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| Wolfgang Weiser |
The Station at God’s Cut
South Carolina does not bury things properly.
It leaves them beside rivers, beneath church suppers,
inside tobacco barns softening toward collapse.
Even the mosquitoes here drink like inheritance—
slow with salt-blood and August heat,
heavy with whatever the marsh refuses to keep.
That was the first thing the woman understood
about the creature waiting in the station at God’s Cut:
it was never meant to die.
Not truly.
The South is a museum of skinned things
still pretending to live.
The bird had no feathers.
Only the translucent pull of skin over bone,
a man’s ribs narrowing beneath its breast,
and a mouth crowded with tiny yellow teeth.
Sometimes it coughed.
Sometimes it sang in a voice so human
the woman had to leave the room.
She did not keep it caged to protect it.
She kept it because some secrets become structural.
You feed them long enough
and they begin supporting the house.
So she fed it train tickets.
She fed it the names of children she never carried.
She fed it the silence growing between prayer
and the moment a person realizes
the ceiling is not listening back.
Every Thursday the freight train passed without stopping,
its scream shaking gray dust from the rafters
like the station itself was slowly coming apart.
But one winter night, the train stopped.
Not gently.
Metal shrieked through the dark
like a levee breaking open somewhere inland.
Forty windows.
Forty identical men in dark suits,
their faces worn smooth by exhaustion,
by repetition,
by the long discipline of being unloved.
The conductor stepped onto the platform.
His shadow pointed east
when the moon said it should not.
He opened the cage door without touching it.
The creature unfolded itself carefully onto the floorboards.
Its joints cracked like dry kindling.
It did not resist.
It recognized the train.
It recognized the upholstery.
It recognized the machinery waiting to reclaim it.
And more than anything,
it looked tired of being hidden.
“You can come too,” the conductor said.
But the woman was already part of the station.
Her marrow had turned to pluff mud.
Her breath carried the humid weight
of courthouse hallways in August.
“No,” she whispered.
“Someone has to remember this place existed.”
By morning, the station was gone.
No tracks.
No ticket counter.
No evidence iron had ever passed that way.
Only an empty field behind the courthouse
where stray dogs still refuse to wander.
Animals know what people edit from the record:
The land remembers everything.
Storms.
Names.
Blood.
Nothing here disappears cleanly.
Even now, the mosquitoes drift above the marsh at dusk,
bloated and slow as old gossip,
carrying the only version of the truth
that has never passed through a clerk’s hands.
© Ginny Brown
Enjoy more posts by Ginny Brown HERE.
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| Ginny Brown |
Ginny Brown is a South Carolina writer whose work explores justice, memory, faith, and the quiet resilience found in ordinary lives. Drawing on more than three decades of experience in the legal field, she writes poetry and literary nonfiction rooted in the landscapes and communities of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in several literary journals. She is currently completing a nonfiction collection examining the human stories that exist beyond the official record.
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