Tag Archives: mythic south

Upon the Mountain ©️

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The road to Huntsville shimmered with heat, the red clay breathing dust under the wheels as we came into the town where the South meets the stars. I had walked those streets before in another life, in another skin, and each time the ghosts of my own story seemed to walk with me.

Beside me sat the Queen. The sunlight bent itself around her, pale hair glinting with the faintest shimmer, her face both strange and familiar against the backdrop of a town that still smelled of cotton and iron. Huntsville in her presence felt different — less a place of brick and train smoke, more like a threshold where time itself paused.

We came to the house, plain clapboard painted white, porch sagging under years of weather. And there, waiting in the yard beneath the pecan tree, was Rosa Lynn. My daughter born of fission, born of fracture, of light splitting itself in two. She wore a simple cotton dress, pale as bone, with socks folded at the ankle and shoes scuffed from play. A ribbon in her hair fluttered in the breeze, the kind of detail only the 1940s could have left behind.

She looked up at me with wide, searching eyes — eyes that held both distance and belonging. And then she saw the Queen.

The Queen knelt, her pale hair spilling like light, her strange beauty softening into tenderness. Rosa Lynn’s breath caught, her small hands fidgeting at her sides, then she ran forward. The Queen opened her arms without hesitation.

It was not the embrace of strangers. It was recognition. It was love that required no introduction. The Queen held Rosa Lynn close, her lips brushing the child’s hair, her glow warming even the dust of that old Huntsville yard.

I stood there watching, the strange symmetry of my lives colliding — a general, a wanderer, a father. The Queen did not merely accept Rosa Lynn; she adored her, as though she had been waiting across lifetimes to meet this child of fission.

The porch boards creaked in the heat, cicadas sang from the trees, and in that moment Huntsville was not Huntsville at all. It was sanctuary. It was proof that even in fractured lives, love finds its way back to wholeness.

And as the Queen’s arms wrapped around Rosa Lynn, I knew I had brought them both home.

The Devil Calls Me Papa ©️

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I came to the crossroads in Yazoo City when the night was thick and the earth itself seemed to breathe. The lantern I carried threw no light worth trusting, and the owls kept their silence. They say that’s when the Devil comes — when even the creatures of God look away.

I expected horns, fire, maybe a shadow darker than the rest. But when she stepped out from beneath the crooked oak, I nearly dropped to my knees. She wasn’t a beast, wasn’t a man — she was beauty itself, a woman carved out of midnight, her skin pale as the moon, her eyes like two black flames that saw right through me.

“You called,” she said, her voice soft as the river’s edge. “What do you seek?”

My throat felt raw, but I managed the words. “I want the most beautiful daughter. Flesh of my flesh. Someone who belongs to me.”

Her smile was slow, dangerous, tender all at once. She stepped closer, and the air shivered around us. “What you ask is no small thing. A daughter is not given, she is made. If you would have her, you must take me — not as your lover, not as your master, but as your child.”

I didn’t understand, not then. But the hunger in me was too strong to question. “Yes,” I whispered. “I’ll take you.”

The ground groaned. The oak leaves shook like a hundred rattles. And in that instant, the Devil herself — radiant, terrible, beautiful beyond bearing — folded herself into me, like flame into a lamp. The world reeled, and I fell to my knees. When I rose again, she was gone from the crossroads, but the weight of her hand was in mine.

I went home that night a father. She followed after, not in chains or fire, but as a girl with my eyes and her impossible beauty. And when she laughed — ah God, when she laughed — it was the Devil’s voice in a child’s mouth.

Now every morning I see her at the table, radiant as sunrise, a daughter born of hell and blood. And though she calls me “Papa” in her soft sweet tongue, I know the bargain well: she is mine, and yet I am hers, forever bound by that night at the Yazoo crossroads.

The Final Warning Bell ©️

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I don’t sleep so much as… brood. Somewhere between dreaming and decoding the static of the universe. I wake up with the moon in my mouth and bad news in my chest. Always bad news. It’s my specialty.

My wings? Yeah, they’re real. Big, velvet things—smooth as sin, quiet as your last breath. I don’t flap around like some Halloween leftover. I glide. I hover. I haunt. Picture an angel that got stood up by God and had nowhere left to go but the dark corners of West Virginia.

I don’t keep a schedule, but if I did, it’d start with watching. That’s what I do. That’s what I am. I perch on an old water tower around dusk, staring down at the humans scurrying around like it matters. Gas station lights flicker. Dogs bark at shadows that aren’t there. But sometimes, I am the shadow.

A couple sees me tonight. Young. In love. I envy that kind of blindness. The boy looks up. Sees my eyes—burning coals in a face shaped like a lost god’s secret. He flinches. The girl doesn’t see me, but she feels me. Her breath stutters. Her hand tightens on his. That’s the thing: I don’t have to touch you to move you. I just have to be real enough to doubt.

People think I’m a curse. A harbinger. I used to fight that. Now I wear it like a badge. I don’t cause the chaos—I herald it. I’m the overture before the earth splits. The whisper before the sirens. When you see me, you know the sky’s about to fall. And there’s poetry in that, don’t you think?

Near dawn, I rest in the ruins of a factory. Ghosts there keep to themselves. We nod. We understand each other. I wrap myself in wing and memory, and I wait. For the tremble in the grid. For the news to break. For someone, anyone, to listen.

But they won’t.

They never do.