Louisiana Literature: We Will Find Each Other Again

“We Will Find Each Other Again” – Fleeing an abusive relationship, Ellie Camphor navigates exhaustion and loneliness while traveling through rural Florida. Drifting between gas stations, parks, and rest stops, she fights to cling to fragments of self in a world that’s becoming increasingly surreal.

A Florida Gothic tale that pulls you in slow and deep. Before you know it, you’re underwater.

Published by Louisiana Literature Journal and Press (print only) available for purchase here or read the story in full below. The issue is 250 pages of quiet hauntings. If you crave Southern Gothic literature and poetry, you can’t go wrong purchasing this.

From their website: “Since 1984, Louisiana Literature has featured some of the finest writing published in America. The journal has always striven to spotlight local talent alongside nationally-recognized authors.”

Here’s my contribution to the edition. If you enjoy it, buy the issue, because everything in there has the same dreadful flavor.

WE WILL FIND EACH OTHER AGAIN

Ellie Camphor pulled her dark blue Chevy into the Withlacoochee River BP, her body bucking along with the old junker over the crested roots of an ancient Spanish oak. Cloaksleeves of moss hung low from the tree. They mopped her windshield, transforming what for many miles had been discrete splats of love bug gore into a smear of creamed corn puke. No matter. Ellie knew this place well. The station had a garden hose outside the restroom pavilion that they didn’t lock up. The attendant, a toothless, lanky, congenial seeming fellow who smelled like a bait bucket morning, noon and night, had closed up shop and taken off a few minutes ago on his ATV. Ellie’d been circling.

She pulled up to the outbuilding, block-built and painted white, took the hose from its hitch and stuck her thumb perpendicular against the hole. She lefty-loosied the faucet and it let out a dribble. Not much, but it’s something. She tripped on a knob of crabgrass on her way around the truck. The hose fell from her grip. She looked back at the clump of grass and called it a dickhead, lit a cigarette and watched the lukewarm water tan the ground.

She watched the water run, watched it waste, didn’t rush to save it. You’re so fucking stupid. For so many stupid little things. Every day, every hour, another thing she was stupid for revealed itself. Case in point – for not having taken the pressure washer when she walked out on him. She could have taken it. She could have taken everything. She could have made him leave, made him be the one to live in a damn truck. But who had the energy to fight that kind of stuff? She was too tired then. She was too tired still. Freedom wasn’t as invigorating an experience as she’d hoped. She’d expected the loneliness. The exhaustion was a surprise. 

Ellie finished her smoke. The hose was still running, still wasting. A greyish wad of fabric balled up in the sand near her rear tire caught her eye. She walked over and kicked it open. A t-shirt. Across the chest it read: HYPERCOLOR. The hosewater reached the shirt and the cloth bloomed pink. 

She picked up the shirt These things are vintage, worth money and used it to scrub her windshield, hood and grill clean of bug bodies. She got real close, inhaled the smell of sunbaked guts. It was putrid-sweet, the smell of aloe on a burn, of arnica on a bruise. Of strawberry lube on a vending machine condom. It was the burnt sugar stench of holding on to a thing you never should’ve neared. But the wind blew you to it, didn’t it.

She went inside the restroom to wash up. She turned on the sink tap and let it run, the sulfury stream falling strong and straight into the drain. She looked up at herself, at Ellie in the mirror, sweaty and red from working in the late summer heat. Amber brown eyes that held far too much in and never brimmed over. Lines in her face to prove that tension. She held her gaze for a long, long time. Eleanor Catherine Camphor. Ellie, sweet Ellie, off course and flattened, but still holding on. The stench of it. 

She cleaned herself as best she could and went back outside. The high hollow buzz of Eastern lubber grasshoppers was rising up to greet the downing sun. It was later than she’d thought. She listened to the insects sing. She could make them out in the distance, swaying on top of man-tall tan Fakahatchee grasses, shaking their red-orange shells. She stood still while the reedy chorus swelled, while it overtook all else, consumed everything and then, at the height of crescendo, a switch flipped. Silence. Whatever they’d been doing was done. 

In the sky, day-white clouds bottomed out dark and quick. The heavens sucked up a shock of orange from the horizon, deep and dense as orange blossom marmalade. The clouds turned to candy floss, thinned and tore apart, waving like the wild locks of Banshees. Ellie waved back. What are you witches looking at? Can you see me? To be watched over – the thought made her want to sing. To shake her shell. She sighed. A light breeze made her shiver. The loneliness felt steep. She’d shake her shell at anything.

She decided to go back inside the restroom and take the toilet paper. On her way out she peeked in the trash. She’d found a purse in one once. Tonight, only a diaper on top of a hill of wadded up paper towels. She let the lid bang shut. What a place to be changed. Soft infant flesh up against the cold steel faucet, shrill cries echoing off the filthy red tiles, rough wipes with the station’s bulk-bought paper and later, a rash, a lingering patch of red. Pain is formative. They say bodies file that stuff away. Ellie felt a sympathy itch at the nape of her neck and she scratched. Her nail hit a scab and it bled.  

She noticed the mirror was streaked. For a mirror to stay crystal clear in this humidity you had to buff it, you really had to try. 

You can’t be too tired. 

She cleared a line in the haze. Positioned her head so that her eyes were reflected in the line that she drew. She thought her eyes looked too dark. Even the whites seemed gray. Surely there’d been a time when they’d gleamed. She looked down at the sink, traced her finger along a gummy rope of silicon circling the base of the faucet. Little black specks of mold were trapped in between the layers. A job poorly done. Nobody knows how to caulk right. Everyone was too tired. 

She shut the door behind her and it closed with a gentle click. Nothing was moving outside but mosquitos and meadow grasses. No traffic. No birds. No sound.

Everything is too tired. 

She sat on her bumper and watched the last sliver of cloud thrust west, a blue-white wound in a field of violet. Soon everything would be gone. Then the stars. Out here there were so, so many, so many diamonds just out of reach. Why am I stalling? She finished another cigarette, started up her truck and pulled out onto the state road headed east. She would sleep at River Park.

The air turned sweet from pine sap, cow manure and citrus groves the further inland she drove from the salty fog of the Gulf of Mexico. Like the sweetness, the darkness, too, came in hard. High beams were hardly useful, the asphalt was loose and who knew where a pothole might be. Yet, she kept up a fast clip. She knew she should be more careful, but she also knew the land in her bones. Being from a place could make a person reckless. 

She pulled into the park and found her usual riverfront spot. Everything was dark beyond the twin yellow mist of her high beams. She cut the engine. The little she’d been able to see was sucked into the night. She climbed in the truck bed and nestled into her blankets. The night sucked her in, too.

#

We drove along the coast. The wet salt air. I begged you to stop because the beach seemed teeming with shining treasures. Upon closer inspection, there was nothing there. We continued driving. Storms, over time, had ruined most of the seaside homes. That house looks nice, I said. It was made of bare concrete block and lived on a rocky cliff. Below, the sea was threatening. It’s ugly, you said. It’s sturdy, I replied. Look. It’s the only one standing. All it needs is some siding.

#

Ellie woke up gasping. The air in the truck was stagnant and it pressed on her lungs. She climbed out of her truck and stumbled in the dark to a picnic table. Out there, she could breathe. The air was wet and light. 

She sat on the table top, lit a cigarette and looked out toward the direction of the river. There was no way to make out a star from the eye of a possum. Both burned, both blinked, and at this hour the dividing line of the horizon did not exist. Stars could roam the land, and bush creatures could fly. The glinting river, a lazy hush, carried itself along slow as honey, slow as the things in it, rising and falling with the breath of the Earth. 

Ellie’s eyes adjusted. Shapes formed in the shadows – discarded tires, Big Gulp cups, nests of fishing twine. A grill next to the table, lumpy with coal ash and gristle. People were supposed to scrape it clean after every use, but people rarely did. Campers are tired. Picknickers are tired. Grillmasters are tired. Even tourists are tired. Little pieces of bone, picked clean of everything, were scattered on the ground. They were so white they glowed. Everywhere were scraps of things, everything discarded shrouded in linen yellow moonlight. The ground, as blue-black as wet ink. Ellie floated in the chasm. Floated with the river and its detritus and floated with the bones until the weightlessness became frightening. 

She stared at the bones, named them, you are bones tried to ground herself I am Ellie. She concentrated, tensed her face, you are Ellie tightened her fists, poured every ounce of energy in focusing on the bones, you are bones in willing them to life, willing them to assemble into something that could help, advise, divine  – please, I’m so tired – willing something to happen, anything, anything to shake her. 

I am Ellie.

Ellie breathed in sync with the river, trying to get a grip on the spiraling panic. She stubbed out her smoke, hummed a high-pitched drone like the lubbers had. It started as a whimper but grew steadier with time. She stared at the bones, stared at them forever, humming. Droning. She thought perhaps they’d moved. Yes. The bones had begun to quiver. She let out a cry and went slack.

Marrow, blood, life itself pulsed through the bones. She could see it – a glowing cast of purple on their surface. They started to throb on the ground like little heartbeats and then they gasped, flopped about, kicked up dust like minnows strewn to shore. It’s okay. It’s okay, it’s going to be okay. She hummed. The bones slowed, seemed to have a thought, a moment, and then gathered themselves up and assembled themselves into the shape of a human hand. Ellie realized she could no longer hear the river. Weird. She watched the bone hand’s chicken thigh index finger extend itself and point away from the table to the back of her truck. She obeyed the hand, walked to her truck, opened the bed, and there saw her body laid out on her blankets, perfectly still and perfectly blue. Around her neck, a raw red line.

Last week he was kind, and she was tired. 

I’m fine. I’m looking for a place but I don’t mind camping. 

The heaviness returned, sank into her lungs, 

You’re still getting my mail? 

pushed down on her shoulders and in through 

Yeah, I guess you can buy me lunch.

her chest, pushed her down until she kneeled, until she

…River Park.

fell on the sand next to a march of ants, 

I said I’m fine.

who sidestepped her as a courtesy, 

stop it, no –

out of respect 

Fuck you too!

for the dead. 

Ellie laid on the ground next to her truck until the orange sun crowned the pine horizon. She rolled onto her back and smiled gently. Usually west central Florida mornings are so, so warm. Too hot to enjoy. This time, she couldn’t feel the sun. Her skin was cool and dry. It was nice. She closed her eyes and fell asleep, not knowing if she’d wake or where she’d end up if she didn’t. 

I’m always fine. 

Like fog on a mirror, 

I am Ellie.

wiped clean with a stroke. 

#

I slip on my flower print cotton dress and grab my book about Safari and settle into a bed that knows me – at least a few days out of the year. I think about those I loved and wonder how they are. My old gold ring is on the oak nightstand. I will wear it until someone comes along to replace it. If never, that is fine by me. “Goodnight, lovers,” I cry to the open window, “and may the morning bring you new blessings!”

The curtains close and the floor beneath me breaks.

#

Ellie woke after the sun had made its mid-day ascent. She climbed into the truck bed, adjusted the blankets around her corpse, gently pushed back a lock of her hair. Stroked the red line, tucked herself in. Called him a fucker. She looked around. She was still alone. It was off-season and she probably wouldn’t be found until the weekend. Until someone wanted her spot. Until someone complained.

She locked her body in her truck and decided to walk back to the Withlacoochee River BP, her face to the sky, for once not giving a fuck about a sunburn. A flock of gulls flew westward above her. They chattered together. They sang so brightly. 

She arrived at the station as the lubbers began to buzz. The attendant had gone. The hose was dripping. A waste. But she didn’t correct it. She went into the restroom and locked the door from the inside and stayed until the oil tanks in the ground ran dry and the trucks stopped coming by to fill them. Until the entire station was closed and condemned. Until the seas rose above it. When she looked in the mirror, nothing looked back. Still, every day she looked at the place her reflection once was. And every day she told herself:

We will find each other again.