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Momma would never let me mow the grass, said I’d run over her hydrangeas, rosemary, Granny’s old rose bush. Probably run over rocks, tear up the mower. I’d get into some ants, they’d eat me up. Really, she just coveted the time behind that mower, great big raindrops of sweat, the sun tanning skin deeper brown, freckles that turned to moles that turned to spots that eventually had to be cut off. Melanoma, squamous cell carcinoma, two on her back, two inches, taking root, one j

Chapter 1: Momma Remembers the King but Can’t Remember My Name Half my life, that oil portrait of a too-tan Las Vegas Elvis hung in the hallway of Momma’s house. Now, she may not know my name most days. Now, I’m her best friend. But she knows that when The King died, she pulled over on the side of the road and cried. Probably for about a week straight, she says. Now, the portrait she painted hangs in the hallway of our house in Bon Secour, after forty years at Momma’s. Wh

Bon Secour, Alabama for my momma Prelude: Spanish moss drips from live oaks, hangs from limbs that dive towards the earth. It survives, despite summertime droughts, a week or two of winter. Brittle and despondent, it hangs like unconditioned hair, split ends trying to capture every last drop until there’s nothing left, and it falls like ash to the ground. Epilogue: We saw it hanging everywhere that day in Bon Secour, w

I brought back his sawed-off hand— those fat fingers, massive wolf worms I dreamt of most of my life, larvae that entered through my eye, feasted, grew fat on tropical punch Kool-Aid and brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts, then festered, refused metamorphosis. Why would they change when they can stay and gorge themselves on innocence? I did not come back from Hell with empty hands, but I brought back this deck of moldy playing cards, a broken whiskey bottle, years of silence, a