Anderson Ferrell

…he didn’t do it the clean way. He stepped out onto his front stoop where I could see him, cocked his shotgun, the one his daddy had given him, and aimed at me. I am trying to think that the reason my daddy fired over my head instead of into it is that he loved me so much.

“You smell like a girl,” Johnny said, smiling.

“I know,” I said, and I smiled, too. And when he saw that I didn’t care, he didn’t care either, and he would press closer to me. Sometimes his nose would be in my hair, and his breath would be like warm water all over my head, and that felt good, as if it was what ought to be even though I knew it was something that God saw wherever it happened, and remembered and sent to hell not everybody it happened to, but everybody who liked it.

It’s women’s work I do. On hot summer days when all the other boys are swimming or playing baseball or going howling-wild in the woods and fields which are running distance from anywhere in town, I slip away behind my grandmother’s washhouse and arrange funerals. I spend long hours making caskets out of cigar boxes—humming somber but hopeful hymns. Since the time I discovered I wasn’t a girl, but gave up anyway trying to join the race of boys, I have buried things. Dignified burials I give to frogs car-smashed in the street at night. Beetles, killed by DDT which is sprayed all over town by the county health department to keep down mosquitoes, rest in ground which only my imagination has hallowed.