Following Magellan by Jamie Etheridge

            ​Mike Maguire CC



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Following Magellan

        A map is a thing used for navigation that sits in the glove box or between the front seat and the middle console, coffee and tear-stained, torn and written upon and I learned to read one at an early age Rand McNally unfolded across my lap as I traced with my index finger a route we were driving down Highway 90 another highway, another day and this was before I learned about landmarks about place about people actually living in the same place for more than a few days without moving but I traced my finger and realized we were close to Mobile close to Granny and Papaw close to something like home but not home for us and then I looked up and Daddy was drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette and there just ahead was a lighthouse—that famous Gulf Coast, Biloxi lighthouse—and it stood sentry in the middle of the road standing its ground through hurricanes and depressions and civil war and serving as a beacon guiding us home-not-home but somewhere familiar, a place where people knew our real name, and where Momma knew all the roads and here is the smell of salt and fish on the breeze buffeting the open windows a familiar scent reminding me of a previous summer at the beach with my grandparents, a graying wooden deck, a splinter in my thumb and a red bucket, blue shovel and all I wanted was to dig a moat for my sandcastle but the tide kept washing the wet sand flat and in the back seat Momma sleeps with the rest of my siblings and I cannot even remember how I ended up shotgun but I folded good old Rand and slid it into the glovebox because now I know where we are and more importantly where we were going and that is something new, something true—something that I have never known before—and so I look at that lighthouse cast iron structure solid and unmoving a monument to fortitude, to immobility a thing regal and magnificent in the fading glow of blue twilight and I know it has seen centuries and uncertainties and injustices and it has seen heartache and death and it has seen more than I can even imagine and it has seen us too as we passed this way before, seen us as we fled into the night, running from the law, seen us as babies, as toddlers, as children who never know where they are because my parents drove back and forth, crisscrossing America, fugitives and lost⎯lost as I remain to this day, lost as we never could be found, lost in his shadow and lost with his hands on the wheel⎯and so I called out to that lighthouse and I said thank you for being here thank you for showing us the way thank you for reminding me I’ve been this way before, for not collapsing when everything around you is a swirling, spinning mass of wind and water and brokenness but we didn’t stop and I knew that we would pass this way again and I prayed, even when I no longer believed, that the lighthouse would continue to survive hurricanes and depressions and wars and that it would show me the way again someday in the distant future not realizing that by then a landmark—no matter how resilient no matter how indifferent no matter how durable—would never be enough to lead me home.  

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Jamie Etheridge's writing has been published in X-R-A-Y Lit, (mac)ro(mic), Bending Genres, JMWW Journal, Emerge Lit and anthologies including Serious Flash Fiction 2021. She placed second in the Versification Contest 2021 for Mosh Pit CNF. She tweets at LeScribbler.

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