As I Lay Dying Blog Post

            I heard about the family before I saw them. I’m not quite sure how I ended up here. This tiny town in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t even like Mississippi. I’m not sure why I let that man drag me here. We’d met when I was living in Los Angeles. I was trying to make it as an actress. Well, trying to make it as something. He’d been charming, and, stupidly, I had fallen for it. Don’t ask me why. I was desperate. Desperate enough to follow him back to godforsaken Mississippi. Desperate enough and stupid enough to get pregnant. And now here I was. Back in the diner. Except this diner was worse than the two I had worked at in Los Angeles and San Francisco. I heard my customers talking about them. This family of misfits. Allegedly on their way to bury a family member. Who knew. At this point, I doubt they even existed. People—especially people in the middle of nowhere—liked to gossip.

            Then the craziest thing happened. They entered the diner. I knew it was them because they weren’t from around these parts. And I could smell the dead body through the cracked glass of the diner door. I couldn’t help but stare at them, along with everyone else. What on Earth? I wouldn’t call our town “nice” by any means, but we were civilized. We did well for ourselves. We weren’t at the level of these people. I could see expressions of disgust on the faces of the other customers. The other waitresses and I didn’t bother going over to them. We knew that the owner of the diner would be over there shortly, asking them to leave. They weren’t welcome at our establishment. We weren’t the same.

           I watched the situation unfold. The looks of anger that crossed their faces when they were asked to leave. The way they stood up, begrudgingly. The looks they gave the other customers, who refused to look them in the eye. For some reason, I felt the urge to look away from them as well. Even though I knew we were right to kick them out, there was something about this family, something about the way some of the boys seemed mentally unhinged, the way the girl looked nervous, the way the father looked sullen and hardly sad, that left a poor taste in my mouth.