Riffing
A SHORT STORY BY JALON YOUNG (SLA ’22)
It was two blisters instead of one this time. Two circles of distorted and pulsing flesh at her
left ankle and heel. Sitting on a bench in front of a late-night diner, Bren crossed her leg foot-to-knee observing the sore brought on by her no-good shoes that tried her every day. Maneuvering her foot to return sensation to the paining areas, Bren wanted to cry. Or emit a moan. Yet that required energy the world milked from her day in, day out. Bren glanced through the restaurant window at the clock. 12:15. The night was thick, too thick given the eclipsed stars and with the moon — Bren’s only guiding light toward home — being partially hidden by fast-approaching clouds. The wind of rain to come blew gently, just enough to momentarily break the Mississippi heat, just enough to bring leaves to gather at her sore feet. And in this moment, Bren recollected her mother. Luanne. A short and stout woman with a gentle, underlying hue of wine at her earth-colored cheeks and hands. She would walk two miles from her various jobs of cooking, laundry-working, sweeping off front stoops to the one-room shack where the colored children — sitting shoulder to shoulder — learned from books tattered and held together by any adhesive available. And from there she would walk home. One child carried, another hanging to the bend of her arm, bags of hand-me-downs or groceries dangling from her fingers. Be it rain or sweltering heat, she moved along the unpaved road to a home sometimes empty, sometimes filled with a husband’s drunken lamentations. Stuck sifting for mites in the bag of rice nearing its end and praying that the children will at least have enough. So, when Luanne sat in church and hollered out, “Come here, Lord!” Bren knew she meant, “Damn this world.” But church was not equipped to allow expression of such a grief. Mama love too easy and live too hard, Bren would tell her brother. I ain’t gone be like that. I can’t.
30 | TUL A NE SCHO O L O F LIBER A L A RTS M AG A ZIN E
