After the sermon, the preacher slipped into a back pew and filled his Bible’s margins with notes from another man’s message.
Down the hall, a student raised his hand.
The teacher never looked up.
One left church with fuller pages.
The other left with empty margins.
The customer laughs when he sees my dirty hands. “Grease monkey.” I laugh too. Rent is due on Friday. By closing, oil has settled into every crack of my skin. At home, my little sister asks if I fixed another car. I tell her yes. Groceries cost money. She smiles.
Louie Rivers is a writer from Mississippi whose work explores labor, family, faith, and Southern life through microfiction and poetry.
The radiator clicks without warming the room. He crosses out sentences until the paper softens beneath his hand. Outside, trucks hiss along the highway. Inside, unfinished thoughts press against his teeth. Near dawn, one finally escapes him whole enough to survive the page before morning enters the room.
Louie Rivers is an emerging poet from Mississippi whose work explores labor, isolation, and emotional endurance through compressed imagery and lyric intensity.