their heads. The women are frantic and running into the houses to call the police. I walk forward, dumb. I walk into the church and step around the bodies, searching. Crying. Tears dribbling down my chin and onto my beautiful white dress. Hymn books charred and burnt and people with ember faces and spooled limbs and Amazing Grace echoing around the chapel like a stone dropped down a neverending well.
I'm looking.
I'm looking for Bobby Daniels.
I find him after a little while under the body of a big, working man and I pull him out and I kiss him on the face over and over, giving him forgiveness, saying it's okay, it's okay. You can rest easy. You can die easy, Bobby.
; you did a fabulous job with that.
Gender:
Points: 27175
Reviews: 387