Jordan's Stormy Banks

Perimortem, Part I

The flames flared within the darkness, swirling red and orange and oily black, as the cross caught fire on the courthouse lawn. Lit and shadowed by the fiery undulations, as if in a nightmare, I saw angry faces, oiled guns, and the tight, heavy coils of a noose.

But it was no nightmare. I was wide-awake, it was Christmas Eve, and it was not entirely clear to me who would be found swaying from the noose by the light of Christmas morning: the black man huddled inside the Morgan County jail, or the meddlesome scientist standing on the building’s steps, his back—my back — pressed tight against the wooden door.

How had it come to this? Was I wrong about the century I inhabited? Had I somehow been transported back in time a hundred years, from 1990 to 1890? How had matters come to this — for the man behind bars, and especially for me? Had I spoken out of turn, or rushed in where angels fear to tread? Maybe I should have stayed in Kansas instead of taking the job in Tennessee.

Or maybe it was all just because of the memo. That damned memo…