By Marika Guthrie

Everyone in Shirttail called her Familiar. Not because that was her name, no one knew her name. And not because eventually the men of Shirttail would become as familiar with Familiar as the inside of their own palms. No, they called her Familiar because she felt familiar to them despite not being born in Shirttail or spending a day of her short life there before arriving unannounced to squat in the late Larson Boucher’s chicken coop.  

That trashy little blank-faced girl over at Larson’s place sure seems familiar, got shortened to, that familiar-sorta-girl living in Boucher’s old meat bird coop, got shortened to, that familiar girl, and within five days they had talked her over so hard she was whittled down to Familiar.  

The meat bird coop was twenty-three paces east of Larson Boucher’s twobedroom house, which was set behind Boucher’s Gas & Garage. The station had died years before the man. Wild Turkey brought premature death to them both in equal measure. Boucher’s Gas & Garage was on the south end of town, spitting distance from the “Welcome to Shirttail” sign, erected by the Rotary Club. Proximity to that marker made Familiar an outskirts problem, not an intown scandal. Still, “town” wasn’t but three blocks away, and the residents of Shirttail watched from the sides of their eyes and talked out the sides of their mouths.  

Familiar, seemingly not much older than fourteen or fifteen according to all who saw her, loitered in front of the meat bird coop, shaded by an adolescent sweetgum tree that had taken seed and twisted up into form through the frame of a 1934 Chrysler Airflow. Stony white skin, black hair, black eyes, black nipples visible through the insubstantial weave of her white cotton dress, as if a decent person could call it a dress and not a shift.  

The Daughters of the Merciful Heart, pouring tea at their Wednesday night bible study at the First Methodist on 4th Street, put their hands to their heavily padded breasts and clicked their teeth, clicked their teeth, clicked their teeth at the white cotton, at the bare feet, at her sitting idle in the open door of that coop. Sugar, sugar to sweeten the tea and spoons to stir it into whirlpools.

But goodness isn’t she familiar somehow? Something in her . . .  face? Something, something so familiar don’t you agree? Yes. True enough. So oddly familiar. Just can’t put a finger on it. 

But no, this was Shirttail after all, none could claim such a backwoods creature if they were from somewhere so respectable. What the Daughters of the Merciful Heart really wanted to click their teeth about were those black nipples, but what kind of lady could admit to having seen them? Obsessed over them? Was it possible for such a stony white girl to have nipples black enough to show through white cotton? They simply could not talk about it. So, their curiosity unsatisfied, the ladies of the Daughters of the Merciful Heart sat at the First Methodist, stirred storms into their tea, clicked their teeth at each other, and could not put their powdered-sugared fingers down anywhere.  

The chronology of the story goes: the day before Familiar arrived she wasn’t there and the next day she was. Five days after that day she was whittled down to Familiar by the teeth clicking of the town’s fine white ladies. On the sixth day, Shirttail’s Black men’s wives started to put salt in their husbands’ pockets; the Black men would take the salt their wives gave them into their fingers as they passed Boucher’s place on their way to work before dawn, and sprinkle it in a line on the ground between themselves and that stony white girl sitting in the darkened door of the coop. Ten days after Familiar wasn’t there then was, all the white men of the town woke up at the exact same time, not awoken from sleep but awoken to some extemporaneous impulse.  

Wake Dolor, who’s wife, Talia, sent him to the Crawford Farm for fresh butchered late-spring hens and did not know to fill her husband’s pants pockets with salt, found himself turning into Boucher’s Gas & Garage on his way home. Drove right over that hard white line laid down by the Black men on foot. Drove past the station of broken glass. Drove past the shuttered two-story house with the roof sagging worse than a working man the morning after payday. Right up to the meat bird coop where Familiar was waiting for him.  

Later he would talk about it when he was alone. Who could he possibly tell? Who would believe him? Who would not be disgusted?  

She beckoned him out of the truck with her palm turned up and her fingers moving together like a hinged door. Come. Come. Come. Come. Wake put his hand on the door handle, then paused, turned and flipped open the top of the cooler on the bench seat next to him, and took out a carefully wrapped hen. As he walked toward her, toward the meat bird coop, his boots crunched and crushed the spiked seedballs of the young sweetgum tree that swayed and shadowed the yard. Behind the coop, low dogwoods bloomed white, frothy waves of starry flowers. She did not come toward the big man as he approached, but her fingers kept moving on their hinged joints. Come. Come. Come. Come. Familiar did not speak. Wake Dolor could not speak. He had no salt in his pockets. He held out the neatly wrapped late-spring hen. Inside the butcher paper she was plucked clean down to her rosy skin and decapitated. Familiar took the bird with her stony white, bony hands, then turned toward the meat bird coop. Wake followed her as if he were a deflated carnival balloon tied to her childish wrist. He had to duck his head to step into the building although it was a large shed, large enough to house the hundred birds Larson had kept before the Wild Turkey pecked him to death.  

The birds were gone, but the chicken shit and feathers were still everywhere. There was no sign that the girl had taken up residence. No pallet bed. No cardboard suitcase of clothes. No overturned oil drum or crate to tend to meals. Just the loose feathers, chicken shit, and the heavy duty roosting bars. Familiar set the wrapped late-spring hen on the sill of the only window, then came close to Wake. The white cotton dress brushed against his plaid shirt. Then she reached up and took hold of a roosting bar above her head and lifted her body up to wrap her bare legs around Wake’s hips.  

He wouldn’t remember much about the fucking. He knew he was inside her. The skin of her thighs so white. She was silent but ardent, arching and thrusting and grasping. At one point she released the bar and let him hold her up. That’s when she put her mouth on his. Ran her tongue along his teeth, took his lips up between hers. Tasted and gathered the residue of his wife, Talia, and swallowed her down her black throat.  

What Wake talked about most when he was alone was the kaleidoscopic blackness. The black mane of hair that was thick and mercurial as spilled ink. The velvet kitten down, ebony between her legs. The wet polished eyes, round with a sheen, like patent-leather shoes on Sunday mornings. Her nipples were as black as the Daughters of the Merciful Heart’s imaginings: little hard disks of coal set on almost flat saucers of porcelain. Wake had taken one between a thumb and finger through the white cotton. There was more black to her. A slot between her front teeth so shadowed it set a man to thinking of the end of a long, lightless hallway. And finally, when Familiar’s head was thrown all the way back and her jaw open, there was a bloody little blackened hole where her left cuspid was gone.  

When Wake released that evening, inside Familiar, inside the meat bird coop, on the tenth day after Familiar was not there and then was, every white man without a lick of salt in his pockets woke up at the exact same time. And so it began. 

Wake returned time and again to the meat bird coop, as did every other white man in Shirttail. They brought such odd offerings to Familiar. Hairbrushes with their wives’ locks tangled in the bristles. A single silk stocking the color of creamed coffee. A broken lipstick tube. The title page torn from a pew bible from the First Methodist on 4th Street. Familiar took them all without comment. The men also brought fleshy little gifts from their wives’ prized gardens. Tiny green tomatoes, hard as disappointment. Premature cucumbers and eggplants. The new soft blades of herbs. Early carrots as tenuous as promises whispered in the dark. Familiar also took these without comment, but in front of the men would use her deft fingers to slip them into the rotten carcass of Wake’s late-spring hen. Then they voyaged all her shades of black and she licked the bits of forgotten wife from their trembling mouths. 

That summer the gardens of the Daughters of the Merciful Heart were fertile as to be obscene. Almost to blasphemy. The ladies delighted in tomatoes saccharine enough to make jam, peppers that took two hands to hold, lettuce whose leaves folded down, down, down like a bed with a thousand satin sheets. They worked in their sunhats to avoid getting too dark. They had garden parties with chardonnay and discussed the odd shortage of salt at the Piggly Wiggly. They made promises to swap seeds in the fall and wondered aloud at the domestics who seemed to be stealing their hair brushes and stockings. And all the while they clicked their teeth about that skinny phantom of a girl living in a dead man’s meat bird coop.  

And so the summer went for the ladies: garden parties and bible studies, a Fourth of July parade, days at the community pool, and charity events. And so the summer went for their men: mowing lawns, trimming hedges, stealing their wives’ intimate things, pillaging their gardens, and fucking Familiar. And so the summer went for Familiar: walking barefoot on the sweetgum seed pods, watching the Black men lay a desert of salt before her, fucking the white men who came in a mass, and stuffing the garden offerings with their wife’s hair into the ass-end of the decapitated late-spring hen who was growing a new mantle of feathers of mold. 

It was early August when Patsy Hewitt turned to Temperance Walton at a Labor Day Celebration Planning Committee meeting at First Methodist on 4th Street to click her teeth about Familiar barefoot and drawing in the dirt out front of the meat bird coop with a length of stick, when her front right tooth came clean out of her mouth and landed with a spray of blood into the ambrosia salad on the refreshment table. After that first event, the Daughters of the Merciful Heart lost teeth like it was an epidemic. Tootsie Jackson dropped an incisor into the lap of the Shirttail Elementary School principal when she leaned in to whisper a tidbit about Familiar into his ear. Shirley Calloway and Ruby Laurent both lost canines in the Piggly Wiggly dairy department when they stopped to speculate on how the girl survived alone in that coop. It was only a matter of weeks before every proper white lady in Shirttail had arrived weeping at the door of Dr. Philip Thibodeaux, DDS, their mouths like old factory buildings with half the windows knocked out. They had to be fitted with fakes fastened to their good teeth with thin strips of gold wire because the original teeth could not be found once they took leave of those women’s busybusy mouths.    

The chronology of the story goes: the day before Familiar arrived she wasn’t there and the next day she was. Five days after that day she was Familiar. On the sixth day, Shirttail’s Black women started to put salt in their husbands’ pockets. Ten days after Familiar wasn’t there then was, Wake Dolor fucked her in the meat bird coop and all the white men of the town woke up. Eight weeks after the white men woke up, the gardens of the Daughters of the Merciful Heart offended God with their excess. A month after the gardens turned whorish, the teeth of the white ladies began to fall out. Then 121 days after Familiar wasn’t there then was, she dug a hole in the ground in front of the door of Larson Boucher’s shuttered two-bedroom house and buried the latespring hen full of seeds, human hair, and feathered in mold. As the dirt fell on the late-spring hen, the white men of Shirttail began to fall back to something other than sleep, shaking their heads, trying to clear their ears and eyes of white cotton and black coal. 

It was harvest time. The ladies picked squash, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant . . . their garden baskets heavy, as if they had just pulled Moses from the river. They spread the labors of that summer on the vinyl counters of their kitchen and stared with a glass of their husband’s bourbon or Scotch or vodka in hand. The last weeks had made them tentative. They were nervous, but they couldn’t put a finger on why. All across Shirttail, in dozens of kitchens, the tips of tongues ran over the gold wire and the false teeth that grew more familiar with each passing day. Finally, their resolve stiffened up with liquor, the ladies selected their blades of choice; they had sauce to make after all. When the tomato halves fell away from each other, the women drew back at witnessing their own familiar teeth, blackened in the centers, and wrapped in hair, embedded in the translucent, sweet flesh. 

Everyone in Dog Jaw called her Familiar. Not because that was her name, no one knew her name. She wasn’t there and then she was. Stony white skin, black hair, black eyes, black nipples visible through a white cotton dress. Familiar in a way that you can’t put a finger on. Standing in the doorway of the still-upright half of the Dog Jaw Trading Post. On Good Friday, Jericho Hedgecoth turned his 1951 cornflower blue Buick Roadmaster into the dirt parking lot of the trading post with the Easter duck his wife, Sue Ellen, had special-ordered wrapped in butcher paper sitting on the passenger seat. The First Baptist Ladies of Grace began clicking their teeth and stirring their tea. At the local Piggly Wiggly the salt disappeared from the shelves.  

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Marika Guthrie is an emerging writer residing in Pueblo, Colorado. She is an nontraditional undergraduate student currently attending CSU-Pueblo, pursuing a major in English with an emphasis in creative writing. Guthrie is an ardent horsewoman, a sometimes artist, a stumbling philosopher, and a poet. Her work has been published in The Baltimore Review, The Rappahannock Review, Tempered Steele, and Vortex.