Honie Briggs

“Why’d Mama wanna be buried all the way out here? Ain’t nobody gonna visit her grave once Auntie Rube passes on.”

“I hated comin’ here as a kid, sleepin’ on that screen porch so close to the graveyard and those goats bleatin’ all night!”

“Yeah, but remember hearin’ their muffled voices comin’ from inside the house, Mama and Auntie Rube laughin’ late at night?”

“I remember what you thought they said.”

“Fo somebody don’t allow no shoes in they house, yo floes show do get nasty, Rube Lee.”

“What you ‘spect? Be cleanin’ after bleedin’ ghosts mournin’ nude at night?”

*****

This week’s flash was almost a poem about grief and the raw emotion people experience during dark times of life. Then the picture of rural Alabama came to mind and I thought about the old cemetery where my grandmother’s sister was buried. When I was a girl, sleeping on a screened porch in the summertime was what kids did. We could hear the adults laughing and talking in the kitchen late at night. One of us would always try to sneak in and listen to the interesting conversations about things we didn’t understand.

Just thought I’d give a little background for this flash fiction story.

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