If Karma’s A Bitch, Does That Mean God’s One Too?
– Stephanie Holden
“You only paid half your rent this month, bless your heart.” Her words dripped sweetly from her lips, slow and thick like molasses. It was a landlord thing, or maybe a southern thing, or both, to make sympathetic words seem aggressive. I had been late on rent almost every month since I moved in, and Linda was pretty much ready to evict me. I knew that, and she knew I knew it, but she would never outright say it because she had the kind of decorum that made her look benevolent without her actually having to do anything nice for anyone.
“Few more weeks and I’ll be high on the hog just like you are, Lord willing.” I had it too – my mother used to talk to her church friends that way. Linda and I stood there for a moment, each with a snide smile painted across our face, not breaking eye contact. The silence hung over us.
“I do hope you’re right,” Linda said. “I wouldn’t want Richard to be angry with you.”Richard was Linda’s husband. He was a tall, solid man with a blond mustache that dribbled lamely from his upper lip and all but blended into his pale skin. To be perfectly honest, I couldn’t really distinguish him from the rest of the men in this town, except he kept his holster on his left hip because he was left-handed.
“Do you think he’d have the time to come down here, what with all the business trips he’s been taking with his secretary lately?”
Linda let a humph out through her nose and smiled wider. “It was nice seeing you, but I have to be off for the Daughters of the Republic of Texas meeting.”
Ironic that Linda, capitalist that she was, was part of an organization founded by a woman named Ima Hogg.
“I’m sure it’s hard for someone like you to find work, but you need to get the money in by the end of this week.”
Linda may have been a mosquito getting fat off my hard-earned money, but she was right. I went through a number of jobs that had all eventually fired me for “promoting my agenda” or something or other. I finally ended up at Dairy Queen. It was hard to keep a job in Bumfuck, Texas, but without a job I had no way to get out. I dreamed about running away to San Antonio or Amarillo or anywhere the population broke six digits and maybe even had a gay bar. Maybe one day. I had plenty of time. Gay boys are allowed to party until we’re gray because we have our youths stolen from us.
Linda, like most people in this town, was too polite to flat-out say she didn’t like the whole homosexuality thing. But she started telling me she was praying for me when she found out, and she sure as hell wouldn’t have rented to me if she had known.
—
Life would have been easier if I hadn’t opened my big mouth. I should have known that “live your truth” bullshit wouldn’t work here; the Southern Baptists who keep their hair bleached and close to God don’t even let themselves be true to who they are. Two little words and suddenly I was living under Linda’s reign and unemployed.Mom – well, Suzanne, now – had always been the perfect preacher’s wife. She hosted the community potluck lunch every Sunday and fraternized dutifully with packs of West Texan women who forced their sons into too-big suits and their daughters into ugly, knee-length dresses. Suzanne was always going on about loving thy neighbor and how donating nearly-expired cans and outgrown clothes was the work of God. I thought she might be almost okay with it, but apparently the Bible doesn’t say much about being kind to your gay son. The day after I told her, I came home from cleaning the pews to all my stuff on the lawn and a sticky note that said: The Church can’t employ people who have succumbed to the Devil’s temptations.
The sign outside the church read “Homosexuality and Hellfire: Resisting Lucifer’s Snare”. A flare for the dramatic must run in the family.
—
When I got back from my shift at Dairy Queen, there was a bright green eviction notice taped to my door. Maybe I went a little too far with the secretary quip. Three days to up and find a new place to live, even after giving Linda my whole paycheck for five months. It honestly took longer than expected for little miss mosquito to get bored of me, but it still stung and left me with a welt the size of a softball.I didn’t start packing. I figured it would be a few more days before the cops could come kick me out for good, and I was going to take what I could get. Maybe a few more days of DQ money would be enough to rent a U-haul and leave this town for good. I thought a little about something Suzanne used to say, that God had a reason for everything. Maybe that guy really did hate me.
—
At 8 pm on the day I was supposed to be gone, Richard’s dark blue truck pulled into my driveway. He knocked a few times, the pure force of his rough knuckles shaking the front of the house. I could see him from my living room window, standing in the front yard with his thumbs in his belt loops. Which meant he could see me too, peering out at him from a still-fully-furnished room in a house he owned. I definitely wasn’t getting that security deposit back.
His left hand crept from its place in his belt loop to the weathered leather holster on his hip. He fired a warning shot into the sky, and it rang for miles across the flat land, and I wondered if the bullet hit God, and I hoped it did.
Stephanie Holden (she/they) is a Halloween-loving queer living in New Orleans, Louisiana. She writes about love, trauma, gore, and the self. Her interests are fantasy books, body modification, and the South. Find her work at or forthcoming in Ghost City Press, Kissing Dynamite, Cloves, Voidspace, The B’K, Bullshit Lit, Soft Star Magazine, Martello Journal, and elsewhere, or her narcissistic tweets at @smhxlden.
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Matthew McGuirk – The Maple Stand (November 2021)
Amanda Williams – blessed are the drunk, and other beatitudes (July 2022)
Rough Diamond Poetry 