“I’m telling you, you’ve got to stop the pumps!”

In hindsight, yelling and slamming my fist down on the head of Memphis Light, Gas and Water’s desk probably wasn’t the smartest idea.

Thankfully, he held his hands up and kept the security guards tackling me.

“Mister-,” he began.

“Professor,” I interrupted.

He coughed, then continued. “Professor Lucas, even if I believed a single word of what you’re telling me – and I don’t – this company supplies water to nearly a million people. Would you suggest I simply let them die of dehydration to satisfy your…speculations?”

I hung my head in frustration.

“The water in the aquifer belongs to them. They sealed themselves down there, God knows how long ago, God knows why, with a hundred trillion gallons of clean water.”

I was talking too fast, I tried to slow down.

“We’ve been pumping water out of an underground sea for nearly a hundred and fifty years. We never knew what was down there before. But with modern scanning, I’ve seen it. There is another city beneath this one. And it is waking up.

Now, please. You’ve got to stop the pumps.”

That’s when he threw me out of his office.

Memphis Note
There are actually four separate aquifers beneath Memphis, the largest of which is estimated to be somewhere around a hundred trillion gallons, maybe more. In all the time we’ve been pumping water out of it, the water hasn’t even dropped a hundred and fifty feet from its original level.

Her eyes flashed fiery defiance.

“No.”

“Miss,” the uniformed police officer began, leaning heavily on the table, trying to be as imposing as possible. “I don’t think you realize the sort of trouble you’re in here.”

She smiled up at him, like a feral cat that’s learned to slip a trap. “And I don’t think you realize just how wrong you are.”

There were four of them in the room: the woman, the leaning officer, a younger patrolman guarding the door, and a well-dressed but very anxious man.

“You stole from this goodly gentleman. You’re a woman of vacant morals. Precisely what part do I have wrong?”

Her smile widened.

“Well, yes, I did steal from him. And, yes, I am a whore. But you’ve got this futile idea that he’s going to do anything about it.”

She turned away from the officer and addressed the well-dressed man directly.

“I stole your watch and your wallet. I looked inside both. I know where you work, which church you attend. I’ve seen your chubby little wife. And if you prosecute me for taking a bit more, they’ll all know about me, too.”

The woman was released within the hour.

Memphis Note
There’s a line from WC Handy’s Beale Street Blues that goes “If Beale Street could talk, married men would have to take their beds and walk.” The lady in the story above just realized how she could swing that to her favor. Story’s based on a real case, too. She got of scott-free.

He walks through the empty warehouse, humming to himself and tapping his nightstick against the corrugated metal wall in rhythm. This time of night, he’s the only one here, which means it’s safe to go to his secret space.

It was two years ago when they’d originally brought the containers in. At first he didn’t pay them any mind, but then he found out what treasures were hidden in them. He’d been working on his secret space ever since.

Stopping at the breaker box on the wall, he pushes the thick black switch up. Music begins to drift through the air, same as the tune he was humming.

He unlatches the container door and swings it open, warm light spilling across his smiling face. Freed, the music reverberates off the hard walls of the warehouse, doubling onto itself in a perpetual echo.

Inside the container are the scattered remains of a disassembled carousel, remade into a wonderland of horses and dragons and cherubs. A player piano sits in the back, providing the score.

He pats a white stallion with a wreath of painted roses around its neck and nods as he looks at the familiar faces.

“Hello again, my friends.”

Memphis Note
The Grand Carousel at Libertyland was dismantled and put into storage at an undisclosed location in 2009. As part of the ongoing demolition of the park, they city decided the carousel had to go and couldn’t afford to repair and relocate it.

He wouldn’t let anyone near the pit while he was cooking. He had a twenty foot rule. Come within that, and he’d stop cooking, ruining everything. He was that protective of his recipes.

They all said what he did was magic, pure gastric alchemy.

But he knew the truth.

It was science. Ratios and measures mixed with perception. It was letting your senses open to their fullest and not taking anything for granted.

The sugar mix in the baste had to be perfect so the outside of the meat would cure and sweeten, but not form a caramelized crust. The spices in the rub needed to make your taste buds stand up to get more flavor, but not be so intense they caused irritation of the membranes. The heat needed to be stoked to just the right temperature to liquify and distribute the fats, but not so hot that all the enzymes and flavor would be cooked out. The wood had to be just the right mixture densities and smells that you could imbue the smokey flavor without any of the acridity.

Hell, he thought, there’s probably less involved in building an atomic bomb than in making the perfect barbecue.

Memphis Note
In Memphis, barbecue recipes are protected like Illuminati secrets. It’s a blood-in, blood-out sort of deal. But, because of that, we’ve got the best damn barbecue in the world. Even if Anthony Bourdain can’t be bothered to visit us, yet somehow proclaims to be an expert on the subject.

She spat on the grave. And then the rain started, as it is wont to do when a spurred lover stands alone over her dead partner’s grave.

In her hands, a glossy photograph flaps in the wind.

“Dammit, Will.”

The photograph is of them. It is in blinding color, over-saturated, perfectly composed for that half second of life between shutter opening and closing.

They are standing at one of his openings. Before one of his photographs. Her arm is around him, but his is not around her.

No one ever knew they were together. He told her that he kept too many public lovers; she told him that it didn’t matter. But, regardless of what either of them said, it always did.

She puts the photograph back into her purse, and swings the camera draped around her shoulder into her hands. Holding a hand over the lens to mask it against the falling rain, she presses the shutter button.

“You were always a bastard. But you’ll always be my bastard.”

The shutter clicks. It’s a picture of his headstone. A perfect capture of the austere grey of the day.

She’s shooting black and white, in opposition to their color.

Memphis Note
William Eggleston was born and lived in Memphis, Tennessee. More than any other photographer, he is credited with bringing color photography into the norm of both art and commercial consumption. He currently lives in Memphis, in declining health, and complicated circumstances.