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Posts tagged ‘murder’

May 24

54 Comments

What Happens When We Fall

This post is part of the America Street series. If the street name rings familiar, it was a song by Edwin McCain back in the ’90s. He took it from a street on Charleston’s East Side. A couple of blocks from my new green door. Maybe it’s a mirror of America. Maybe it isn’t. Click here to read the series from the beginning.

Daddy couldn’t understand it. He pulled his dual triggers with his fat finger, felt the kick of the gun in his shoulder, saw the shot rain over the inside of that colored church, obliterating the sight of his seed with that……that…….

He was confused. What was he doing here again? The balcony supports lurched in his vision, splayed sideways. He watched his shotgun hang disembodied above the sanctuary floor below, and he was inexplicably following it. Floating. It was only when the floor rose up to meet his heft, in the split second before his bones cracked on impact, that he realized he fell.

Everything was quiet. Was he dead? He tried to breathe and felt a chasm in his chest, a spreading hole where one of his lungs was lacerated by a bullet. Every gasp radiated hot pain around his body in waves. How did I go an’ shoot myself? How the hell did I end up on this floor?

Nobody offered an answer to his unspoken questions. Instead, a shadow advanced, obliterating the bulb light overhead. It was practically upon him when it stopped.

A little boy.

Did Loretta already have that bastard baby? Am I looking at a colored version of myself?

Bile rose in his throat, mixed with blood. He swallowed, but another flood took its place.

“I tole you, Paw Paw. That lady. She be in trouble. I tole you, didn’t I, Paw Paw? Is this what you meaned when you said ‘kill’?”

The boy stood there, twisting back and forth with his black hands behind his back. Did this here BABY shoot me?

Behind him, another figure materialized from shadow. Hulking and grey. Eyes of charcoal that burned with hate. Eyes he knew.

“Yeah. This is what be, Suh. Your own cigar plant foreman done shot you. You no-good-bully-Klan loving-colored killing-racist piece of white supremacist shit. I seen yo’ daughter runnin’ thew, and I knowed what that all was ’bout.” He stopped and swept his eyes over the space. “Anybody gonna report me if I finish him off?”

Daddy listened for the seconds to tick off the church clock in the tower, but nothing met his ears. No protest. No movement. No ticking clock.

He forgot the colored church didn’t have one, right before the sound of gunfire deadened his ears for all time.

May 22

39 Comments

At the Corner of Twelfth and Never

This post is part of the America Street series. If the street name rings familiar, it was a song by Edwin McCain back in the ’90s. He took it from a street on Charleston’s East Side. A couple of blocks from my new green door. Maybe it’s a mirror of America. Maybe it isn’t. Click here to read the series from the beginning.

“Powpowpow!”

A little boy played in the street at 2am as Loretta sprinted past the dark tenement.

“Kill!” The man in his life snickered, an afterthought to her fleeing wet back.

The tide crept to her waist, reminding her to dive just as HE raised the gun, pointed it inches from her face. “Boo,” HE whispered, right before HIS fat finger fumbled with the cool steel trigger. Two barrels. Which one would kill her first?

She didn’t wait to find out, gasping her last breath and diving. Through the swirling grass. Into the blinding silt of the water. Coughing, she emerged mere feet from where she entered the marsh, the shifting tide and dark water disorienting in the shimmering night. She could see HIM, combing the grasses with the dual end of HIS shotgun, still shouting obscenities at her, lit by a halo of moonlight.

In a disarming movement, she heard a bullet whiz by her ear as she heaved herself into the dark lane and fled. Barefoot. In her slip. She ran ahead of the advancing tide that tended to flood the streets of her neighborhood. Ran past the little boy and his crowded tenement. Along the vacant trolley line at Columbus Street. In the distance, she recognized the power of her father’s car engine, revving somewhere close. She came to her dead house at the corner of Judith and America. She dared not stop for presentable clothing. HEe was tracking her, that HE had the advantage of the mechanical.

Would they protect her? Clad in wet lingerie in the darkest fraction of night?

The solid brick building jutted out of the ground. She ran up to its gothic side door and banged on it with balled fists.

“Help me! Please!”

The engine crawled closer. She could hear it round the corner at the opposite end of the street. HIS headlights would claim her in seconds. She thought she heard the oiled mechanics of a shotgun mingling with HIS self-satifsied chuckle, could hear HIM whisper, “Don’t pay to run away from Daddy, do it, Loretta?”

Right before HE shot her, before she fell to the ground.

Only she landed on the hard stone floor of the church sanctuary. Uninjured. Unprepared for the opening of the door. A sleepy dark face greeted her surprised gaze.

“Lawd, lawd Child. What you doing running ’round nekkid in the middle of the night?”

May 20

39 Comments

At the Edge of America Street

This post is part of the America Street series. If the street name rings familiar, it was a song by Edwin McCain back in the ’90s. He took it from a street on Charleston’s East Side. A couple of blocks from my new green door. Maybe it’s a mirror of America. Maybe it isn’t.

He didn’t move. Hands stuck to the red vinyl wheel, still hot from the summer sun. Wet air sealed the sizzle in all night, fried human skin in the dark of a parked car.

So. Maybe he could crack the window. A smidge. The chrome handle squeaked as it rotated counter-clockwise. Heavy glass disappeared into the red-and-white door with a blow of cool air. A few no-see-ums whined around his ear but didn’t stick.

A pop of sound. Quick-like. It smacked his chest like her voice. Her cry, when she dug her orange fingernails into his rippled back. The thought of that single curl of hair falling into her face, lit up with him.

Well.

It crept into the car and stole his breath. Robbed him while he waited under a burned-out streetlight down the block from her house. Waited for her and her big white hard-side suitcase to come prancing out of the old piss-colored Charleston single she shared with HIM.

That old abode looked like HIM. A frayed shell dressed up with flecks of peeling paint. Missing teeth in the jaws of the upstairs porch. A dingy sheen obscuring the window to the soul through the front door. Frilly purple hydrangeas snarled with thick monkey grass. Dull light, almost burned out. Extinguished. Gone.

Part of the past.

This hell would all be part of their past, if she would just come on. Climb in beside him. Snuggle up her warm bosom to him as they sped away from this place. This America Street. It wasn’t a glory to anybody. Not anymore.

Another pop of sound that had to be a door slamming. He sucked in another breath, but his chest wouldn’t take it. It protested. Groaned, even. Something sticky coated his left hand. His life force, oozing onto his pristine red vinyl. Eyes that wouldn’t focus swept the murk beyond the lowered glass.

HE had been there all along. HIS bourbon-scented breath sucked the life out of the inside of the car when he leaned in and whispered, “Ain’t no drugs here, Boy. But, them coppers’ll think you was at the other end of a deal gone bad in the mornin. ‘Member that as I’m a-leavin’ you with that there window rolled down. Sea gulls come in here, Boy. They for-show eat your soft bits afore them police find your dead carcass.”

HE shoved the gun under the rib cage a final time. Thrust HIS face real close. He scrabbled for life from HIS stale, used air. “You ‘member this, too, Boy. I’m a gonna kill her next. Good and dead. Just like you.”

Darkness changed to white with another pop of HIS gun, right there where HE killed him, under a dead light post on America Street.

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