Southern Gothic

By Mike Ramon

A short story.

Lou and Will. Father and son. A man and A man-to-be trying to get by in their hardscrabble life. Trouble comes knocking when thugs come to collect a debt from Lou. Will is left with a hard decision: do something awful to help his dad pay the debt, or stick to his moral code and face the consequences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Ramon
• Release date: Mar 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005842390

Mike Ramon

Born and bred in the Midwest.

Book preview

SOUTHERN GOTHIC

Mike Ramon

Smashwords Edition

© 2019 M. Ramon

This work is published under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs). To view this license:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

If you wish to contact the author you can send e-mail to:

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Web addresses where you can find my work:

http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/mramon

Eye of a horse photo on cover originally by Leonard J. Matthews, with edits by me.

License for the original photo:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

I: The Ferry

A little girl laughed as she ran over to her father near the railing. She stuck her arms through the rails, waving them on the far side. The deck moved gently beneath Will’s feet as he watched the girl. He wondered if he’d ever been that young himself, which was a strange thought for a fifteen-year-old boy to have. Not only had he been that young once, but it wasn’t that long ago. The father leaned over and said something to the daughter, and the daughter laughed; Will wished he’d been able to overhear the joke.

Will saw his own dad walking over, though if there was a time when Will had called him Dad, he could not remember it. For as far back as his memory stretched, his dad had always been Lou. Lou had a cup of coffee in his hands, from which he was taking small, exploratory sips as he came and stood beside his son. They didn’t say anything for a while; they merely existed in each other’s presence, the son a slightly shorter version of the father, his hair a lighter shade of brown.

Over by the railing, the girl and her dad took one last look out at the waters of the bay before walking away to find a seat. Lou left Will’s side, going over to the railing and taking up a position right about where the girl had been moments before. He didn’t call Will over, or beckon Will to join him; he knew that his son would come. This assurance annoyed Will, but this irritation did not stop Will from joining Lou by the rails.

The water of the bay was a dark bluish-green, with swells of white froth. Birds cried overhead, swooping to and fro on invisible air currents. A distant part of Will’s mind hoped that none of those birds would grace him with a shower of droppings, while the front part of his mind thought about the start of the new school year, which was coming up