Drip

I can't blog. I really just can't. So I'm letting someone do it for me.

What follows is a very short story by my friend Amy. She's a really good writer:


Hit your drip, Momma, and stop your ranting. Go on and click that button. Let the good stuff loose in your veins. Tell us what’s really on your mind. You’re chock full of morphine, flying high after your hip replacement surgery and babbling on about how President George W. Bush is really the Apostle Paul. In the state you’re in (God, let me wipe your drool, Momma), it would be easy to make the connection between the two. It doesn’t help that your Bible study group renamed itself a “cell” because ya’ll like to think you’re part of the Holy War, too. You took down the Ten Commandments chart and put up a map of the Middle East in the Fellowship Hall. You issue your own jihads, written on the backs of recipe cards for Hummingbird Cake and Marshmallow Sweet Potato Casserole. Then your church lost its building when your Facilities Committee voted to sell to developers wanting to build a Wal-Mart and to send all the profits to Christian Freedom Fighters in Gaza. Now you go to your Bible Cell in a vacant storefront in a dying strip mall right smack between Dollar Dayz and Mickey’s Chicken Wings. You worship with heathen shoppers looking for bargain t-shirts or a bucket of chicken for Sunday lunch, peeping in at you with eyes squinted and hands cupped on brows. Don’t scorn them too badly, Momma. The closest you can get to God nowadays is not cleanliness, it’s shopping. President Bush believes it, and he’s the Apostle Paul, ain’t he? Besides, Apostle Paul killed all the non-believers. Those heathens see your map of the Middle East and they see your jihads on flowered-trimmed index cards taped to the back wall. They’re not so much staring in to make a fool of you. That squinty look in their eye is them wondering whether they had better start stockpiling themselves, thinking about their own war to wage.

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Watch the Hobart website for an interview Amy conducted with the writer Victor LaValle.