by Annah Cash
Dancing on the hardwood feeling good, I snap
my fingers. Listen. At a horse track in Hot Springs my father
bet all his life savings on a palomino Quarter Horse named Diamonds
Sparkle. When my grandfather peppered his seed across the alluvial floodplain, cotton cropped up like southern snow in September. My grandmother’s hand-stitched quilts lopped like gongs on the washing line. Blighted youth, blackspot on roses, butterfly milkweed, I murmur as I tumble ass-backwards—headlong, my blithe youth behind me.
I’ve come this far, barefoot and mean, out of the backwoods of the Mississippi Delta. Dripping in Southern drawl and mud-stained fervor like water splintered the levee—it doesn’t ask why first. It has a rhythm to it, a gentle pulsing like my grandmother’s spider-veined hands in the biscuit dough. Her food thickened all her toothpick-limbed children and my grandfather, mellow like smooth corn whiskey. Under a setting sun, his bourbon-boozed breath came in small spurts. Most folks talk too much, he’d say, aiming chewing tobacco into an old coke can. He never murmured. Sometimes he’d look across at the tar-tinged night and talk nonsense with the invisible choir of cicadas. My innocence clucks like a chicken hauled off to the chopping block.
Goodbye fruit flies cruising the heirlooms. Goodbye pecan pie and homemade vanilla bean. Goodbye my cover of coots that grandmother fattened every morning with slivers of leftovers. Where the word holler was both a verb and a place—where ramshackle little mud huts were made. Some words are rickety doors creaking open, and I walk on through another lost summer, a red-stained road never coming to an end.
The cicadas still sing.
One of these days,
I’ll be gone.
Annah Cash is from Madison, Mississippi. It wasn’t until the fall of 2015, when she randomly took a creative writing class at Mississippi State University with Catherine Pierce that her mind truly opened. She found writing in any form—short stories, prose, and her personal favorite, poetry—to be utterly cathartic.