When I tell people about where I’m from and what I’ve done and what has been done to me it sounds like some sort of fucked up Flannery O’Connor story. I went to college in New York City, learned about “abjection” and realized that my childhood was one grotesque abject experience after another. I love my life and I love my parents but I’m plagued by the fear that someday an NPR host will do a podcast about how wretched and gothic my part of the world is, but also that there’s some wisdom and beauty to be gleaned from these tragic stories—flowers grow best on graves.

Yesterday my mother called me from the front porch of our house in North Central Mississippi to say she thought she saw that degenerate that I used to hang around in high school—Purvis Tutwiler’s boy with the one eye that wouldn’t open all the way? Great cheekbones, wasn’t he half Choctaw?—On the 7 o’clock news. He held up the pharmacy on Forsythia Street to get OxyContin, since the ATF raided the pain clinic last month. Four years ago we got the pain clinic since we’re the county seat. We’ve got the big Piggly Wiggly too and the good liquor store where you can buy beer on Sunday.

The connection was bad so I told her to call me back from the landline in the kitchen—Anyway, I always knew that boy wasn’t right.

Purvis was a philandering drunk and loved the song “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” so much that he named his son Levon. I never loved Levon, but I said I did when we tripped on research chemicals his cousin Randy in Itta Bena sent him in exchange for a favor I asked him not to tell me about. He was likely slightly autistic but taught me a lot of things: how to jimmy a lock, how to siphon gas, to not ask questions I didn’t want to know the answers to and never let my mouth write checks my ass couldn’t cash. I didn’t know what that meant until he took my hand and led me into Mr. Tutwiler’s study and took the Savage Springfield 67E 12-gauge pump action shotgun off the wall and pointed it at my chest. I was 16 and I didn’t mind dying, I just wanted to look pretty when it happened. It’s not loaded, silly. He was a hard dog to keep on the porch.

Never had a lick of sense, that boy. I’ll call over to his daddy’s place and tell him I’m sorry and I’ll bring over a casserole tomorrow night, if he’s receiving.

Don’t do that.

Why?

He didn’t die, he’s just a delinquent. You don’t need to make a casserole. Do you have any good news?

We finally got some rain, lord knows we needed it. And the Dogwoods are blooming.

She paused for a while. I could tell that she had walked with the landline out of the kitchen into the TV room ‘cause I could hear my daddy watching MASH reruns in the background.

OH! Ann Blanchard came over for bridge the other night and told me they dredged the lake and finally found the body of that little touched girl they’ve been looking for since August.

Oh, that is good news. Maybe don’t say “touched” though.

Bless her heart. Went missing after the Neshoba County Fair. They had to use dental records to identify her on a count of all the snapping turtles.

Jesus.

Honey, you ought not take the Lord’s name in vain. They go for the soft flesh first.

I know.

Well, I didn’t want nothing from you. Just wanted to hear your voice.

I love my life and I love my parents and love my two dead dogs SIG and SAUER. I even love my uncle the prepper who’s been waiting for the race war for so long now that he’s obese and sits all day in the folding chair in front of his double wide that my long-suffering mother lets him park behind our house next to the above ground pool—chain smoking Pall Malls and dragging his oxygen tank around behind him. I hope he blows himself up one day so I’ll have something interesting to write about.