Transcending Jellico

theless. The phone sounded. It was Cletalee. Wasn't it bad about poor Lula. Heart attack. What a shock. Never a sick day. Wonder what brought it on? Was there an accusing note to Cleta's voice ... or was it only her imaginationa result of the remorse about the earlier incident? "Mazie, we thought it'd be appropriate , being Lula is the first of the crowd to go, we ran the bus so all her friends from church could ride together to the funeral home and burial. You'll ride with us. You will, won't you?" Cletalee Kaused. "You are all right, ain't you, lazie? We missed you at Sunday School. What was the matter? You're okay enough to go, ain't you?" "Yeah, 1 11 be going. Thank you for calling." The receiver rocked back into the cradle. When the time came she was ready. As ready as she'd ever be in her best navy suit and matching slippers. Her hair was in place and sprayed until it was as stiff as her joints. Mazie stood and watched the bus approach . She clutched her white purse with a corner of a lace-edged hanky protruding from the side, and grimaced. She had heard of bats in your belfry, but she had them-tens of them-in her bellybig ones, too. As she had done hundreds of times, she got on the bus, and although she tried not to, her eyes traveled to the third seat on the right side. By now, it was a spontaneous reaction, no longer under her control. Harve. He sat alone! Finally. Her knee locked and she was nearly jerked off balance when Mis Weston pulled the bus back out into the street. Her eyes never left Harve' s face. She moved her knee. It hurt, but it was working again. Mazie began her walk, a dreamlike slow motion sliding down the aisle. She was proud of herself, she only paused for a minute by his seat before she made her way to the back of the bus. Transcending Jellico By the burnished reflection on a Tennessee gas pump she watches herselfa skinny pubescent cheering for the Jellico Wildcats in a town where social mobility is marked by megaphone, sweaters, Sears and Roebuck washers, and mud-splattered half-ton pickups. Her mother calls her lazy because she reads summer afternoons instead of plucking warm, patient berries from their thorny vine, or folding her father's Bondo-stained work socks. She consumes True Confessions found abandoned in a salon's dumpster, Nancy Drew mysteries handed down from a spinster aunt in Qiatanooga, and sometimes the yellowing pages of the family Bible. In her immanence she learns to imagine, "What if . . ." to believe in the thin image on a Tennessee gas pump now chilling as a cantaloupe sun sinks from the sky. -Carmon Hacker 37 ...