THE GOD BOX SAT ON THE COUNTER in Burkhardt’s mother’s kitchen, where everything was dark faux-marble lined with white streaks like fat in a steak. Painted pale gold, the box, which was sandwiched between the wall and a trio of LED candles with dust rimming their cupped bulbs, was the kind of thing in which one might keep stationery or old photographs, sewing needles or an erstwhile chequebook. Someone, maybe Burkhardt’s mother, had drizzled white and grey puff paint and silver glitter across its surface. The look was messy, something bombastic: Pollock but gaudy.
After Burkhardt’s mother died, he asked me to help go through her things. She lived in a two-story townhouse that smelled of burnt vacuum cleaner and stale lemon spray. The carpet was shaggy, flecked white-grey-brown, the furniture formal and gilt, all floral-patterned fainting couches and wing-backed chairs. The edges of the coffee table looked murderous.
His mother had only been in her late fifties, taken by a stroke brought on, I assumed, by her smoking habit; we found three ashtrays on her concrete slab of a patio, the glass bowls crowded with butts the size of mealworms. Burkhardt wanted to start there because the furniture was easy – just a little wrought-iron table and a pair of matching chairs. Something nice and simple to checkmark. But when he saw those ashtrays he let out a shudder like he, too, was about to die, and I slipped inside to give him a moment and to get us both a
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Joe Baumann is the author of three collections of short fiction, Sing With Me at the Edge of Paradise, The Plagues, and Hot Lips, and the novels I Know You’re Out There Somewhere and Lake, Drive. His fiction and essays have appeared in Third Coast, Passages North, Phantom Drift, and many others. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.