In the Great Wide

On a warm day in May, some years ago, Mary’s uncle set up a crawfish boil for his family of twenty-five and ended up feeding the five hundred members of St. John’s Cathedral. Hard red crawdad shells piled up on the newspaper-covered picnic tables and the altar boys swore the ice-cold beer never ran out. Across town that same spring, in the churchyard where my parents’ graves had already shifted in the soft soil, swarms of cream-colored roses grew, though no one had planted them. In late summer, a hurricane’s eye rested over the delta while the outer storm stalled[…]