Fiction by Damn Jones

Damn Jones writes voice-driven, lyrical literary fiction and numinous poetry shaped by grief, faith, violence, memory, and spiritual fracture. He is a proud member of the Thirty West Publishing House masthead and the author of two novellas, including Keel., longlisted for the 2026 Fugere Book Prize for Finely Crafted Novellas. Originally from Appalachian Ohio, he now resides in the Ozarks of Missouri and has a background in the mental health field.

“I Did Not Kill Aubrey Deacons.”

“When I was five years old, nothing happened to me. I wasn’t molested, my dog Isaac didn’t die and my parents didn’t divorce. When I was eleven, there was no sadness to speak of. My Grandpa didn’t have a stroke, I didn’t get in trouble at school and I wasn’t picked on by other kids. When I was seventeen, the bottom didn’t drop out. I didn’t snort Xanax until my nose ran red, or drive eighty in a forty-five and I didn’t kill Aubrey Deacons.”

I didn’t kill Aubrey Deacons. I didn’t kill Aubrey Deacons.

I didn’t kill Aubrey Deacons. I did not kill Aubrey Deacons. I didn’t kill Aubrie Deacons.

I didn’t kill Aubrey Deacons.

I did not kill Aubrey Deacons. I didn’t kill Aubrey, Deacons.

I didn’t. I didn’t kill Aubrey Deacons. I didn’t kill Aubrey Deacons. I did not kill.

I did not.

I did not kill Aubrey Deacons.

“The driver’s side window was rolled down, the air was brisk, even for late April. It was the biggest Chevy they made, a 3500 with each and every trimming, but I guess you already know that. I took out a loan I couldn’t afford to pay and I couldn’t believe the bank approved. My Dad gave me shit for springing for a lift kit, said it was a waste of money and was a stupid trend, but behind every protest burnt a jealousy.”

He worked for thirty-seven years at a factory that made parts for high-end race cars but no actual race cars. He never moved up from the production line, said he didn’t need the stress and all managers ever did was sit on their ass and collect double the paycheck. He was named after my Grandpa Joseph, and so he named me after him, third in a line of good ol’ boys that had a way of getting themselves in a bad way. He and his brother, Robert, put Grandpa in a home after the stroke. He couldn’t so much as wipe the drool from his own chin and neither brother was willing to do it for him. My Dad’s visits lessened and lessened over the years until they just stopped one day.

We didn’t talk about it. His weekend drinking started bleeding into the week. Robert shot himself behind the old blue barn on the property where Grandpa used to live, but the brothers were quick to sell it out from under him. I heard the young woman who found my Uncle stopped going to church and lost the baby she was carrying. The Bentley curse, Grandma used to call it, before arthritis clubbed her hands so bad that she couldn’t grip the banister when she reached and fell going down to the basement. Her spine was broken in too many places to report.

Grandpa cursed God, right there in the church and twice more at the gravesite. Robert had to carry him away like a madman while Dad apologized to the Reverend Jim Brody through clenched teeth.

Now he sat uneasy in his easy chair, watching old Twilight Zone episodes and sipping Kentucky Bourbon until it got easier not to move. Many a night I would rap on the side door to no response, go on in because he never locked it, hell, sometimes it was standing half open, a hundred blind moths beating their bodies against the kitchen light fixture that housed a hundred more of their corpses. He’d be slumped to the side, a Winston often burnt down to skeletal ash in his hand, an almost empty bottle of bourbon sat like a trophy on the table I made freshman year in woodshop. I’d stub the cigarette in the dark green ashtray that he took from Grandpa’s bedroom nightstand the day before they sold him out. I often left the old console TV on to keep him company, there was something about him waking up in silence that didn’t sit right with me. I’d take the checkered quilt Grandma’s Mother made back in twenty-eight, lay it over his lap and straighten his head so his neck wouldn’t ache in the hungover morning.

“I was high. High enough to cause my nose to bleed, and trust me, it’s been toughened up plenty. What time it was, I couldn’t say, but it had been dark for at least a couple hours before we took my truck on a joyride.”

My Mother was a saint, the patron saint of never coming through, but some people live their entire lives and die without a title like that. God gave her a thirst that only gossip and Mad Dog 20/20 could satisfy, so she sat all day and night sipping on fluorescent wine, hand heavy on the trigger of her CB radio mic. On low in the background somewhere undefined could be heard the ghosts of every country singer you could hope to find, though Conway T witty and Hank Sr. were given generous rotation.

She said when she was just sixteen, she would climb out her bedroom window and down an old wooden ladder her Daddy never bothered to put up. She’d swear her sister Peggy to secrecy and run through the eastern woods of the property to find Joseph II waiting in an old stepside Chevy, blue and thunderous like his eyes. He called her Mary Anne, even though everyone else called her Mary, said it would otherwise be a waste of a good name. They’d go drinking and dancing out at the County Line, a little shack of a bar no more than a car-length into the next county over. There wasn’t any judgment there but the sin was plentiful and on tap. My sister, Julie, was conceived in the women’s washroom, but she was stillborn and the story lost its humor there, though Robert inevitably told it at every drunken cook-out. I suppose we have heard it told for the last time.

“Fast...too fast, for sure. Maybe eighty, or more. I’m not sure what made me decide to turn off the headlights, but I did. That’s a dark stretch of road, too, you know...well, of course you do.”

Henry was my Mother’s only brother, he came first but his mind never caught up in position. She wouldn’t stand to hear him called retarded, and I’m not sure that he was, but she left welts that rose like fire on my lower back, butt and hips. T old me that’s what I get for squirming around while she took the belt to me, though I wondered about anyone's ability to stay still for five, ten, fifteen minutes of punishment. If anything, Henry seemed quiet and depraved. He would find stray cats and tie their tails in a knot, then throw them over the clothesline and laugh until he cried, killing the winner with the heavy stomp of his oily black work boots. He told me that the Indians, Cherokee, maybe, used to roam these parts. They were savages, more animal than man, scalping peaceful farmers and raping little white girls while their Mother was forced to watch them, and when they were through, it would be the Mother’s turn. He said they would slit her throat as they came inside her because it made her cunt tighten up like the gates of Heaven. I was a year from starting school but these were lessons learned, burned into my fragile psyche, while other five year olds went about coloring and riding bikes with friends.

He used olive oil, I remember the light aroma wafting toward my face with each blunt stroke. An old red rag was stuffed in my mouth, the one he used to check the oil on the station wagon before Mom went into town. She played Bingo most Saturday nights and would come home stumbled, violence spilled on her dress, and if I was lucky, she would pass out before she thought of me, but like one of her favorite country songs, I was always on her mind.

Henry threatened me, pressing his rusted bowie knife to my throat, but his efforts were wasted, I was broken and devoid of all hope, and would never tell a soul. He told me it was a punishment from God for causing mischief, but it happened again and again, and I tried so hard to be perfect. It was only after about a year of smelling stale oil that my Mother found out. Henry had been especially rough the morning of my third day of school, and I bled through my Levi’s while the teacher, Mrs. Elders, led the class in the Pledge of Allegiance. They sent me home early, I found my Mother half lit at eight-thirty, a blue bottle of Mad Dog half-emptied between her legs, a scowl forming on her dampened lips.

She shouted at me, tell her what happened, and when I shook my head she started choking me with one hand while punching the CB mic into the top of my head. The sounds of static and the smell of drugstore wine paled only in potency to the shrieking of my Mother. After an eternity, when you’re five, I gave up Henry and for a moment, the cacophony of anger seemed to subside. The next events I can only recall in faded sparks, being drug through the kitchen, the brown and off-white laminate flooring being swept clean by my backside, the sound of the bathtub filling with an intense water pressure, and lastly, the pure hate that dripped off my Mother’s reddened face as I lay pinned against the tub’s bottom.

I lived and Henry stopped, well, three weeks later, when my Dad beat him to death with the handle of a pickaxe. Henry begged for mercy, promising to leave the town, the state, the country, Robert said, but my Dad beat him until he himself collapsed from exhaustion. Henry’s skull was broken into too many places to report, and besides, they buried him in twelve different places, twelve different pieces, like apostles embracing their sin.

It’s strange, still to this day, I have this irrational fear that somehow Henry will come back for me, through hell or back from the void of death. I know better, but on certain days, things just feel dangerous, like the time my cousins and I kept throwing Solo cups of gasoline on Grandpa’s brush fire. Every rise we provoked from the flames sent a cold chill up my spine, convinced at any moment the fire would reach out and take one of us in. To be warm and counted among the millions buried in a million cemeteries, I’m not saying I welcomed it, but there is something to be said for safety in numbers.

“Being foolish, I guess. It all boils down to that, but I guess that doesn’t have much of an apologetic ring to it. I was high...I just wanted to drive fast and have a good time. I was seventeen, you know? No, it doesn’t make murder justified, but maybe...maybe it brings some sense to it all, an understanding that when you’re young you do terrible things, you fuck up, and you hope you don’t fuck up too much. Yeah, I fucked up, alright.”

Somehow, the look in my Dad’s eyes is what haunts me the most, all other sick tragedies aside. They were nearly closed by the direction of the afternoon sun, but I could read the anger much easier than any book, but what ran my blood January cold was the glaze of tears being skillfully held back from falling. He didn’t want to be a part of what came next, but he had these sort of things long beaten into his bones, Joseph Sr. made sure of it. Looking back, I wonder if the same task hadn’t fallen to him, but I doubted my Grandpa had any emotion to contend with.

In his right hand was an old grain sack, frays from errant plastic protruding from various points, like man-made hay that carried goods from the ground but would never decompose back into it. We had scientists to be sure of this. 

His forearm was thick and vascular, having held the load for quite some time. As I approached, I noticed the hammer in his right hand, three-quarters down the handle stained nearly black from the oils from a working man.

He didn’t yell, though each word carried palpable restraint of possible violence. I had left the pen open to Dad’s full-blooded coonhound, Dorothy, and one of the half a dozen mutts had come calling. Whimpering and squirming within the sack were seven mutt puppies that should have been full-blooded coonhounds that would fetch Dad three hundred for the males and five hundred for the bitches. He told me coldly and in no uncertain terms my instructions; take them down the road that dead ended in a makeshift dump and only come back when they were all dead.

And don’t forget to close the pen again.

I wanted to beg him to reconsider, to hit my knees and press my face into the warm Alabama clay, but there was a finality to his dark orders, like judgment day. So, I took the heavy sack, placed the hammer in the leg loop of my dusty carpenter jeans, and I carried the puppies two handed, resting my burning arms every twenty feet or so, resigning myself not to drag them on the potholed road.

The dump was empty, for this I was thankful. I would be lucky to handle the guilt of knowing what I was about to do, let alone the judgment of others. I stopped at the northeasternmost corner, behind the brittle remains of a car so rusted that I could not venture a guess to its name. Maybe I could let them loose, but that thought quickly died in the summer heat, there was no one around for ten miles or better and they would likely get eaten by coyotes or laid low by the stifling heat.

I took them one by one from the sack, their eyes not yet opened and their little bodies slick from the humidity of the sack. I aimed carefully and each hammer blow was true, ending them quickly as my only available mercy, stopping only to puke in the tall weeds beside me, my face awash with bitter tears.

I named the last one Isaac and paused my killing hand, in hope that God would call down to me in a gentle, booming voice. ‘Joseph, Joseph, lay not your hand upon him.’ And I waited, sweat mixing with emotion, until I was sure God was not in this place, nowhere near.

“I didn’t see the headlights, or her face like a picture behind the glass of the windshield frame. I may have well went blind from the pills or the darkness of that road, or maybe selective memory, I can’t say, but I recall the sound, loud as rapture...the wind rushing past me as I exited the windshield felt like my soul leaving the body, but I awoke face down, legs up to the knees in Carlton’s pond. My face was cut but by the grass, I always thought that strange...my Dad was in a bad way but he made it okay. Sure. I was driving. I killed Aubrey Deacons. No, I can’t imagine why I would say it again. You have it in writing, I reckon that will do just fine.”

Judge Cassner got choked up as he read his sentence to me, and truth be told, I did, too. After two and a half days of a trial that lasted two and a half days too long, a jury of people I knew as good and honest folk, seemed in mourning when they found me guilty on all counts.

Vehicular manslaughter

Driving while under the influence

Failure to safely operate a vehicle

Failure to wear a seatbelt

Sixteen years, with the possibility of parole after ten, contingent on good behavior.

Aubrey’s Mother cursed me masterfully, like she had just climbed out of a foxhole, chasing down a Nazi, another one dead was another step home, and she was well on her way. Her husband joined her in wearing a white t-shirt with what looked to be a school picture of Aubrey crudely ironed onto the front with the words, You Will Be Avenged, stenciled in black underneath. They didn’t cry, there was no room for anything after the anger they filled themselves with. I could neither understand it or complain, I took their dagger words with a hollowness in my eyes.

My Dad begged the Judge and when that failed he devolved to threats as insane as they were fashioned from love. I wanted to smile at his resolve but I knew it was neither the place or the time and I wondered if such a situation would ever arise for it. I spent the night in the same small cell I had for the past two nights. I didn’t sleep that night. In the morning they took me by van to Holman Correctional Facility. I remembered hearing Henry speak briefly about it, that it was unpleasant and that was where they held all of the state’s executions.

On my third day there, I was hit in the mouth by a metal serving tray, losing seven and a half teeth. I didn’t fight back, I wasn’t scared or intimidated, but simply devoid of anything resembling a spark of life. After that, I was put in solitary confinement for my own safety, they told me. I didn’t mind it, in fact, I grew to enjoy the solitude. I read books, I drew and found that I had a talent for it and found a pride in it. My baby fat quickly went away and I purposed myself to do two hundred push-ups, two hundred sit-ups and two hundred chin ups everyday. I struggled at first, but within the year I was able to complete my routine before lunch came around.

My Dad visited me often and we would sit in the visiting room or outside at a picnic table on nice days and talk about regular things that I couldn’t quite imagine anymore. For the first three years, without exception, he would beg me to change my story, to tell the truth. He was driving that night, drunk on jealousy and homemade wine, shutting off the headlights for a gag and swerving over the line, but I was unmoved, unwilling to even speak on it for fear that he was wearing some sort of rigged up recording device. It was hard to live knowing I was taking the punishment that ought to be his, but it was harder still to imagine this burden placed on him and I held fast to my chosen sin.

After that, we got on better. He would bring me Mounds bars and always remark that he didn’t know how anybody could stand the taste of coconut. In the silences, I could feel his feet twisting in his old brown cowboy boots. He used to ride in the rodeo and was damn good, but my Mom wouldn’t have it once I was born and so he hung up his buckle but kept wearing the boots in some quiet rebellion. He wanted to ask my forgiveness, but a lifetime of stubbornness and self-hatred would have none of it. I would always give him a knowing nod and break the silence with talk about fishing, or baseball or anything less serious.

They let me out after ten years, twenty-seven days. I kept to myself, got a certificate in machining - lathes, mills and the likes, and kept my cell clean, impeccably clean, the head guard, Jerry, would often remark on inspection day. I got on at the local dog food plant, sealing bags and loading semi-trailers for a decent wage. The manager did some time himself when he was young, something to do with a bar fight and stolen checks, and he took an interest in me. My Dad died the following Spring, the fire chief said he must have passed out and dropped his Winston on the floor, the fire came on strong and quick, flames escaping through every available window or door by the time anyone took notice. I hoped he slept through it, maybe unable to breathe from the smoke, and went on to some other place that fools like me pretend to know.

I survived parents, hurt and bent by the parents that reared them, violence in every conceivable fashion now hung around my neck in invisible permanence, I had done things I could never bear to speak of, and took the punishment and recompense when the opportunity revealed itself. I loved girls who couldn’t love themselves, drew pictures of mountains hovering over seas I would never touch, I tried to live this life the best that I could.

All of this I admit, but I did not kill Aubrey Deacons. I did not kill Aubrey Deacons.