THE MAGNOLIA CLUB — UNPUBLISHED, 2024

[excerpts from chapter III: AN AMPUTATION; A SEVERANCE]

J. Bailey Hutchinson (Gut, 2022)

atticus finch is so hot, i love my politics class holy shit

time is heavy, dripping slowy.

ethel cain studies

“People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil... Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.”

– Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice (1976)

Beauty/Death

You smile at the deer eating grass by the underpass

you smile at the dead ones on the highway too

Beauty does not stop at death to you.

4/9/24 via @cassiopoet

art is mine :]

Abigail hobbs + ptolemaea

Bark Like a God by Sloppy Jane

i was passed an open tag from @cruelflesh cause she knows i love these little games, and in honour of finishing up the first draft of my religious literary thriller, THE MAGNOLIA CLUB, i thought it a perfect time to share some with all of you.

⇢ my words are rust, ember, damp, breath & teeth

♰ " RUST " ♰ — THE MAGNOLIA CLUB, CHAPTER 21

Waylon idled below, framed inside the porthole window like an octopus swept through a current, dressed in his best whites, held together solely by a string of other people’s graciousness. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows but nothing saved them from the reddening soil—his fingertips were stained with it, his cuffs a keen shade of tetanus rust. He’d been in the garden since Mrs. Gaskill and her two middle-aged daughters finished setting out refreshments, long enough for the frankincense to burn clean out, well past when the hinge cover on the casket had been gently, quietly shut. She was out there now, a reflective floral entity on the beige lawn, pressing him to come inside. He did—only after driving the rest of a bruised belladonna tangle into a plastic garbage back and smoothing back the wilting hair from his lightless eyes.

♰ " EMBER " ♰ — THE MAGNOLIA CLUB, CHAPTER 9

“Easy,” warned Arthur, a cooling ember. “We’re not callin’ anyone.” Edith straightened from Midge’s side, taking a lengthy assessment of each of them where they stood; mismatched chess pieces on a muddy board. She tossed a sweeping hand towards the road, a dense wall of smoggy breath rising from her tense lips. “We’re goin’ on a ride. So’s she.” “Now?” Jeri intercut, her fear reeling her closer, trembling in the cold dark. “All the way out to that ol' highway? At this hour?" “Please,” Edith begged, “spell it out for all us morons.” The blonde took towards the parking lot and left Midge at Arthur's mercy, and he came quickly to her aid in a terribly familiar, jacket-donning way that made her fear for the imminent end, certain that the Lord would strip them each away from her before she was ever ready. “If you’re right, an' some fella's layin' out there on the road, havin' done this to her—then I wanna make sure the cunt’s good an’ dead.”

♰ " DAMP " ♰ — THE MAGNOLIA CLUB, CHAPTER 17

The incomparable black of Ruby's backwoods midnight made a joke of her; the tangles of bony, low-hanging willow and marshy soil didn’t help. She'd never have the time or awareness to duck if a branch swung at her; staggering the suffocating blindness, tramping like panicked hunting dogs through damp carpets of kudzu, all that came to Midge were spatters of static colour, dressed by her anxieties—Audrey, sallow and freckled, her corpse torn sloppily in two. Two dusky blue eyes pointed lazily at the sky, her painted nails locked into clawing fists at her throat, purple around the corners of her slack lips. Now beneath the hum of crickets, Gage was a wild thing in among the weeds, his eyes just two light-bouncing plates in the dark, black holes of electric lunacy. Now, he had a knife the size of a small pie server in his oily hands. Now he was grinning, skulking behind a nearby tree, stinking with adrenaline. Now, something was eating her. Now, something was tearing her apart. They’d let her go—that always kickstarted problems. The moment someone stepped out of Midge's sight, they were good as—

♰ " BREATH " ♰ — THE MAGNOLIA CLUB, CHAPTER 4

“Well, it ain’t about that damn veteran and you know that, ‘cause you’re smarter than me, and you’re smarter than them,” said Jonas, casting a finger in the same direction Midge’s gaze only just shrank from, “which means you know I love you whether I’m away or not. An' you know I care about what y'think, and how y'feel, and how folks around here see you. ‘Cause I get it—Midge,” pled Jonas, in the terrible, doting way she'd only ever suffered from others, “I try to get it, and if I don’t, I let you be. But they won’t even try.” It hurt more than usual to love her brother that night. To see even under hallway shadow the deepening bruises around his hazy eyes, sure to be yellow-rimmed by morning, his eggs and bacon set in doubles with duplicated plates and silverware. “That's why you didn’t come home?” fell Midge’s words like a dead bug on a sill, cut right from her breath. “You’re embarrassed of me?”

♰ " TEETH " ♰ — THE MAGNOLIA CLUB, CHAPTER 16

The darkness caught Midge's wrists and slid her through the split in the door, drawing her into a well of warped shadow which sluggishly took shape and meaning; a half-shredded bookshelf and pool of books, a molehill of plastic bags stuffed with sewing supplies and skeins kissed by velvet mold, tongues of outstretched Halloween decorations, a desaturated spectrum of sweaters and tarps, old milk crates, swaths of spider silk, dead termites—decay. Midge staggered through a sole walkable path, fenced by canyons of old worth, and the house devoured the whisper of her sneakers on its warped barnwood floor. What had narrowed the entry was the great, many-fingered hand of a tree, jammed against the backside of the door, its paint scraped into an illegible language by years of eager winter wind gushing through the swollen gash in the building's left side. Its roots burrowed deeply between the separating planks, coiling around the blackened teeth of an unused fireplace, smothered by sheddings of bark and a surmounting pile of rot-sweet crabapples.

i love you @cruelflesh so u have to do it now, and i'll leave an open tag for anybody who sees this and wants to join!

♰ your words are soil, shy, bleed, needle & spirit ♰

“It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper!

It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw - not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

“Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn't convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.”

~ Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

– Lee Mandelo, Summer Sons

At the end of each day, he used to ask me, “what have you done today to deserve your eyes?

—Eric LaRocca, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke