Delicious Foods by James Hannaham

saying grace, and his mother tumbled from behind a fitted sheet, clutching a pair of his father’s dungarees, embracing them as if his legs were still in them, smearing them against her face, stifling her cries, dampening the fabric with tears. Eddie ran out to her, but she didn’t seem to see him through her grief.
    Days later, something like a party followed. All his relatives had been invited except his father. When he asked his aunt Bethella why they had forgotten to invite him, she thwacked him sharply on the behind, glared, and raised her index finger to a point between his eyes, the way a robber might hold a switchblade.
    Don’t you ever, she said. Ever!
    His mother, uncommonly silent and numb, in a pillbox hat, her face veiled, dressed him in a black jacket and itchy pants from the local thrift store and held his hand in the front row of the church as everybody sang and wept before a shiny oblong box draped in flowers that people now said contained his father. How did they know? Nobody could see inside.
    Later Eddie stood perspiring in his jacket but not daring to remove it as they lowered the box they claimed contained his father into a hill, and men shoveled dirt on top of it. When would they stop the circus act and let Daddy out of that thing? He had read picture books about Harry Houdini. Maybe he’d tell them, he thought. But he had started learning not to say the majority of what he thought.
    In the rainy days that followed, seemingly related to the events of his life, he would beg his mother to go visit the hill and bring extra umbrellas. We can’t let Daddy get wet, he’d protest.
    Friends came to the house, shaking their heads and saying, Mph, mph, mph. Well, you know if he’d a been white they’d have a suspect by now.
    Over time, Eddie came to understand the part of dead that means never . That is to say, the whole thing. Never coming back, never going to swing you upside down, never taking you to school, never giving you presents, never coming to the holidays. But the finality of it didn’t upset him the way it should have. For the most part he didn’t believe it, so he tried to turn never into someday with the usual tools: ideas he heard in hymns, tinglings he felt while soloists cried during Sunday services at Ebenezer Baptist. Notions of angels, of heaven. Of ancestors gazing down, pride and anger wrinkling their foreheads. Of the sun and wind tickling the tassels of ripe corn in a wide field. Of pious deeds and of Jesus Christ levitating above an empty cave.
    In contrast, his mother started to demand something impossible, maybe indescribable, something he didn’t understand until much later—she needed for time to reverse itself. Gradually her posture slumped, her chest became heavier. She stopped having anybody over, she rarely called anyone, the phone didn’t ring anymore, she became quiet and unresponsive, her moods enveloped her.
    For a long time, Eddie thought only about adjusting to the loss of his father, and the loss of the grocery store, not about seeking the cause of those losses, and no one pointed him in that direction—in fact, his relatives diverted his attention away from it. He would ask a direct question of a random cousin or of Bethella during her sporadic visits—How did my father die? They’d stare into a corner of the room and feed him a noble abstraction—He died fighting for your rights. The follow-up question seemed ridiculous, unaskable—I mean, what killed his body? —and would linger in the air.
    You need to find out, press charges, and sue, everybody would say to Darlene, sometimes even to him, at six years old. Eddie, your mother needs to bring these people to justice. What’s she scared of? She has a thousand percent of our support.
    But he watched his mother during these days, and he sensed, without actually knowing, that something unnameable had curled itself, snakelike, around her leg, then bound her torso; her breathing got more strained, her eyes