Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: These flash essays (a triple feature!) by Joe Kapitan about the south/South situate the speaker as a cultural anthropologist of humor, gun ownership and gun violence, music, and landscape. During my first term as an editor at the CR, while I was a graduate student at UC, we published Kapitan’s story “Brothers of the Salvageable Crust” in our Issue 9.1, and it’s great to feature his work again. I was floored by how these interwoven short pieces move from a sense of menace to a sense of hope.
And an editorial note: although the Chicago Manual of Style says that “south” should be lowercase unless referring to Civil War contexts, we let writers choose the character, quite literally, of their South, since it can mean different things in different contexts, as you’ll see below.
To hear Joe read the essays, click below:
Southern Humor
When I lived down south, years ago, I met a portly, white-haired gent named Carroll who always had a joke ready for the weather. In August when the asphalt highways buckled under the scorching sun, Carroll said that it was so hot he saw a fire hydrant move next to a dog. When the spring rains hadn’t stopped for two weeks, he complained that the catfish had eaten his tomato seedlings. I tried to join in; I told him once that I’d driven way south for the weekend, so far south that I couldn’t find one tree that didn’t have Spanish moss or rope dangling from it. Carroll looked at me granite-faced, like I was some two-headed Yankee monstrosity. I tried again months later, saying I’d driven so far west that I had to stop the car to let a herd of assault weapons cross the road. Same icy response. Before I left the south, I finally got him to laugh when we drove past a ramshackle trailer park and I called it tornado bait. Carroll leaned over and clapped me on the back and said, Now there you go, you Yankee sumbitch, there you go.
Invasive Species
When I lived down south, years ago, I served in the military—a green lieutenant, boy-meat hung from man-bones. I never shot an AR15 or an AK-47, but I logged many hours of experience with a similar species, the M16. I remember that an M16 on full automatic felt like a wild beast writhing in my arms, lustfully spitting lead. I recall joking with Carroll about a herd of ARs crossing a county road in western Arkansas, and now it seems the herds have taken up residence in the woods behind schools where they’re permitted to live as an invasive species, worse than kudzu, much worse than Asian carp, because the ARs are a protected species, and the local school boards have taken some semblance of action, they’ve positioned domesticated ARs at all entrances as deterrents, but at any moment a wild one might slip through, slip inside, perforate students and teachers before it’s put down. I imagine the hungry ARs by day with their scope-eyes scanning through the leaves, scanning the kids on the playground. At night they call to each other in those staccato barks that sound like laughing. Laughing at the thoughts and the prayers.
Southern Radio
When I lived down south, years ago, I drove a blistered Plymouth Sundance equipped with nothing but intermittent air conditioning and an AM/FM stereo that picked up all three types of southern radio stations: country, western, gospel. The difference between country and western was subtle (it had to do with which individual had stolen the singer’s love), so I often ended up tuned to gospel stations. In between pleas for my cash the preachers delivered solid messages—the one that stuck with me was Ask and you shall receive, which also confused me a bit because if it were really that easy, every singer (both country and western) would have gotten his lover back by then, and everyone else down there would have been delivered from racial violence and gun violence and tornado violence. In that South there’d be nothing on the radio at all, just static, and I would gladly switch off the radio and slide past the endless miles of cotton fields between Memphis and Little Rock with nothing but the hum of the tires on pavement and the smothering blanket of summer heat and the bug-crusted windshield and the skies darkening to the west.
Joe Kapitan (he/him) writes fiction and CNF in Cleveland. He is the author of a short story collection, Caves of the Rust Belt (Tortoise Books, 2018), an editor’s highlighted piece in Best Small Fictions 2023, and recent or forthcoming work at Centaur, No Contact, JMWW, and Citron Review. Joe is an assistant CNF editor at Atticus Review and Pithead Chapel.
