“There must be a bond . . . a connection, between those that go up North, and those who across the sea... We will always live this double life, you know, because we're from the sea. We came here in chains, and we must survive. There's salt-water in our blood.”
— From "Black American Gothic: A Southern Herstory of Black Magic Women"
JEREMY
I was behind the Dollar General because behind the Dollar General nobody had to look at me.
That was the whole point.
The dumpster smelled like old meat, wet cardboard, and drunken piss . The brick wall still held heat from the day . Mosquitoes kept finding the one place my hoodie didn’t cover. Richkin had a talent for making even hiding uncomfortable.
I lit the blunt anyway.
First pull burned. Fuck !
I held it until my chest started acting stupid, then let it out slow through my nose.
“Come on,” I said to myself. “Do your job.”
It didn’t. Not really.
It just moved the panic from the front of my ribs to somewhere behind them, like hiding a dirty room by closing the door. But all dirty rooms get discovered by parents.
My phone buzzed.
I didn’t check it.
If it was Dad, it was going to be the same tone. Not yelling. That would have been easier. My father had perfected calm disappointment, which somehow felt louder than shouting.
Jeremy, we need to talk.
Jeremy, this cannot continue.
Jeremy, rehab is not punishment.
That last one was the problem. Because if it wasn’t punishment, why did it feel like being sentenced?
I took another pull.
The Space Camp application was still open on my laptop at home. Half-done. My essay saved under three different names because every version sounded too desperate.
Why do you want to attend?
Because I want to be somewhere nobody knows my name.
Because up there, maybe my chest won’t feel like a fist.
Because everybody in Richkin treats leaving like betrayal unless they’re the one doing it.
I laughed once, but it didn’t come out right.
The smoke drifted from my mouth.
Then stopped.
Not faded. Not curled. Stopped.
It spread flat in front of me like it had pressed itself against glass.
I blinked.
“Man.”
The light above the back door hummed.
It always hummed, but this was different. Not louder. Organized.
Buzz.
Pause.
Buzz-buzz.
I looked up.
The bulb flickered once. A moth threw itself against it and dropped into the dirt like it had been corrected.
I should have gone back into the shadow.
I stepped out instead.
That’s the kind of dumb thing people do right before their life gets weird. They know better and still lean forward.
The parking lot opened in front of me, wet in patches from rain that had quit an hour ago. The Dollar General sign glowed yellow over the front doors. One of the letters was dim, so from where I stood it looked less like a store and more like a warning missing a tooth.
Across the lot, some dude sat in a beat-up car with the door cracked open, blue laptop light on his face.
Near the front, another dude sat stiff in his car with a police cruiser pulling in behind him.
I knew both of them by sight.
Everybody knew everybody by sight in Richkin.
That didn’t mean we knew each other.
The light hummed again.
Buzz.
Pause.
Buzz-buzz.
This time my lighter clicked in my hand.
I hadn’t touched it.
I looked down.
The flame was already up, small and mean and steady.
“Okay,” I said.
And for once, I wasn’t talking to myself.
DEZ
The problem with Richkin was people thought small because the town rewarded small.
Small dreams. Small talk. Small lies. Small little fights outside the gym because somebody looked too long at somebody’s girl. Everybody acting like the whole universe started at the Shell station and ended at the football field.
I hated that.
Not in a dramatic way. I just hated how proud people were of not wondering about anything.
I sat in my car in the Dollar General parking lot with my laptop open, building something nobody at school would understand and everybody online would call trash until the right person heard it.
The car was old enough that the door had to be lifted before it closed. The roof fabric sagged in the middle like a tired eyelid. I had my MIDI pad balanced on my lap, one headphone over my ear, the other pushed back so I could hear the world if the world decided to act up.
It usually did.
I ran the loop again.
Kick. Snare. Kick-kick.
No.
Too clean.
I hated clean.
Clean was fake. Clean was church shoes on red clay. Clean was the principal saying “scholars” to students he wouldn’t trust alone with his phone.
I dragged the second kick behind the grid.
There.
Now it limped.
Now it had a memory.
I replayed it and watched the waveform crawl across the screen. The low end sat wrong, but wrong in a useful way. Like a door not shut all the way.
Somebody outside the store laughed too loud. A truck passed on the road, bass rattling from busted speakers. The police lights hit my windshield before I saw the cruiser.
Red-blue.
Red-blue.
I looked up.
Jay was in the car near the front. I knew it was him because Richkin treated boys coming home from juvenile like ghosts with paperwork. Everybody pretended not to stare. Everybody stared.
I looked back at the screen.
None of my business.
Then the lights above the Dollar General started humming in time with my loop.
At first I thought I had left the monitors too loud. I muted the track.
The hum stayed.
Same rhythm.
Kick.
Silence.
Kick-kick.
I unmuted the track.
The hum sat inside it like it had been recorded there.
I leaned forward.
“No.”
I said it because I wanted the room, the lot, whatever, to disagree.
It did.
The storefront lights pulsed, not random, not weak wiring. Precise.
I tapped one pad.
The light answered.
I tapped two.
It answered twice.
The hair on my arms rose.
I forgot about the cruiser. Forgot about school. Forgot about the boys who called my stuff “robot gospel” and laughed like that was clever.
I isolated the low frequency and pushed it under the beat.
The whole parking lot seemed to listen.
Not shake.
Listen.
That was worse.
Because shaking could be bass.
Listening meant something was there.
I looked through the windshield.
Behind the store, Jeremy Greene had stepped out from the dumpster with a lit blunt in one hand and a face like he had just heard his name in an empty house.
By the police car, Jay had opened his door.
Three points.
Three corners of something I couldn’t see yet.
I adjusted the tempo down by one.
The light above us bent inward.
Not flickered.
Bent.
My laptop screen glitched. The waveform stretched past the edge of the program, over the menu, into black space where nothing was supposed to render.
I didn’t touch the keys.
The beat kept going.
For the first time all night, I wasn’t making anything.
I was being played back.
JAY
I came for candles.
That part matters to me.
White for peace. Blue for protection. Maybe a red one if they had it, but Dollar General red candles always looked too cheerful, like they belonged on a birthday cake, not an altar.
Grandma would have said intention mattered more than the object.
Granddaddy would have said don’t bring that hoodoo mess in his house, then still asked Grandma where she put the blessed oil when his knee started hurting.
People think contradiction is hypocrisy. It’s not always. Sometimes it’s survival with two names.
I parked under the light because I don’t like corners anymore.
Inside taught me that. Corners make people brave. Doors make people stupid. Light does not save you, but it removes one excuse.
I sat there with the engine running and counted my breath.
Then the cruiser rolled in behind me.
No siren.
Just lights.
Red-blue in the mirror. Red-blue on my hands. Red-blue on the windshield like somebody painting over the night.
I placed both hands on the wheel.
Slow.
Visible.
My mouth went dry, but my face stayed still.
That was another thing I learned. Your face can betray you faster than your hands.
I watched the officer’s door.
He didn’t get out right away.
That bothered me.
The waiting is part of it sometimes. Let you sit in yourself. Let your mind start confessing to things your body never did.
I breathed in through my nose.
Grandma’s voice came soft.
Be still, baby.
Not “be quiet.” Not “be scared.”
Be still.
The Dollar General sign buzzed overhead. One corner of it was full of dead bugs. A plastic bag crawled along the curb, caught on a weed, pulled free, then caught again. Across the road, the old funeral home sat dark except for the porch light. Richkin always had something dead nearby, even when you were buying toothpaste.
The hum changed.
I felt it before I heard it.
It came under the skin.
Buzz.
Pause.
Buzz-buzz.
My right hand tightened on the wheel.
I loosened it.
“I know that,” I said.
The words came out before I could test them.
The officer still hadn’t stepped out.
I opened my door.
Slow.
Hands visible.
Shoes on wet pavement.
“Evening,” I called.
My voice sounded normal. Good.
No answer.
The hum pressed deeper.
Not a sound now. A presence wearing sound as a coat.
I looked toward the back of the store and saw Jeremy by the dumpster, smoke around him like it didn’t know which way to leave.
I looked toward the car in the middle of the lot and saw Dez lit blue by his laptop, staring like he had found God in the wrong file.
Then something touched my thoughts.
Not a voice.
Not Grandma. Not God exactly.
Older than both in the way dirt is older than a church built on top of it.
I closed my eyes for half a second.
“Who is that?” I asked.
The answer was not words.
It was pressure.
It was a hand on the back of my neck, not pushing, just reminding me I had a spine.
When I opened my eyes, my shadow was wrong.
It stood a breath behind me.
I raised my hand a little, and the shadow waited before raising its own.
That scared me.
Not the cop. Not the lights.
That.
Because I understood, all at once, that something had noticed us from the other side of ordinary.
And it was deciding whether to open.
THE LOT
Later, if anybody asked, none of us would tell it right.
Jeremy would say the smoke hit a wall.
Dez would say the lights followed the beat.
I would say the air remembered us.
All three would be true.
The parking lot tightened without moving. The puddles under the lamps stopped trembling. The moths vanished from the light. Even the cruiser seemed caught inside a held breath, red and blue frozen against the wet pavement.
Jeremy’s lighter burned green for one second.
Dez’s speakers gave out a tone too low for ears.
My shadow stepped back into me.
Then the space between us folded.
Not open.
Not yet.
Just folded.
Like a page someone meant to return to.
On the other side of that fold, something orange pulsed.
A sun, maybe.
An eye.
A wound.
Then the officer’s door opened.
The sound cracked the moment in half.
Everything came rushing back: rainwater dripping from the roof, cooler compressors groaning inside the store, a woman laughing near the register, the cruiser radio muttering codes, Jeremy coughing behind the dumpster, Dez slamming his laptop halfway shut.
The officer stepped out.
“Son,” he called.
I kept my hands where he could see them.
But I was not listening to him anymore.
Neither were they.
Because under the normal sounds of Richkin, under the cheap lights and wet asphalt and old brick and dead bugs, the rhythm was still there.
Quiet now.
Patient.
Buzz.
Pause.
Buzz-buzz.