Smokey Mountain Breakdown

This story is for an assignment from Wordsmith's Unlimited. Read the original assignment HERE.



“What in tarnation?!”

Ennis stepped back out onto the porch to watch the UPS delivery van try to make its way back up the rutted gravel drive that led to his house up in the holler. The driver had just thrown the package up on the porch rather than navigate the sea of blue tick hounds and dead cars in the yard. Its wheels stuck and spun a few times in the mud but it finally made its way back to the main road.

He squatted down on his haunches and turned the red box around in his hands, then spit a stream of tobacco juice out into the bare dirt yard. It barely missed a game hen scratching for bugs in the dirt. He wondered how much he could get for the box at the pawnshop in Newport. He wondered if it were worth anything.

Probably not, he thought, since the damn thing wouldn’t open.

He stood and scuffed his worn boots on the weathered wood of the porch. He’d been expecting a delivery but this sure wasn’t the immersion heater he’s ordered for his still operation. And he sure as hell needed the damn thing since he was almost out of quart jars and needed to do another run.

“Ennis? What were that?”

He turned to see his woman standing there in her tattered housedress. Her hair was mussed from sleep, its brassy blond ends contrasting sharply to the blue-black roots next to her scalp. The left side of her face was creased with sleep lines and she hadn’t put her teeth in yet.

Wordlessly, he handed the red box to her.

“Awwww, this here’s right purty!” she crooned as she caressed the box. “Where’s it come from?”

Ennis let another stream of tobacco juice snake out into the yard.

“Think it h'ain’t s’posed to be here.” He said with his long gaze fixed toward Snowbird Mountain, etched against the Tennessee sky.

Later that day, in Charleston, SC, Mrs. Davies-Smythe, in her elegant home on the Battery, tearfully opened a package to find an odd piece of hardware, an immersion heater, instead of Mr. Davies-Smythe’s cremains.

“What in tarnation?!”