Free Don't Make Me Stop Now by Michael Parker

preparing to go off island by teaching herself what to expect to pay for a pound of butter across the water in 1980. But after four or five years he figured the flyers were part of what kept her here. She’d spit the prices out like fruit seed. She’d get ill at a bunch of innocent bananas for costing highway robbery, she would read her prices like Maggie would read the letters to the editor, taking sides and arguing with every one of them, My Land the way people live in this world, she’d say every night when it got too dark to read, and she folded up her newspaper like the Coast Guard taught Henry to fold a flag, that careful, that slow, like a color guard was standing at attention waiting on her to finish.
    Crawl don’t know nothing about how old I am, Henry said to the water.
    Old enough to know better, said Maggie. She tugged at his shoelace while her sister studied the paper above them. Henry always sat on the second to bottom step and Miss Maggie’d start out on the top step and slide down even with him as the evening settled, though her sister would rustle prices to try to halt her.
    Too old to change, what it is, said Miss Whaley.
    Henry swatted the back of his neck loud, but he didn’t come away with any bloody mosquito because it was a sea breeze and there wasn’t any bite. His head was getting ready to switch around and stare out Miss Whaley over her paper and he backslapped himself to keep still. The slap rang out like a hammering. Miss Whaley cleared her old throat. Miss Maggie to cover up got on with Crawl’s letter, but Henry didn’t listen anymore. In his head he started his own letter to the sisters, one he knew he’d never ever send them even if he could write. Y’all ought not to have done me like y’all done me, he wrote in the first line, and that was as far as he got.
    That night he lay talking to Sarah in the dark. He told her what Miss Whaley said and he discussed it. How come she talking about me not changing when it’s her sitting up in her throne reading out her numbers on and on. Why you let that white woman hurt you so, Henry, he heard Sarah say. He heard her words like he heard the surf frothing on the banks, making its claim and then receding, taking it back, offeringmore words. A conversation. Sarah used to say to him, You the strongest man I ever met, you can work all day and all night if you care to and not make a noise about it to nobody. I seen you sit outside shucking corn in a nor’easter and you ain’t scared of anybody who’d pull a knife on you. How come you let what people say get away with you so much? And Henry never answered, though he knew how bad people could hurt him with what they said. He just hurt. He’d been knowing that. Maybe that was why he stayed on this island so long after everybody left and there wasn’t anyone to hurt him anymore but Miss Maggie who was too sweetly dizzy in the head to hurt much and Miss Whaley who he thought he knew every which way she had of hurting him but she was good for coming up with a new one. Henry just hurt. Sometimes it didn’t take anybody saying anything to him to his face, he’d remember what one of the men he used to fish with said to him sixty years before when they were boys swimming naked in the inlet and he’d be out in his skiff all by himself and he’d want to put his head down in his lap and let all the crabs and oysters and mackerel and blues and tuna go on about their business. He didn’t care about reeling in a thing. Hurt nearly bad enough to let everybody starve.
    Henry had been this way ever since he was born on this island that the wind was taking away as he lay there not sleeping. Wondering how old he really was, he thought of the island as it used to be when he was a boy, the two stores stocking shoelaces and bolts of colored cloth, the old hospital and the post office with over fifty boxes in the walls, little glass windows