EQMM, August 2012 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Dell Magazines

Department Of First Stories: AMAZING GRACE, SORTA by J.L. Strickland

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J.L. Strickland grew up in an east Alabama cotton-mill village where he worked for several decades as a weaver. During all of that time he was also writing freelance for professional humor markets and contributed many topical monologue jokes to the late-night talk shows, including work for Jay Leno and Bill Maher. He also has many non-fiction pieces to his credit, including a recent memoir for Southern Cultures magazine. This is the author's first work of fiction.

So, my Granddaddy Paw Jack's baby brother, Uncle Ave, though he lacked a heap, being a baby, comes rolling in driving his old yellow Mercury about dusk-dark, his sweat-stained hat low on his head and a mashed-up, hand-rolled cigarette dangling from the corner of his wide mouth. He parks the yellow Mercury near where me and Paw Jack was settin’ in green metal chairs under the chinaberry tree.

Alabama is hot anyway, but it was sho’ nuff hot that August day. We got global warming ‘bout a thousand years before ever'body else did.

"Ain't that Avie?” Paw Jack asked, squinting at the yellow car. Being nearly blind from cataracts, he had got to where he couldn't hardly tell who nobody was, even close up. Just a day before, when Paw Jack saw his own reflection in the glass door at the drugstore, he said “hidey” to it like it was somebody else. I ‘bout died laughing.

"It sho’ is Uncle Ave,” I told him. Paw Jack depended on me a lot since his cataracts got so bad. I guess it's a good thing me and Mama moved in with him after her and my daddy busted up. If there was a rattlesnake on the floor, Paw Jack might mistake it for his belt and pick it up.

Paw Jack wouldn't never mistake a snake for a necktie on the floor because he didn't have a necktie. He had cut pulpwood until he got too old and started having eye trouble—he didn't never wear no necktie. Paw Jack said a necktie made his big Adam's apple itch.

As Uncle Ave slid his tall, lanky frame out of the Mercury, an old rusty pistol fell out of his baggy overalls pocket. He picked it up off the ground and slowly creeped over to where we was settin'. Uncle Ave never got in no hurry for nothin'. Paw Jack ain't got but two outside chairs, and he says to me, “Bremen, get up where Avie can set down."

(Okay—about that “Bremen” business. My mama and daddy first met up when he stopped and changed a flat tire for her on the side of the road at Bremen, Georgia. Mama said it coulda been a whole heap worse—they coulda struck when she was passing through Pascagoula, Mississippi.)

"What kind of gun is that?” I asked. Uncle Ave and Paw Jack favor a lot, tall and lanky with big hands, but Uncle Ave ain't friendly like Paw Jack. So, it waddn't no great big surprise when Uncle Ave ignored me.

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