Blue Ridge Baby
A Fantasy Pitch By Tim Barrus
Baby lived down the dirt road to the coal mines. What do people do in the dark down there, anyway. Some bad things going on at the tops of the mountains. It was as if the wind was speaking in tongues to the whispers of your face. Baby could see in the dark something considerable. No one believed it. Edna believed it. Edna was the owner of Voodoo Donuts. Edna was god. It was Gram's flashlight. Cornmeal mush ain't shit to write home about.
Baby had been down there in that hole because no one thought anyone would do it. Or why. Demons. Baby was a demon. Children of the devil. Nothing to be done.
"Boy, you were born to a toad."
"What happened to the toad."
"Toad soup that week and grits."
He remembered.
Being hungry. It hurt. It was like being raped from the inside out and all the screams of Scotland. Gram could not read. He read to her. She would nod and smoke a cigarette. Instant coffee is an island of cancer patients. Baby stole some of those tractor scarves she could wear when she was bald.
Gram pawned the TV. She rocked a lot. He had no idea she spoke 27 languages, all of them demons. Whiskey demons are the best demons providing nothing explodes and starts a forest fire. She only cried when she walked through the hills.
Those demon children. You gotta watch them. Baby knew where all the herbs were and when to pick. Chicken scratch and coffin money.
The mine had been a mite of trouble. Baby liked adventure. There wasn't that much adventure in the Blue Ridge at that time. Baby's gram saw to that. "If I ever catch you down that mine, boy, I will snatch you with those Voodoo Donuts you like and will never see another Voodoo Donut again."
His gram was the one Voodoo Donut he was afraid of. She knew this boy. She had raised him his entire worthless existence and when he tried talking sense to her about what mountaintop removal was. The mountain.
The whole fucking thing and get it over with.
In that house, if you could all it that, y'all gotcher house for the city people, Appalachia has a lot of City People. She knew who he met at night up at the still above the hollow. She took her old shotgun up there and laid her old snake eyes at all that booze, that ripple in the universe and that sting like a whip in your mouth. Two moonshine boys corn ripe as a lover's tongue. It was her own recipe, and better than anything she had made on Radiator Hill.
That old rusted hunk of skeletons and squirrels and those dead eyes that was those dogs whose heads went up and down in 1974. After they had so badly abused the backseats of every backseat in the country, old wounds were healed and old fights set aside. Gram had a secret, too. She would have taken it to her grave but there were papers shoved inside a drawer of that thing she called her desk which doubled as her kitchen table and Baby had to catch some fish it was that basic. The fish had shrunk. So had Gram. Sometimes thinner by the day.
And Mainly, grits, eatcher grits boy and that ache all the Old People got it raining catfish in the Blue Ridge. Nothing you could eat considering all those tumors on the fish like that Flash flood. Schazaam. That shack you called a house in the burbs is gone, it all floats away.
"Baby, look at me. It all floats away."
