Church
R.K.B | Fiction, Summer 2025
The woods lie behind the movie theater.
The movie theater is a red warehouse of a building that sits on cream-colored pavement. Three boys fall off skateboards out front. Skateboard wheels roll across uneven ground. Wooden boards clatter against pavement.
We ignore the three boys. They laugh as we pass by.
“No one goes to the movies here,” I say.
“At all,” he says.
I can’t tell if he is asking a question or not. I stick my hands in my jeans, close a loose grip on my wallet and my phone. I rub my thumb along the wallet's front in a small circle that could have been in the shape of a cross, or a heart. The leather is soft.
“No, we go to the movies. In the city. Just not here,” I say.
We walk around the corner of the building and look across the parking lot, across the tar-dark sea entombing the pavement that is the theater. We are trapped here in the black asphalt.
The parking lot is empty save for the old Buick that has always been there. Five parking spaces down from the Buick are trees. The world ends all at once, right there. Green leaves break through the denseness of themselves, forming a scraggly line.
“There’s no one back here,” I say.
He stops and stares at the Buick. There is rust on the doors of it, a flaked, dead iron color. The windows are clear, but the windshield has a crack where once, when I was twelve, my friends and I took turns trying to shoot out the front glass from across the parking lot.
“At all?” he asks. I feel the trace of inflection in his voice. I watch his eyes linger on the windshield's small crack, following the threading, thin lines that spiral from it. A web that will catch nothing. I think about telling him the story of the Buick, but I don’t know if he will care.
“At all,” I repeat.
He nods. He looks solemn. He looks at me then, and I wince. I dig my hands deeper into my pocket.
The paths we walk grow closer. We smother the distance between us with the sounds of our footsteps, until, eventually, our shoulders touch, and we walk slower and gentler, bathed in silence.
We walk together, on top of the sea of black asphalt, and across. Across into green light.
The weight of all the green drags down the air. The crispness of September itself is diluted.
We walk unhurried under the interlocking brown arms of oaks and hemlocks. We lose sight of the street, though neither of us turn our heads from the path in front of us to check.
Visible now, one hundred feet from the line of asphalt, past the curving green ditches filled with brambles and thickets of sharp thorn, is an old shack of rotting wood I call Church. Soft lichen crawls up its sides and rests itself in the cracks between the dark wood.
When I look over at him as we get closer, as the faded splatter of red paint on the front of Church becomes visible, my heart falls. He does not see the penknife scratches next to Church's door. His eyes do not count the thick ring of smooth rocks along the ground that encircle Church’s four walls. I think he is bored and this makes me want to freeze. I walk ahead of him, my eyes turned to the floor. I step over twisted roots. My shoes crunch down on dead leaves with no sound. I can hear his boots scuff against the floor of the woods behind me.
When he curses softly under his breath, I think of how much older than me he is. I turn nineteen in June, a fact I have kept from him. My online profile reads only “PARTRICK, 22”. In the week that we have messaged, he hasn’t questioned my age. Outside of a bar, it is the easiest thing to tell people you are over twenty-one.
We are in the innermost circle of ringed stones now. They are all rocks that my friends and I stole from the Wolf Run Riverbed, two miles deep into the woods. There’s a wheelbarrow that rests behind Church, its insides lined with greywater and rust. Rosebuds peek from over the sides of the hollow of it, an old joke that never died turned beautiful.
I push open the door, push hard against the accumulated grime that has settled behind it. A beer bottle slides across the ground’s exposed dirt with a pitched rattle. Church's inside is filled with the damp heavy scent of musk and loam. No one has opened the door in almost a year. As I shoulder across the threshold, duck beneath the cobwebs and falling flakes of dust, he comes nearer. I glance over my shoulder. An unopened condom is in his hand, and I look away. Now that we are shielded from the light that falls between the closed hands of the trees, he is bold.
His age gives him something I don’t have, some missing quality that I know time will not give me. He wears his years with the ease of those who drive between cities and see nothing in between. He has told me in past messages that he does not like my town. He has said that if it were not for me he would never stop here, even to pump gas. When he told me this, only a week ago, I had lied to him. I had told him that I hated it here, too.
The door groans in an attempt to close behind him, but it does not fully shut. Sunlight pours down the sliver of space between the door and the wall. The light hits against countless dust particles that rise from the floor.
Hating the only place you’ve ever known is like burning down your home because you heard that the house across town has more bathrooms. I don’t know how to tell him that this is all I’ve ever had.
I was the last of us to visit Church. Jack and Tim moved three years ago. They live in The City now, where trees grow in neat strips in the islands of roads, and where buildings taller than Wolf Run Baptist spring up like weeds.
Marcus is still here, but his eyes avoid mine when we see each other on the street.
He likes to think that pretending I don’t exist is a kindness. Eight months ago I showed up at his home, drunk and rambling, beating on the weathered storm door, yelling for him to come downstairs. He did not answer my call, but his mother had.
A stern little woman, hair fixed behind a bonnet like a crown. She had been wrapped in a bare thin wool robe. It had been summer then, and rain had soaked my t-shirt through and I shivered as I stood. Marcus's mother, whose house I’d visited almost every day since kindergarten, had refused me. She had commanded me to leave and to never come back.
I had slept at Church that night, on the old mattress squeezed into the corner. All night I had kept expecting Marcus to show up, dripping water droplets and apologies. My dreams had been empty things. Fog had rolled into Church at dawn, creeping across the ground like a revelation. Dew had clung to the necks of brown bottles arranged across the floor. Sunrise had lit the fog a faded orange, and whispered pink into curled wisps of air. I had woken alone.
Now, I have brought a stranger to hallowed ground. One who will look at me the way that Marcus never will. He hooks thumbs on my belt and pulls. I don’t move for too long and the movement stops.
“How old are you?” he says. His body tenses. I am trapped against him for a moment, and a wildness somewhere in me flashes. The light is dim. The window to my right is a cloudy brown. I touch his forearm, slide my fingers across the fine hairs there. My eyes adjust to the dark all at once, and I see how muscle ripples under my fingers. My motion is stiff, filled with half starts and jitters. He pushes against me and we stumble to where the mattress lays, a few feet from the door.
“Ease up,” he says. He laughs and I laugh with him. His laugh sounds like something stolen. It is as though if he does not laugh fast enough people will realize the laugh is not his and demand its return.
Later he zips up his pants as I look up from the mattress. His hair is out of place and there is a tension absent from his shoulders. We have both gotten something that we may have needed.
He winks at me as he pulls on his socks. I smile.
The mattress smells of sweat, and I fold my hands under my head as a makeshift pillow. I look at his shoes, thick leather chukkas, at the head of the bed. I wonder if he’ll want to stay.
He looks too much like Marcus, I see now, though their eyes are different colors, and Marcus is less muscular.
He leans down to grab his shoes. Holding them, he leans over the bed. He kisses me.
I decide then. I decide that if he stays I will tell him about the rocks we carried from Wolf Run, and the wall we planned to build. I will show him the hatchet buried in the stump of a tree we tried to cut down. I will tell him the story of our shooting at the Buick, and how the frost stung my fingers through the gloves.
I am naked in front of him.
He jabs a finger towards the door as he puts his shoes on.
“I have to go. I’ll hit you up though, if I’m in the area. I need a shower, this place is disgusting," he says. "This was nice,” he adds.
Church fills his absence with creaking as the door almost closes, strained hinges groaning for a long moment. Then the door slams itself open and a wind flows through. Heat is wrapped in the wind. I do not move. Leaves rustle in their unquiet multitudes outside. I wait for the wind to die, and the door held open by its passing to close.
I fall asleep still waiting.
________________________________________________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“Through and between the words on a page, through fiction, we can trace the lines of truth. This truth in fiction is the truth of places deep in the woods, ruined and near to crumbling, that, through yearning, can become something hallowed. On the warped floorboards of such a place, something verdant and full grows in the memory of footfalls past. Fiction fossilizes not just time, but story. It depicts life, while also remembering its ghosts.”
R.K.B. is a Jamaican-American multidisciplinary artist, writer, and attorney whose work is dedicated to the pockets of liminal spaces under and between unearthed memory. Often, their narratives have at the foreground young Black protagonists negotiating visibility, tenderness, and agency within interstitial environments—homes that both wound and shelter, woods that both protect and erase.
Church
R.K.B | Fiction, Summer 2025
The woods lie behind the movie theater.
The movie theater is a red warehouse of a building that sits on cream-colored pavement. Three boys fall off skateboards out front. Skateboard wheels roll across uneven ground. Wooden boards clatter against pavement.
We ignore the three boys. They laugh as we pass by.
“No one goes to the movies here,” I say.
“At all,” he says.
I can’t tell if he is asking a question or not. I stick my hands in my jeans, close a loose grip on my wallet and my phone. I rub my thumb along the wallet's front in a small circle that could have been in the shape of a cross, or a heart. The leather is soft.
“No, we go to the movies. In the city. Just not here,” I say.
We walk around the corner of the building and look across the parking lot, across the tar-dark sea entombing the pavement that is the theater. We are trapped here in the black asphalt.
The parking lot is empty save for the old Buick that has always been there. Five parking spaces down from the Buick are trees. The world ends all at once, right there. Green leaves break through the denseness of themselves, forming a scraggly line.
“There’s no one back here,” I say.
He stops and stares at the Buick. There is rust on the doors of it, a flaked, dead iron color. The windows are clear, but the windshield has a crack where once, when I was twelve, my friends and I took turns trying to shoot out the front glass from across the parking lot.
“At all?” he asks. I feel the trace of inflection in his voice. I watch his eyes linger on the windshield's small crack, following the threading, thin lines that spiral from it. A web that will catch nothing. I think about telling him the story of the Buick, but I don’t know if he will care.
“At all,” I repeat.
He nods. He looks solemn. He looks at me then, and I wince. I dig my hands deeper into my pocket.
The paths we walk grow closer. We smother the distance between us with the sounds of our footsteps, until, eventually, our shoulders touch, and we walk slower and gentler, bathed in silence.
We walk together, on top of the sea of black asphalt, and across. Across into green light.
The weight of all the green drags down the air. The crispness of September itself is diluted.
We walk unhurried under the interlocking brown arms of oaks and hemlocks. We lose sight of the street, though neither of us turn our heads from the path in front of us to check.
Visible now, one hundred feet from the line of asphalt, past the curving green ditches filled with brambles and thickets of sharp thorn, is an old shack of rotting wood I call Church. Soft lichen crawls up its sides and rests itself in the cracks between the dark wood.
When I look over at him as we get closer, as the faded splatter of red paint on the front of Church becomes visible, my heart falls. He does not see the penknife scratches next to Church's door. His eyes do not count the thick ring of smooth rocks along the ground that encircle Church’s four walls. I think he is bored and this makes me want to freeze. I walk ahead of him, my eyes turned to the floor. I step over twisted roots. My shoes crunch down on dead leaves with no sound. I can hear his boots scuff against the floor of the woods behind me.
When he curses softly under his breath, I think of how much older than me he is. I turn nineteen in June, a fact I have kept from him. My online profile reads only “PARTRICK, 22”. In the week that we have messaged, he hasn’t questioned my age. Outside of a bar, it is the easiest thing to tell people you are over twenty-one.
We are in the innermost circle of ringed stones now. They are all rocks that my friends and I stole from the Wolf Run Riverbed, two miles deep into the woods. There’s a wheelbarrow that rests behind Church, its insides lined with greywater and rust. Rosebuds peek from over the sides of the hollow of it, an old joke that never died turned beautiful.
I push open the door, push hard against the accumulated grime that has settled behind it. A beer bottle slides across the ground’s exposed dirt with a pitched rattle. Church's inside is filled with the damp heavy scent of musk and loam. No one has opened the door in almost a year. As I shoulder across the threshold, duck beneath the cobwebs and falling flakes of dust, he comes nearer. I glance over my shoulder. An unopened condom is in his hand, and I look away. Now that we are shielded from the light that falls between the closed hands of the trees, he is bold.
His age gives him something I don’t have, some missing quality that I know time will not give me. He wears his years with the ease of those who drive between cities and see nothing in between. He has told me in past messages that he does not like my town. He has said that if it were not for me he would never stop here, even to pump gas. When he told me this, only a week ago, I had lied to him. I had told him that I hated it here, too.
The door groans in an attempt to close behind him, but it does not fully shut. Sunlight pours down the sliver of space between the door and the wall. The light hits against countless dust particles that rise from the floor.
Hating the only place you’ve ever known is like burning down your home because you heard that the house across town has more bathrooms. I don’t know how to tell him that this is all I’ve ever had.
I was the last of us to visit Church. Jack and Tim moved three years ago. They live in The City now, where trees grow in neat strips in the islands of roads, and where buildings taller than Wolf Run Baptist spring up like weeds.
Marcus is still here, but his eyes avoid mine when we see each other on the street.
He likes to think that pretending I don’t exist is a kindness. Eight months ago I showed up at his home, drunk and rambling, beating on the weathered storm door, yelling for him to come downstairs. He did not answer my call, but his mother had.
A stern little woman, hair fixed behind a bonnet like a crown. She had been wrapped in a bare thin wool robe. It had been summer then, and rain had soaked my t-shirt through and I shivered as I stood. Marcus's mother, whose house I’d visited almost every day since kindergarten, had refused me. She had commanded me to leave and to never come back.
I had slept at Church that night, on the old mattress squeezed into the corner. All night I had kept expecting Marcus to show up, dripping water droplets and apologies. My dreams had been empty things. Fog had rolled into Church at dawn, creeping across the ground like a revelation. Dew had clung to the necks of brown bottles arranged across the floor. Sunrise had lit the fog a faded orange, and whispered pink into curled wisps of air. I had woken alone.
Now, I have brought a stranger to hallowed ground. One who will look at me the way that Marcus never will. He hooks thumbs on my belt and pulls. I don’t move for too long and the movement stops.
“How old are you?” he says. His body tenses. I am trapped against him for a moment, and a wildness somewhere in me flashes. The light is dim. The window to my right is a cloudy brown. I touch his forearm, slide my fingers across the fine hairs there. My eyes adjust to the dark all at once, and I see how muscle ripples under my fingers. My motion is stiff, filled with half starts and jitters. He pushes against me and we stumble to where the mattress lays, a few feet from the door.
“Ease up,” he says. He laughs and I laugh with him. His laugh sounds like something stolen. It is as though if he does not laugh fast enough people will realize the laugh is not his and demand its return.
Later he zips up his pants as I look up from the mattress. His hair is out of place and there is a tension absent from his shoulders. We have both gotten something that we may have needed.
He winks at me as he pulls on his socks. I smile.
The mattress smells of sweat, and I fold my hands under my head as a makeshift pillow. I look at his shoes, thick leather chukkas, at the head of the bed. I wonder if he’ll want to stay.
He looks too much like Marcus, I see now, though their eyes are different colors, and Marcus is less muscular.
He leans down to grab his shoes. Holding them, he leans over the bed. He kisses me.
I decide then. I decide that if he stays I will tell him about the rocks we carried from Wolf Run, and the wall we planned to build. I will show him the hatchet buried in the stump of a tree we tried to cut down. I will tell him the story of our shooting at the Buick, and how the frost stung my fingers through the gloves.
I am naked in front of him.
He jabs a finger towards the door as he puts his shoes on.
“I have to go. I’ll hit you up though, if I’m in the area. I need a shower, this place is disgusting," he says. "This was nice,” he adds.
Church fills his absence with creaking as the door almost closes, strained hinges groaning for a long moment. Then the door slams itself open and a wind flows through. Heat is wrapped in the wind. I do not move. Leaves rustle in their unquiet multitudes outside. I wait for the wind to die, and the door held open by its passing to close.
I fall asleep still waiting.
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“Through and between the words on a page, through fiction, we can trace the lines of truth. This truth in fiction is the truth of places deep in the woods, ruined and near to crumbling, that, through yearning, can become something hallowed. On the warped floorboards of such a place, something verdant and full grows in the memory of footfalls past. Fiction fossilizes not just time, but story. It depicts life, while also remembering its ghosts.”
R.K.B. is a Jamaican-American multidisciplinary artist, writer, and attorney whose work is dedicated to the pockets of liminal spaces under and between unearthed memory. Often, their narratives have at the foreground young Black protagonists negotiating visibility, tenderness, and agency within interstitial environments—homes that both wound and shelter, woods that both protect and erase.