Jonesville//Jonathan Pizarro

You told me something about the mountains. How the earth pulled apart to make an ocean and we drifted, drifted each of us seeds planted millennia ago like a promise waiting to be fulfilled. And the earth it did not stop. It crashed and split and out of it rose the spine of Appalachia.

You pointed at the trees as we walked down the path to your mother’s house, the dogs winding across our feet and down into the holler. The echoes of their barks like they could crack the sky open at the discovery of something under a log. When you turned your back, I placed a palm on the limestone and felt underneath the reddish-brown to the pale cracks underneath like I was back in Iberia.

Had a greater power conspired to make this union?

I held my breath for an instant, just in case the thought fell out of my mouth and disappeared forever.

The deer heads on the wall do not disturb me, they remind me of home. Of towns in Southern Spain where antlers are hung up over fireplaces and it is the thickness of pine smoke that beckons you in. Of bread for sale, made in front rooms. Of women on the side of the road selling fruit they picked that morning.

I know the murmur of gossip on a front porch. I know the stillness of life here, away from notions of productivity that wear you down into the grave. I know what the tongue is like when it is called illegitimate.

And I know what it feels like to wrap all of that into a ball and place it at the pit of your stomach, and then see how they’ll find something else to step on you for. What flows through your veins will not let you forget.

Remember, you drove the rental car up into the hills. We stopped to look at the houses piled up against the side of the cliff. Little white boxes with doors wide open. Curtains of beads to keep out the flies. Grandmothers in fold-out plastic chairs watched us pass by unflinching despite the narrowness of the only route out of town.

Then we left it behind and the world opened up to sky and rows of grape vines. The gnarled and ancient trunks of olive trees, stooped in their dark green hats to give shade to cows. You looked at the yellowing grass in the mirage of a heatwave and you said it looked so much like home it could be. And I reached out to place my hand in the crook of your elbow and rested my cheek on your arm and closed my eyes and I said yes.

In the summer we pushed the canoe out into the waters of the Clinch. I knew then what this country had for me, and it was not on television. It was peace.

I thought about the enormity of seeing this for the first time, unspoiled by highways and high-rises. Here was promise. Here were fish, the outlines of them between the silt ephemeral.

When we got back on land, we ate cornbread crusted catfish and soup beans on the deck. There were no clouds. It was sheer blue, and I looked at it to such a distance that my eyes hurt. I resolved then, to learn it all. The right cheese for the potatoes. How to mush the green beans into bacon. How to fold eggs into buttermilk. The trail that leads from Hilton to Bristol. The spectre of a train line, haunted only in the plucking of Maybelle’s thirty-six strings, clutched at her breast in a fervour like the Child Jesus.

The parkway to Roanoke was ours. You slowed down for the deer that crossed the road. You said they know they can’t be hunted here, so they’re brave. I saw the head of one, peeking through the undergrowth and ready to jump. It looked at us firmly as if to say I dare you to run me over.

You asked me to keep watch as the gloaming brought with it snow. Three deer next, in a line. Patches of white on their back. They looked up from grazing on the slopes, unbothered by anything in the world.

It was the first day of Advent and it felt to me in the peace of that moment like God was saying we could put our swords down and maybe not feel as if all this was going away.

We left serenity behind when we turned and joined the four-lane. The neon bursts of car lights and Taco Bell signs. I looked to my right out of the car window and there in the dark like it was suspended in air was a five-pointed star, red and white and blue in its illumination.

Jonathan Pizarro is a Queer Gibraltarian writer and teacher. His work has been published in Popshot, Litro, Queerlings, adda, and the Queer Life Queer Love 2 anthology amongst others. In 2022, he was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. He is currently working on his forthcoming debut novel and lives in Washington DC with his husband, and their dog Cornbread.