The portrait photograph over the fireplace glowered down at her, and she chased a handful of pills with a swallow of scotch.

“Shut up, old man.”

The picture did nothing, unmoved by her protestations.

“I told you to shut up!” She screamed at it, hurling her glass and the unflinching visage of her father. It shattered against the plexiglass covering the photograph. This was not her first such outburst.

Collapsing to the floor, she started to whimper.

“I did what you wanted, I got revenge on them for what they did to Joe. I got his seat. You said that was enough!” She doubled over, howling, scraping her nails along the wooden floor, leaving rough claw marks in the wood.

The portrait above the fireplace remained silent.

“Twenty votes was enough!” Growling, angry, she thrust her head up, fire burned in her eyes. “I’m a state senator now! You can’t talk to me like that. I won’t be bullied by you anymore!”

She furrowed her brown and cocked her head to the side, like she was having trouble hearing something. “What? What did you say? You’re getting quiet. Why can’t you speak up?”

The antipsychotics were starting to kick in.

Memphis Note
This may or may not have been inspired by our local state senator from a rather large family that is heavily involved in Memphis politics and her rather public separations from reality and love of a good drink. May or may not be, mind you.

The house was tiny, unremarkable, in a neighborhood that a woman of her worth would not normally be seen in. Children chased after her car as she pulled up, their mothers watching suspiciously from the porches of the other shotgun houses.

She steeled her nerves before walking up to the front door of the house and knocking.

The door opened, just a crack. “Yes?” A pair of dark eyes peered over a chain latch.

“I…I”m here for tea.” That was the code she was told to give. The door closed in her face, the chain rattled, then swung open again to let her in.

Inside, intricate arabesque patterning covered the walls of the room, twisting and turning into itself. When she blinked, she swore the pattern moved, like it was alive.

“Hello.” Said a girl standing before her, barely on the cusp of womanhood, yet with a child hanging off her hip. “Twenty dollars. Now”

She put the cash into the girl’s hand, who promptly shoved it down her shirt.

“Ghede Loa rides Mama.” The girls said opening the door to another room. “Drugs in tea bring her back. You have ‘til then to speak wit’ your dead.”

Memphis Note
In the same way it was at the crossroads of white and black culture to create rock and roll, Memphis is also at the crossroads of African and European religions. Voodoo and belief in the supernatural permeates the region, and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of small churches with their own specific takes on spirituality and ritual.

The windows were open and a warm spring breeze whistled through, flapping the light curtains. Shadows danced across the sparseness of the single bedroom apartment.

He sat on the floor, holding the Remington rifle in his arms, hugging it to his chest.

Galt was there, too, keeping watch out the bathroom window. He was always with him, it seemed. He’d been with him since Mexico, maybe even since Germany. He couldn’t remember clearly anymore.

It had been Galt’s idea to do this. To leave California, head east and kill the King.

He sneezed, pain flaring up his nose.

The nose job had been Galt’s idea, too. Said it would make it so people wouldn’t be able to recognize him. Most people didn’t even recognize him in the first place, but, as with everything, Galt insisted.

He wondered if Galt had said something to the surgeon while he was under, because their noses looked awfully similar now. That was the sort of thing Galt would do to him, too. And he hated him for it.

At the window, Galt hisses.

Wearily, James Earl Ray stands up, rifle in hand, and moves to the window.

Time to kill the King, Galt whispers.

Memphis Note
James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr on April 4th, 1968. Ray had been stalking him since mid-March, when he’d left California after getting a nose job. He was using his alias, Eric Starvo Galt, while he traveled. The alias was something he’d started using in Mexico, when he’d attempted to become a porn director. Until his death, Ray maintained that he was part of a larger conspiracy to kill MLK. And maybe he was. After all, a conspiracy just requires two people. Ray and Galt were two people, that just happened to share one body.

Additional Note
Memphis had a pretty bad storm last night, and due to the power outage I was unable to publish this story. I’ll post another one today to make up for it. Sorry for the delay, but act of God and all that.

She’d been out of the hospital three days, and her skin felt a thousand miles from her bones. Her head was empty, like a cave without echoes.

They told her she had to take the pills if she didn’t want to go back to the hospital. Take them to keep her quiet, keep her calm. She didn’t want another incident like last time at the pita place, did she?

But as she stared into the bathroom mirror, pills restless in her palm, she wondered if the doctors in white were right.

The beauty, the sensation, the light was gone from her life when the pills were within her. Sure, maybe she got angry every now and then without them, but anger’s what makes babies cry when they come out of a momma’s womb.

Don’t take them, the whispering voices pleaded. They’ll freeze your heart and poison your brain.

The fireflower birds and the prosthelytizing wind will disappear. If you take them, all the beauty will vanish, it whispered, seductively, like a lover whispering in her ear and blowing through her hair.

She dropped the pills into the sink, turned on the faucet, and pulled the stopper out, gasping for air.

Memphis Note
I spent a decent portion of tonight with a schizophrenic women yelling in my ear. She told me that I’d killed her father, and to stay away from her son, which she didn’t have. It made me think about the nature of mental illness, and how some refuse to take the pills because it cuts them off from some kind of beauty the rest of us will never know. I don’t know if I should envy them, or pity them.