Lincoln Hirn
Short Fiction
Carry Me Along was named a Finalist in the 2025 Clarissa Dalloway Prize Prize for Short Prose, judged by Diane Josefowicz.
The mission shimmered in the dust like a refracted image sent from a world where thirst and privation and Hell do not exist or at the very least are not eternal. Where the whitewashed adobe does not need to be repainted every few years because the desert winds cannot scour it because it is not really there in the first place. Like if a rider from the old times past had seen it he would have spurred his horse on into the Sonoran without a second look because he would have seen it or its like enough times before to know that if he got too close it would slip away into that other world and leave him thirsty and off the trail and searching in vain for the Indians who moments before had been tending garden and the sisters who poured water from ladles made from the dried out husks of longhandled gourds. To be found a hundred and fifty miles on as no more than a pile of dustblown clothes and horsebones and a hundred and fifty years later survived only by a pair of longburied sixshot revolvers recovered by an anonymous hunter or trooper and donated to the state museum.
To be seen tomorrow, maybe. Before the visitation.
There were no ancient terracotta amphorae filled with wellwater nor were there sisters to pour it but there was a laywoman in the giftshop to sell me a plastic bottle and a little nativity scene I figured I could take back to my mother. In the chapel there was a wooden effigy of an old friar in an opentopped coffin and in his hands a rosary made from little burrs that had been woven into cords of longgrass. The plaque next to the casket said that he had come from Spain three hundred years before to lead the mission and had died on the way. But three weeks later when they found the body it was perfectly preserved and untouched by weather or animal and it stayed that way the whole wagonride back. So they kept the real body on display until even God could not arrest the decay wrought by the thousand pairs of desperate lips that had kissed his brow. Now they kept it in a closed mausoleum in the middle of the private courtyard. The plaque also showed a black-and-white photograph of the real cadaver to prove that its wooden counterpart was a fair likeness and the carver an artist of real talent. When I was through with the brother I finished the water and put the empty bottle in the recycling bin outside the gift shop and then drove back into town.
That night I went out to dinner with Anne and Moll and their new boyfriends and they asked me if I’d gotten up to anything. I told them about how the mission was some real Old Time Religion and then asked them the same question.
“Huh-uh” Moll said. “We only got off the plane a few hours ago.”
“You ever been out this way before?”
Anne shook her head.
“But maybe tomorrow. Before. We might at least walk around.”
“Sure.”
They left for their hotel and I went to a cowboy bar and listened to college students sing karaoke and cheered along with them when an old man in a Richard Petty hat with a big turquoise stud on the front sang God Bless the U.S.A. When I got out I slipped down the closest alleyway and knelt beside a stormdrain and used one hand to hold my hair back and when I was sure no one was looking I threw up three times. Then I went back to the hotel room and brushed my teeth and went to bed.
They had a wafflemaker in the dining room and for breakfast I made two and spread peanut butter and jelly in between and ate them like a sandwich and drank three cups of coffee. I took a fourth to-go and finished it before I got to the museum. It was full of old lariats and Henry repeaters and Indian blankets and a few movie props. There were plenty of sixguns in varying states of repair and some with spectacular engravings on the barrels and cylinders and handgrips. But none recovered in a pair a few days’ ride south of the mission and found next to some old gunslinger’s rotted boots. Generally they were donated by descendants or by collectors who had purchased them from descendants. Of the rider dead in the desert there was nothing.
Afterwards I bought a burrito and a greenflavored Jarritos that I poured tequila in. This was my lunch and I had it while I walked to the funeral home. Anne and Moll were already there with their boyfriends and they nodded to me and then at the grieving mother.
“I think I had better have children as soon as possible” one of the boyfriends said, when we were through watching her.
Anne looked at him with disgust and Moll with some amusement. I had forgotten which one he belonged to and this did not help.
“Yeah?” Moll asked.
“Well, sure.” He looked at me. “I’m an only child, too. So if I die my mother won’t have anyone else.”
“Not your dad? Aunts, uncles?”
“Well, sure. But there’s no guarantee they’ll outlive my mom. She’s the youngest of her siblings, you know. And wives always survive their husbands.”
“Nieces and nephews?”
He shrugged. “Sure. But that’s not really the same, is it?”
“I guess not.”
His mother was as you would expect and greeting her was awful. What recognition crept across her eyes at seeing us was faint and further dimmed by tears. I could not tell if the look she gave me was grateful or accusatory or merely confused and I decided not to ask Anne or Moll for their opinion. We gave our condolences to some cousins and left for dinner.
I had three vodka sodas and halfway through the third Anne cocked her head to one side as if just remembering something.
“What’s the guarantee that a grandchild won’t die?” she asked the boy who may have been her’s, may have been Moll’s.
He thought.
“I guess there isn’t. But, still. Better than not having anyone.”
“Unless she had to bury you both. Then wouldn’t that be worse?”
“Sure. But, what’re the odds of that? Losing a child and a grandchild before dying yourself? She’s already sixty-three.”
“No hard cap on grief, though.” This from the other boy. “Take Job.”
“He studied religion for three semesters before switching to statistics,” Moll said. Had they known each other in college, then? Did that mean I knew him and was being rude? Or is that just the kind of thing you tell someone when you start dating them afterwards?
“Sure.” The first boy, again. “But he was the exception. I mean, the story wouldn’t mean much if it was a common thing to go around losing everything. And that was way back when, too. When people died all the time.”
“So you’re saying it doesn’t apply?”
“I’m just saying I don’t think my mother is playing in that particular ballpark, spiritually.”
I wanted to ask something but could not remember what. All throughout the conversation it sat somewhere just under my tongue but never quite got out. So we left and on the way home I bought a bottle of wine from the liquorstore and had half of it in the hotel room. I put the Diamondbacks game on and was asleep before the seventh inning.
The next day was extremely difficult. One of his uncles gave the eulogy and you could see why. His mother was a wreck the whole time and a woman who was probably her sister-in-law held her by the shoulders until it was over. We all shuffled out after and milled around the parking lot and asked each other if we thought it was acceptable to leave yet. The sister-in-law helped the mother into the backseat of a Camry and then went back inside to find her husband. So for about three minutes she was alone back there. She had stopped crying and was instead completely fixated on the passenger-seat headrest. Left alone to remember him and with the fact that when she was dead there would be no one left to do so.
Then a vision of the world where I was on the seat next to her. My mother shotgun or behind the wheel because of course in that world she would have flown out with me. Or maybe even still in Virginia. Because he might have never gone back home, then. But no matter what her there with me. Because ten years of being college sweethearts entitles you to have your mother at the funeral. And so I could have been there to assure his mother that the chances she would outlive me were pretty small and perhaps that would have made things better.
I wondered what my mother was up to.
We didn’t say much at dinner. The others were staying an extra day but I was due at the airport in the morning so we parted early and I drank the rest of the bottle of wine back in the hotel room. It was a getaway day for the Diamondbacks but the Padres were in the primetime slot so I put that on. When the bottle was empty I lay in bed and for a while I listened to the game and watched the hotel room swirl around like the sky viewed from a teacup ride. And cried because if I died tomorrow it would be the same. Her the only one to remember me and without any help. I suddenly understood the boyfriend’s impulse and for a few moments I wished fervently for a child. Then I just wished I had remembered which of the boyfriends belonged to which of the girls. Maybe I could play it off until I could make some excuse to get together with them again. Maybe I ought to do that. And ask my mother to lunch and only have ice tea to show I was on the mend, too. Because she would like that. And because they hadn’t found the rider after all and now his bones were long gone and his clothes returned to the fiber they once were and his Colts lost forever.
Sometime afterwards I fell asleep.
When I was through security I found a bench and fished the nativity out of my carry-on. I passed it from one hand to the other and used my thumbnail to peel the little pricetag off the bottom. There were a few smears of adhesive left so I wet my finger in my mouth and rubbed until they were gone. Then I had two beers at the Chili’s by the gate and later a vodka soda on the plane. I stowed my bag in the overhead without a second thought, forgetting that I had put the nativity back in the outside pocket. And on the side that pushed right up against my seatmate’s hardshelled roller bag. When we landed I discovered that the contents had indeed shifted and found the little laptop bag pinioned against the side of the compartment with a plastic rollerwheel right where the little handfired idol should have been.
It was only nineteen ninety-nine but still enough to make my heart break when I saw the bags. Because giving it to her would have been the thing to make the trip alright. So I took the bag and unhooked the clasp knowing that the nativity had been reduced to shards far sharper than the three hundred year old thorns on the good friar’s rosary. And if one was big enough it might slice my wrist when I reached in and if I bled out right there on the plane then that would have been fine. Because even if it was just a little nineteen ninety-nine keepsake that I had bought it on an impulse that impulse had been brought on by the mission being real and by its having actual cold water in the Coca-Cola fridge behind the till and me not having started up yet for the day and as a consequence being able to remember my mother’s holiday display and tell myself that even though Christmas was six months off I could give it to her now and she could keep it up the whole way through, Black Friday to Epiphany. Which would make something of an apology for her having to put up with me. And that impulse the same one that made me fly all the way out to Arizona for a man I loved once but had not spoken to in six years. The same one that made me bend down and pull my hair back and kiss the forehead of the woodcarved likeness in the opentop coffin. The same one that made me think that if I could just deliver the little nativity to my mother and see it on her mantlepiece next Christmas then maybe underneath all the hurt there would still be something worth holding onto.
The same one that made me cry great heaving tears to embarrass me in front of the pilot and flight attendants when I pulled the ceramic from the bag and found it whole and preserved and by pure miracle still the unshattered image of a new and hopeful Bethlehem.
Lincoln Hirn is a student and writer based out of Connecticut, where he is pursuing a doctorate in American history. His fiction has appeared in The Rivanna Review, Across the Margin, and Issue Five of L’Esprit Literary Review. Let him know if you’d like to talk about books and/or the American Civil War.
Photo Credit: Kirsten Clay is a full time traveling, homeschooling, mother of three. She spends her free time writing and taking pictures. She especially loves the outdoors and going on new adventures, capturing as many images as possible along the way. She is always looking for the next fun adventure and the next beautiful picture to add to her collection.
L'Esprit Literary Review 