"Urns" excerpt by J.L. Moultrie

URNS

CHAPTER 1

VEGA

before the void emptiness and dross lined the river’s 

edge you were reading freud hardly there what i 

avoid gathers in like faces in family portraits i’d not 

seen myself before forged stars unseen in a sequence 

of blighted leaves

David woke up coughing, but continued lying in bed, listening to the cicadas. He’d just moved in with his older sister from his aunt’s project apartment, along with his mom. He stood and turned off the whirring, stationary fan, then returned to bed. His mind was dark and speckled like Detroit’s skyline in summer. The period between night and twilight filled him with melancholy ever since his family was evicted during sundown. They packed their belongings into large, plastic bags and were dropped off at his sister's home on the east side. He noticed moonlight flood a section of the carpet from the open window. Introspection soon became a wind-carried cinder.

His interior was volatile and overgrown. He saw slights where there were none and performed well in school despite his chimeric moods. That’s until he was a participant in the spelling bee and saw none of his family in the vast crowd. The rules of engagement were not explicit, but how long would this go on? His stomach became audible and beads of sweat rose across his forehead and temples. His body felt sordid – besieged by fight, flight or intense hunger. He internalized what was external; he decided, within his inner matrix, that his poor middle school grades were solely his responsibility and not the results of chronic neglect and generational instability.

His perceptions were attuned to identifying potential threats in seemingly innocuous situations. His nine-year-old nephew, fearing elevators, refused to enter one, even with the rest of the family. David volunteered to escort him up the winding stairway to the fifth floor, where they resided. His nephew, nearly in tears, thanked David for his kindness as they ran up the staircase trying to outpace the elevator. The family was split into two rooms.

A sense that he was not central to his own existence gained buoyancy until it surfaced like sea debris. His eyes opened to early sunlight filtered through trees on his walk to school. The cafeteria buzzed with activity. The former auditorium filled with utterances of a hundred or so middle school students. His attention was divided between the long, crowded lunchroom tables, natural light from large, high windows and the empty stage. Lunch time was always a zoo, but today, his peers seemed more rabid than ever. The staff stood at strategic points. David noticed them patrolling the halls like automatons after he stood in line for the metal detector and back pack search by security.

The hotel stay felt like a week-long reprieve. His sense of mortality soon crystallized into a concept he’d yet to grasp: closure. Nocturne was the only time when his thoughts experienced renewal and recalibration. 

His mother led a prayer circle in the living room, which included his aunts and sister. They’d just returned from an hour-long church service and would soon be preparing Sunday dinner. The pastor and one of his aunts had known each other since she'd fled into his modest church across the street from her project apartment. She'd struggled with alcoholism until they’d met. David withdrew into the utility closet near the washer to escape the ensuing chaos. Their joined exclamations made him cagey and diluted his focus. Why would he feel connected to their displays when immense gulfs persisted between them all?

The night they returned from the hotel, there remained a wide opening in the ceiling where the fire had burned through. In the morning, David found himself upstairs, in the bathroom, peering vertically into bare azure.

________

J.L. Moultrie is a Detroiter and multi-genre writer. He hasn’t been the same since encountering Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner and Hart Crane. He considers himself a contemporary, abstract imagist.

J.L. is on X @JLMoultrie and Instagram @jl_moultrie