He hadn’t meant to be gone so long.

Originally it was just supposed to have been a few months of cultural exchange. Him, the unwashed, bearded musician with a metal slide for a guitar in his pocket. Them, them impeccably groomed and dressed “Other” that lived across the sea.

He’d teach them about the blues rock and roll, and they’d teach him how to politely bow away the fact that they didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.

But, like all travelers in beautiful places, he got lost somewhere along the way and forgot about home. It must’ve been the barefoot walks on the beach just down from his apartment that made him go native, because it sure as hell wasn’t the food.

The food, however, was what brought him back.

He was video chatting when a friend back in Memphis one day when it happened. The friend was in the middle of lunch. Eating something that looked so familiar, but that he couldn’t quiet place.

He asked what it was.

Barbecue, the friend replied.

There was a sharp pain of memory in his gut. Smokey, sweet, spicy, delicious pain.

He booked the flight home later that day.

Memphis Note
That one’s for Al, who’s spent the better part of the last few years bouncing about Asian teaching English, taking pictures and raking muck for local newspapers. Every once and a while he’ll video chat with us. We make sure we’re torturing him with all the great food he can’t get over there every time he does.

The passenger cabin was filled with refugees, grateful to finally be returning home. His sister slept against his shoulder, her forehead flecked with sweat. Thankfully not from the immolation of fever, but rather the stuffy heat of the train car.

As the train rattled onward, he looked out the window. The open country passing by was starting to look more and more familiar. They weren’t far now.

His thoughts drifted to their father. To him bribing the station agent so his children could have the last seats on the last train, their hasty, panicked good-byes and then the impenetrable, crushing silence that followed on the heels of quarantine.

They had both written letters. It was how they passed the time at first, until his sister’s questions about home became too much to bare. Sometime he’d hope that they’d gotten through, even though he knew the post had not run in Memphis since before they’d left.

Shifting against his shoulder, his sister mumbled something in her sleep. He brushed a damp bit of hair back from her face. Then closed his eyes, and allowed himself another hope.

That their father would be waiting at the station to welcome them home.

Memphis Note
The yellow fever outbreaks of 1878 emptied out the city. Nearly two-thirds of the population evacuated in August when the disease first struck. Of those that remained, eighty percent would fall ill, and more than a quarter would die. The combination and the mass exodus from the city, along with the return of the fever the following summer, caused the state to revoke Memphis’s city charter. Which it would not regain for a dozen years.

The overwhelming beigeness of the subdivision going up down the street made Elsa Mae spit. She could see the huge trucks moving through the tree line, like some kind of horrible metal monsters that sent her rabbits scattering.

Elsa’s property was the largest in the area. Her grandfather had purchased it as a homestead a century ago. She still lived in the house that her grandfather and father had built. Her parents married on the front porch. Elsa was born here, and wed Henry under the oak tree you could see just out the parlor window.

Her Henry had succumbed to the cancer three years past. They’d never been blessed with children. Instead they raised rabbits. Acres of them, with plenty of runs, slopes and tree roots to hide and play amongst. Jacks, lops, hares, and a pair of Flemmish giants that she wished would get off their duff and make some kits.

Elsa spit again, and went to wrangle her children into their hutches for the night.

It was just her and the rabbits now, holding off the metastasizing growth of the suburbs. A last bastion of what was, standing firm against what is. It was a good fight.

Memphis Note
There are still places like this, out on the edges of Memphis. Where people lived before the city grew out to meet them. It always breaks my heart a little bit when I see one of them sold to a developer to be sliced up into a dozen less interesting homes.