by Cate McGowan
I hadn’t been back in twenty years. Even the air in Christmas still smelled like hickory and brake dust, like someone had been burning sweet wood near an auto body shop. I parked outside the Don’t Tread Diner, where Dolores still ruled the grill like a southern despot, grease spatula in one hand, nicotine patch on the other.
“Eggs the Way God Intended?” she asked, not looking up. She remembered me. She always had a long memory for people and a short one for kindness.
I sat in the cracked vinyl booth beneath the portrait of Reagan, haloed in a sheriff’s badge of grease. Outside, a teenage boy in a Confederate flag tank top peeled away in a mufflerless Camaro. Everything here was both louder and quieter than I remembered.
After breakfast, I wandered down Main, past the Cyclone Wash, where Thursday nights used to mean discount dryer tokens and a kind of tragic flirting I mistook for romance. Blanche still brought her ferret in a baby stroller, offering strangers paper hearts with phrases like, “Love me before the spin cycle ends.” I once kissed her behind the vending machines. I was seventeen and desperate. She tasted like Cherry Coke and guilt.
Tommy’s Worms and the Word had a new sign. Same neon cross, but now the worms were advertised as “Biblically Clean.” Tommy looked older, thin as twine, sitting on a stool behind the counter, reading Isaiah with his eyes closed. He told me he’d found God in the reflective shimmer of a catfish scale and hadn’t needed conversation since.
The railroad crossing hadn’t moved. Neither had the white wooden cross with Zeke’s name on it, the one his mother still adorned with fresh corn dogs every Sunday. He died doing eighty on a dirt bike, wore a Superman cape and no helmet. The cape survived. They buried him in it.
At the school, the mural of extinct animals had faded. One of the booby’s blue feet had chipped off, but you could still make out the saber tooth grinning under the gray sky. Someone had graffitied over the stegosaurus: a spray-painted eye with lashes too long, like it had been drawn by a child trying to imagine beauty. I traced its outline with my finger, remembering how we’d all been told we’d amount to more.
Junebug Simmons was outside the Winn-Dixie, same milk crate, same tremor in his hands. He fed crusts to a single crow perched on the ice machine.
“They remember,” he said, not clarifying if he meant the birds or the town. “Memory’s sticky here. Like sap and sin.”
He asked about my father. I said he was gone. Not dead, just gone. Left one Tuesday morning in ’98 with a suitcase and a cassette of Merle Haggard playing loud enough to rupture the blinds. No note. No goodbye. Just the echo of boots on porch steps and the soft tick of the screen door shutting behind him.
Junebug nodded like he’d been expecting that answer. He held out a paper heart from Blanche, one that said, “Love me like a long song with no chorus.” I took it.
The sun lowered, and I found myself at the edge of the old trailer park where we used to set off fireworks and watch for snakes. Most of the trailers had collapsed or gone silver with mold. Ours was still there. I stepped through the half-hinged screen door and stood inside. The carpet was gone. A mirror still hung in the hallway, warped around the corners. I looked like a stretched version of myself, older but also thinner, like something pulled.
On the counter was a spoon, rusted over. I remembered how my father once used a spoon like it to show me how reflection worked. “You see how it bends your face? That’s truth. Truth ain’t flat. It curves.”
I sat for a while on the porch, listening for the sound of boots that never came.
At dusk, I wandered toward the old revival tent. The Electric Jesus Revival was now a sagging tarp barely held aloft by rusted poles. Kids used to dare each other to touch the pulpit where a snake once bit Deacon Grady. Grady survived. The snake did not. I had been one of those children. I had touched the pulpit and felt nothing, then told everyone I’d seen God’s eye blink.
I stayed the night in my car by the tracks. No hotel here anymore, unless you count the church basement, and I didn’t. Around midnight, I heard the Midnight Parade begin—pots clanging, teenagers howling, a goat painted like the American flag trotting past my windshield. Someone was born during the parade once, a baby girl named Liberty. She’d be nineteen now. I wondered if she’d escaped.
In the morning, I drove out of Christmas. No one waved. No one noticed. But I felt the town watching, like something with a thousand eyes and no mouth. I left behind the eggs, the worms, the chalk outline of that couple dancing beneath the streetlight at 4th and Willow. Left the broken mural, the crow, the whispered names.
I did not look back. That’s how I stay gone.
Cate McGowan is the author of four books, including Sacrificial Steel (Driftwood Press Editors’ Prize, 2025) and True Places Never Are (Moon City Press Short Fiction Award). Her work appears in Flash Fiction International (Norton), Glimmer Train, Shenandoah, and more. She holds an M.F.A. and Ph.D. and teaches writing in Florida. Visit her at www.catemcgowan.com.
𝙾 𝙲 𝙲 𝚄 𝙻 𝚄 𝙼 