Night in September :
F.B. Lloyd
IN SPITE OF THE hour, he had not yet fallen to sleep. He lay on his back, legs bent and curved to one side. His head tilted slightly in the opposite direction, eyes open but not looking or staring. This way, he saw the phone’s fluorescent light though it didn’t make a sound. A corner of the room started to shine, his shadow against the ceiling.
He turned over on his side, eyes open. The words Magnolia, NC, appeared on the phone’s screen once and then again. Everything was silent – a candy wrapper on the pavement outside, air crawling through walls. He could see the bottom of the sky through the room’s window. He could see where the night changed from blue, to purple, to the color of coal.
Magnolia was the kind of place that became playground for a child from the city, layers of sand, but, with time and circumstance, became too tiny for the man that was once that child. A train track runs through the center of town though trains seldom travel that way. On either side of the tracks – one general store, an old post office, a new post office, one and a half doctors’ offices opened a combined three days a week, and a gas station that sells five-cent gum and rents movies for about a buck. A two-lane state highway, 117, leads in and out, to towns much the same, eight miles in either direction. Stretches of road smell like hog or chickens or nothing at all.
A blue bike. For all of his summers spent in Magnolia, this endures. It was as bright as rainberries in kool-aid, with jagged circles of rust where the paint had chipped away. Its size was that of a dirt bike, about three feet off the ground, but it had the wheels of a ten speed, bare bald tires, a seat made for little girls. He and his cousin Fayth would take turns riding up the one road from their grandmother’s green and white rambler, past a church made of cinderblock on the left and another made of brick on the right, past the projects built for poor people and houses with gates and porches, to the train tracks, and back again. Once, he had skidded out on the dirt road in front of the rambler, fallen from the blue bike, cut his knee, and peeled back the skin of his palm. His grandmother put peroxide on his scars as his Uncle J.C. read the Book of Psalms and mumbled something about becoming man. His grandmother said it would not burn.
He held the phone in his hand but didn’t answer, turned his head away from the light. His mother called him often – he was her only child. She had moved back to Magnolia in the spring to take care of his grandmother who had become too weak, too strange of mind. He had taken to listening closely to the sound of his mother’s voice each time she said hello. He thought he’d be able to tell from the rhythm and pitch if his grandmother had died.
In August, he had traveled by plane, subway, bus, and car to Magnolia. They called it a family reunion but knew it was a farewell – a funeral for the living. This is how his mother had gotten the lot to come – 8 children, 16 grandchildren, 15 great grandchildren. She had said, we may not have much longer.
His grandmother used to take off his socks while he slept, a habit of his that she found at odds with nature. She drove a yellow car to the Stockyard on Saturdays and walked to church three times on Sundays singing His Eye is on the Sparrow, her voice low and raspy. In middle-school, he wrote an essay entitled “My Grandma Gertha Lou.” He thought then that she would live forever.
Having come so far, he hugged her only once – in the kitchen, where she watched his aunts make turnip greens. His grandmother stood hunchbacked, body slight, eyes now and again fading. She smiled at him. Her hair looked the same as in his oldest memories – silver, gray, wavy, and flowing.
Four days ago, his mother phoned. Her voice wasn’t how he had imagined, but different all the same. Lucas, she called him then. He pulled to the side of a busy street when he heard her. Mama fell asleep some time this afternoon and when we went to wake her- His mother breathed. Her voice remained the same. Something like two hours, two hours us shaking her and shouting. Then she opened her eyes and she whispers- Mama said, ‘I’m dying.’ His mother paused again. Then she was back sleeping. He did not say a word. She’s in a coma now. Me and J.C. just here waiting. His grandmother chewed tobacco. This much he remembered. He held her still in his mind, lying flat, back against a worn mattress. You okay? his mother asked. Yes, he said, just like that. When they hung up, he stayed on the side of the street for some time. He nearly said a prayer.
Outside his room’s window, he could see the sky. The crescent moon looked like a slit of ice against a dark canvas. When he was a boy, riding toward the tracks, he would watch the moon with his eyes. He imagined it followed his path, never quite catching him.
He held the phone to his ear, closed his eyes for the first time. Hello, he said simply, neither question nor comment. The world is a quiet place. He listened for the sound of his mother speaking.
FB Lloyd has been awarded several grants toward completing a novel, a collection of stories, and three screenplays. Originally from Washington, D.C., he is pursuing an MFA in Fiction as a Chancellor's Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. The Black Pages recently named FB writer laureate of Saint Louis.