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Not So Close, Not So Far
It did not start then, but it was the summer they burned the black churches. Mom was a young girl and saw one go up herself.
They were driving down Potter's Hill, stopped at Robards Street when the sonic boom came, space burping and a ball of heat
blowing their faces back against the headrests.
"Look at that," my Grandfather said.
Flames of cinnamon and blood orange lashed the building like thirsty dogs from Hell. The ground broiled.
Timber crackled and the tar-smoked sky cursed the day.
Uncle Stu had dinner with them that night. Stu was my mother's older brother. Mom said he arrived grinning and left the same way.
At the table his skin glistened, greasy from buttered corn on the cob and, when he talked, you could see white nuggets of mashed
corn meat stuck like buckshot between his teeth.
When Granddad asked him why he was so happy, Uncle Stu tapped his foot and wrapped a fork on the table and said,
"I like this song," even though my mom had turned the stereo off before serving.
***
The high school had a total of twelve black kids who must have lived this side of Chester. Mom went right up to their
huddle beneath the tented branches of a hemlock tree.
"What?"
"I'm sorry," she said, being sure to keep eye contact.
"Why?"
"The fire."
"You do it?"
Mother found a sun-scorched patch of grass to study and shook her head.
"Then get your stupid ass out of here."
In all, eight churches burned that year.
No one got arrested.
Granddad's car got hit by a freight train two nights before Christmas Eve. Uncle Stu died of an aneurism.
By the next decade, when I was born, the churches were all rebuilt, most bigger than before.
***
On TV now, I watch the streets smolder. Car carcasses fume. Outside of the collapsed mosque, sirens squall and women wail.
Next, they show a photo of the man with the vest full of explosives when he was just any other man.
His skin is shiny, caramel corn brown. His hair is black like his countrymen. He wears a beard,
same as them. He is not so tall and not so short. His lack of a smile is ordinary, customary even.
But his eyes, if you look close, these are not vague at all. In them something burns.
When my son comes home his lip is torn and his forehead is bleeding. He wants to tell me all about it, the other boy's
name and the gay slurs he used, but I take my son quick to my chest and hold him there, even though he is too big for me
and we have not touched like this in years. He fidgets. He starts to speak again but I shush him. I say, "Listen."
I lean in further, our ears pressed and crisscrossed against each other's chests so that what we hear is the full
import of our hearts pumping, pouring, pumping.
Len Kuntz has placed over fifty stories in lit journals such as JUKED, GHOTI, ELIMAE, MUD LUSCIOUS and others.
Email: Len Kuntz
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