“Fickle, fickle fickle. The mind is a fickle thing,” The street preacher muttered into a bedazzled, pink microphone. A dirt-stained, white towel reached over his right shoulder, flowing all the way past the frayed tips of his red “Jesus Saves” t-shirt. As he paced, left right left right as though the train tracks overgrown 50 yards away had some ghost train running back and forth over its track, its conductor head out the window with blue eyes staring out at the main street intersection gesturing toward the man with a finger and the rattle of the soldiers in the train making that finger roll up and down and left and right soon to sway to the cadence of a phrase lost to the wind. The towel caught the edge of the volume knob of the speaker, turning the volume up and down like the bursting blows of the bebop tunes remembered in the closed-down bar around the corner.
“YOUR mind is a FICKLE,” he shouted at me, the volume cutting out before he could finish. Out of our, your, their mind.
A line of cars bounced over the metal tracks down the hill, a blur of painted windows reading “Ole Miss ‘27” or “Senior Year.” High school seniors in their fading glory. While the red light lingered, I focused on the darkening shadow of an oak tree on the fading white paint of a wooden barn behind the closed Sonic Drive-In Restaurant, parallel to the three-story antebellum makeover it belonged to, its third floor painted an orange bathing in the final hour of sunset before the blue clouds of dusk take over.
An eye poked out from behind a brown window curtain, curious about me, curious about the shadow.
“They know you’re coming,” the preacher snorted. “They know you’ve come,” The preacher whispered. “They know you’ve gone,” the preacher smiled.
He walked away muttering god, God, god, God, god, God. Giggling in the scrawl of the Mississippi field of mind, a field of mine.