Brothers

This is a short story in which I weave together various parts of my novel Dominion. It was published in The Story Tellers’ Collection II.

The gray sky pressed down on two men, huddled close in the faint twilight.

Stoop-shouldered, leaning forward, Obadiah Abernathy stared off into empty space. He was ninety-two, son of a sharecropper, grandson of a Mississippi slave. His son Clarence, a 260-pound former college lineman, leaned over and looked into his father’s eyes. They were moist and deep-welled, eyes that had seen more than any man should have to.

Obadiah shuffled toward the front porch ...

Dominion: An Excerpt

Clarence left home early. He decided to treat himself to breakfast, to mull over the events shaping his life.

As he drove, his mind drifted to that foreign planet, Mississippi of the fifties, which he so loved and hated, which would always and never be his home. That unforgiving landscape, forever frozen in his mind, that place of Third World conditions, where many blacks and some whites had lived in illiteracy, malnutrition, windows without glass, no running water, no electricity. Trips to the outhouse were as routine then as selecting CDs was for his kids now. Many couldn’t afford ...