“…Amen… Christ Jesus spoke more of Hell than he did of Heaven. Listen: He spoke more of Hell than He did of Heaven. What does that mean to you? We’re a profane bunch, us humans. But that goes without saying – you can see that.”  

As he spoke, he walked across the stage with a casual gait, refraining from verbosity and showy gesticulation.    

“We must continually leave the nest and abandon our attachment to this world. If you walked out of here unsettled, unhoused or doubtful then I believe I’ve done my job. We’re treacherous. We’re untrustworthy. But, above all, we have no faith.”  

He then trailed off, speaking distractedly and somehow abstractly about Moses’ “speech impediment” and society’s “estrangement from morals”. His lengthy tangent ended with him pausing, waving his hand and gesturing for the organist to begin playing.  

He sat on the stage and gazed into the meager crowd, shaking his head. The young were staring into their phones and the old sat with their eyes closed in a rapture that was both familiar and habitual.  

He wanted no more than to disappear into some far-off town out west where no one knew him. That way he could truly be alone with his own thoughts. That way he could escape thoughts of her. 

Instead, he found himself driving down the same route he’d traveled since her departure forced him into the church. His attempts to escape loss resulted in being drunk, handcuffed and hospitalized. They’d been together for ten years and the process of digging the pain out of his heart was incomplete. There were realities hidden behind it that he’d never be ready to face.

While peering through the hole of his life, all he saw was the blue void. 



A year and a half ago, after she passed, he put a padlock on the master bedroom door. However, eventually, images of her body and the room began spilling from his subconscious. He’d awake from these dreams, sit on his back porch and smoke half a cigarette. The sound of bird chirps and rustling leaves would emerge from the waning darkness and put him at ease. 

Upon returning home, the refrain of her scent, touch and heartbeat intermingled with his grief. Each memory he held of her was a remnant of something that would not return. He thought of entering their room and began trembling. He climbed the stairs, hoping that when he reached the top his urges would be gone. 

He stood in front of the door, trying to retrieve the right key. In his haste, he dropped them and nearly abandoned his plan. The door swung open and some part of him expected to find her sitting on the bed. All he found was his open Bible, their bed, curtains and entertainment center covered in dust. He rushed to a window and opened it – the scent of freshly cut grass and stale pungency intermingled and made him dizzy.  

After removing the covers, he sat on the bed and inhaled deeply. Rummaging through the drawers resulted in him finding her hospital wristbands, medication bottles and small notebook. His body stiffened and he slammed the drawer shut.  

After descending the stairs, he walked outside under the blue, violet and crimson dusk. He tried to feign togetherness, but impulses, memories and images raged in his body and mind. He couldn’t go back and couldn’t move forward, so what was there?




The last conversation they had was about how much the neighborhood had changed since they decided to move there in the mid ‘90s. 

“I don’t know what will become of it.” 

“It can only get better, I suppose.” 

“Tell me you’ll stay or return if you leave,” she said. 

He looked out of their bedroom window at the long-abandoned house next door and the vacant lot littered with trash across the street. 

“I can’t promise anything.” 




When he emerged from his reverie, he was steps away from the liquor store. A group of delinquents, noted for their increasingly felonious acts, stood clustered at the entrance. There was a commotion. He stopped. The group spilled out into the streets while brandishing handguns. They glinted like gems in the waning sunlight. 

He entered and purchased a bottle of brown liquor, his first in many months. The cashier’s eyes were transfixed on the entrance while coins slipped between her trembling fingers. She was on the phone with authorities.  

The avenues had no functioning streetlights, so passing patrol cars provided brief illumination. In that moment, he desired nothing more than to be hurled into the void along with the suddenly blue and red world around him. But that didn’t happen. Nothing ever did. 

He opened the door to his church and twisted off the bottle top. After turning on a light, he sat on the edge of his platform, under the pulpit. His thoughts drifted to his father, particularly an encounter they had the morning after his seventeenth birthday.  




“You reek of sin, boy. What would you say to your mother if she found you in such a state?” his father said. 

A force, blind and warped by chronic repression, leapt up inside of him. The texture of his father’s voice was a finger toying with the exposed nerve of his psyche. 

“I’ll be sure to ask her when we meet in Heaven.” 

He sprung from his chair, nearly choking with rage. 

“You’re only bound for hellfire,” his father exclaimed. 




After opening his eyes, he chortled and lifted the half-empty to his lips. The liquor stung as it trickled down into his abdomen. Familiar sensations of dismay and uncertainty rose up in him like a skein of geese.  

That same force rattles within me, trying to gain control, he thought. 

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J.L. Moultrie is a native Detroiter, poet and fiction writer who communicates his art through the written word. He fell in love with literature after encountering James Baldwin, Hart Crane, Charles Bukowski, Patti Smith, and many others. He considers himself an abstract expressionist living in modernity.

Art:
Yuko Kyutoku
Blue Cafe
Mixed media and paper, 10x12
2017