The moments of lucidity were rarer and rarer, but when they came, he regaled me with tales of swallowed teeth, basement brawls, and AIDS tests administered at midnight in ramshackle midtown health ... [+]
Streets of Gold
Stephen Hundley is a Richard Ford Fellow at the University of Mississippi and fiction editor of The Swamp. His story, "Streets of Gold," was selected the winner of Short Edition's Button Fiction, spring 2019 contest.
When I get home from Sunday Service, I strip my pressed white shirt in the living room. I step out of my slacks. Peel off the tight black socks. I fumble naked for my dive skin, the black and blue rubber sheath that zips to the bulge in my throat. In the tall mirror of my bedroom, buried in this little house near the sea, I see the image of my father behind his pulpit. I hear him hewing the bricks of gold that await him, his flock, me. God and the Son and our mansions in heaven, their crystal columns and long reflection pools. Set into the roof of my father's church is a dome of steel and pai