Little Detroit by Michael Brockley The factory by the railroad tracks where your grandfather built McFarlan sedans is shuttered, its windows broken. Its doors jimmied open by scavengers. At Independence Day parades, undertakers once pulled floats along Grand Avenue in their vintage Auburns and Duesenbergs while county fair queen hopefuls waved and tossed butterscotch candies to the crowd. For the city sesquicentennial, the married men modeled the beards and mustaches of Civil War generals. Your clean-shaven father let muttonchops stubble his jaw. Then won a sawbuck for the way he favored General Burnside. Tom T. Hall played for tips in Sue's Diner, the same place you bought sausage-and-egg sandwiches on Saturday mornings. Where you daydreamed over exotic paragraphs in a discarded Grit . Hall sang of giving $7.80 to a waitress for her rent. Of catching catfish in the Whitewater River. Folks said when fog rose from the Whitewater, a phantom McFarlan accelerated along the center
Flying Island is the Online Literary Journal of the Indiana Writers Center, accepting submissions from Midwest residents and those with significant ties to the Midwest.