SIGNS OF THE TIMES ARE EVERYWHERE
By Amelia Franz
 

The faded old Georgia-Pacific boxcars clacked and groaned their way down the tracks, singing the same exact song as me, one with no words. Locusts keened and rattled in the Mississippi delta twilight, thick with the smells of cropdust, magnolia, and the bobwhite quail Mr. Fordyce and his wife raised in backyard coops next door. I was eleven, and as for as long as I could remember, I’d dreaded this time of day. Dust-dark, we called it, the air humid with loneliness and unbearable yearning for something I couldn’t name. An atomic fire ball like the ones I bought for a dime apiece at Pang’s grocery formed in my throat, but like always, I swallowed it down to my heart of hearts,  that spot somewhere between my neck and ribcage that would never show up on any x-ray but was there all the same, heavy as a brick-bat, malignant as any cancer you could name. It was in that place, in my heart of hearts, that I knew beyond the shadow of any doubt that I had never been saved.

The caboose rumbled past the parsonage driveway and vanished from my sight, past the courthouse square with its Chinaman stores and monument to the southern soldier, past the ho-tel, owned by Sister Helen Birdie. She had belonged to the Sutton Church of God for over forty years. From her spot on the second pew, she gazed up at Daddy in adoration each Sunday as he rose and closed his eyes to plead for the anointing, then laid the spine of his highlighted Dake’s Bible on the pulpit, its black wings falling open to his chosen scripture.

I sat on the El Camino’s bumper and listened to the courthouse clock chime seven. Bobwhites called,mosquitoes tinked against light bulbs, a lawn mower buzzed from down toward the gin. By the final stroke, the panic had swallowed me whole. 

“Not again, Amy,” I whispered to myself, my insides lurching and my heart galloping, a taste like new pennies on my tongue. But resistance was pointless. One way or the other, I had to know. My bare feet raised dust and scattered gravel as I raced in my culottes toward the parsonage and the light in the kitchen window, my long, pentecostal hair streaming behind me as I ran.

“Please be there. Please be there.” 

And then I heard it. Mama’s voice singing out through the open window, everything around me slowing down, exhaling, unwinding. Sweet relief flooded every cell in my body, a rushing, mighty river of joy overflowing its useless banks. That wasn’t a blast from Gabriel’s trumpet I’d heard, after all. Jesus hadn’t raptured her and Daddy away, not yet. I ached to fling open the screen door, rush into the kitchen and anchor Mama to the floor, bury myself in her housedress and never let her go, but instead I sat on the concrete step until suppertime, breathing all the mingled scents of Mama and her flowerbed: marigolds, zinnias, four o’clocks, Jergens hand lotion. In, out. In, out.

Signs of the times are everywhere, Mama sang. And there’s a brand new feeling in the air. Keep your eyes upon the eastern sky. Lift up your head, redemption draweth nigh.
 
 

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Fiction by AMELIA FRANZ has appeared in The Texas Review, Oyster Boy Review, and Blue Penny Quarterly. She was born and raised in Mississippi, and now lives in Austin, Texas. The story is set in the Mississippi delta.