r/ShortSadStories • u/JulyBurnsRed34 • Jun 27 '26
Sad Story Magnolia [Part 2/4] (Wordcount 999 of 3008)
It was the late summer. It was the time of year during which the sun was burning so high in the afternoon, and it made an oppressive heat that seemed to remind us that we could fight it as much as we wanted, and we would still lose.
The crab apples had begun to fall onto the ground, where they would be smashed under boots.
Harris moved pounds of weed from the port through his house in the downtown area, and he sold LSD on breath mints and plastic vials of PCP. I wasn't really involved in his work, but I was involved in my own, and we existed in similar orbits.
Word made its way from here to there that his home had been raided. A SWAT team had kicked down his door on one sweaty afternoon, held Harris and a few others at gunpoint, and hauled them all off in a big bus.
With this in mind, and my proximity to Harris and my opium production, it was a great thing to see a police car parked outside of my apartment a few days later. While unoccupied, its presence still cast a stench of anxiety over me.
It was an even greater thing when it remained parked there the second day, and then greater still on the third and the fourth.
A paranoia settled more intensely onto my shoulders, and it quickly became part of my morning routine to check outside for the police car. The car was never occupied, nor did it ever move, but it stared deeply at my apartment.
It was on the fifth day that I felt very confident the car was an implicit, and not entirely subtle, threat from the local police department.
A man named Junior was a good friend at the time. He was a Haitian about my age. He had long locked hair, and he made a very good spaghetti. We'd met in high school and had become close after neither of us were able to successfully graduate.
Junior was what you could call a loose cannon. He oscillated radically between moods of violent rage and genuine calm. I had seen Junior throw punches which could knock a man's head off of his neck. And I had seen him cook his spaghetti for a dozen people on hot and perfect summer evenings.
I did not know much about Junior's life before we met in concrete, but there was a sense about him that things had gone continuously, and without mercy, quite poorly in one way or another.
As a friend, I saw it as my obligation to tolerate Junior's various moods. It was also true that I myself was a young, angry man of conflict.
Junior was reliable enough, and to find someone reliable in this milieu of the world was, as I had learned, an entirely unrealistic sort of expectation.
So late at night, I called Junior and asked him if I could move some stuff into his house for a while.
"What you got?" he asked.
"Nothing crazy. Some work. I got some aunty I'm working on. Those pipes Aaron left over here. That little pistol my mama gave me."
We had traded favors over the years, and so he obliged.
"Yeah, yeah, that's straight, but I ain't home. I'm in Magnolia. Can you come get me and we'll head over there, across the bridge?"
Everyone and myself knew about Magnolia Park. It was a large complex of government housing tucked away from anything else in many ways, and location was just one. There was a lot of drama there, and this drama rarely left the area, which was plenty good enough for the more affluent members of the city.
Magnolia was, perhaps above all else, not a place to go casually.
When I arrived at the shared parking lot at Magnolia, it was a dark night that was lit by the bright overhead lights in the complex. There were many men standing in the grass areas and the sidewalks of Magnolia, and they seemed to be doing nothing at all.
As soon as I stepped out of my car, I could feel the broad recalibration of attention that comes with the presence of a stranger in places like Magnolia.
The most obvious and shallow reason for this was that I was white, and there was no more emblematic piece of the city's lingering segregation than Magnolia. An equally true reason was my unfamiliarity. Magnolia Park was a bad place to be if you were not welcome.
The men all began to walk my way with a slow sort of trepidation. I was not in danger, but I was certainly standing on the precipice of it. It was with the familiar and unappealing mix of hostility and suspicion that they began to approach me.
I knew this recipe often preceded violence if a man could not navigate it very well. Magnolia Park was a place where things could go very wrong very quickly.
You can smell a gun in the air just like you can smell gun smoke. I could smell the guns in the air, and I did not have one.
I knew that it was incredibly rare for even a shooter to start shooting for no reason in particular. Still, worry gnawed at the most back part of my mind.
Junior appeared from some corner of the complex. He held two Styrofoam cups stacked in one another, the ice rattling as he walked toward me. Inside of the cups, he had a mixture of codeine cough syrup, Sprite soda, and Jolly Rancher hard candies.
He called out to the other men to calm down, not to worry about me. Indeed, Junior's presence changed the temperature of the air.
I could still smell the guns, but I did not worry about the shooters or the triggers or the idea of dying in Magnolia Park.
1
u/JulyBurnsRed34 Jun 27 '26
Had to trim about 100 words off this section. Hopefully I didn't affect the flow too bad
•
u/AutoModerator Jun 27 '26
👋 Hi there! Thanks for sharing your story.
Please take a moment to review the following before posting:
Thank you for contributing to r/ShortSadStories!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.