By Blake HC Mihm
Butch Pocket makes his own buckshot by tumbling bog iron in a steel drum. The drum rumbles down the road, rolling in the sandy strip between the pines. His shotgun weighs twenty pounds and can reap an acre of soy with one round. When Butch Pocket fires at a flock of wood ducks, ducks rain from the sky for three days.
Butch Pocket never wears shirtsleeves. He tries but his biceps and triceps tear them down the seam. No one knows his arms are cold November through March because no one asks Butch how he feels.
Butch Pocket has six wives. They live in separate houses a mile apart. He spends one night with each of them, devours his way across a table spread with venison steak and blueberry pies, then retreats to their bedroom. In order to shield himself from feminine sensibilities, Butch blindfolds himself while they copulate.
Butch Pocket spends his seventh day alone. On this seventh day, he sees a flat-bottomed boat floating languidly down the river. Butch thinks the long-haired person to be a woman and he looks away. Then he hears a quiet splash and is drawn to gaze again at the stone-carved muscle of their arms on the oar, and the person turns their head back to where Butch crouches in the bushes, and Butch sees the golden-straw stubble of their face, and knows him to be a man.
Butch Pocket is an excellent hunter. He smells like loam and the breeze itself. He can stalk a cougar on pussy-footed toes no matter how many times the wind changes her tune. Now Butch traces the man, watching him grab blueberries from a pail, lean over the bow, and drop them into the river. They float on the surface, eschewed by back-banded sunfish and mud minnows. But chain pickerel with their long grinning teeth cannot resist swimming to the surface to swallow the fruit. After each pickerel eats her berry, the man leans over the rippling water, and from the depths of the river the fish whispers some clandestine muttering into the man’s ear.
How sweetly the pickerel would fry up, if they died with sugar in their teeth.
Butch Pocket has walked this path every seventh day of his matrimonial life but he has never witnessed this: a golden-haired man unclasping the buckles of his overalls and slipping beneath the surface, as if to capture the diurnal moon, glittering like a captive princess under the water.
Wait, Butch calls. But by the time Butch gets to the shore, the man has sunk so deep that Butch can hardly see him.
Butch Pocket watches the water. He tells time by the shifting of the sun, and as the shadows stretch over him, he can tell the man has been underwater a wide while. Butch has rescued kittens from trees by bending pitch pines to the earth. He has hauled children four to a shoulder out of a burning orphanage (afterwards his skin sloughed off in a leviathan leather coat, which he gave to Old Mary Anne for her balding bull). But Butch cannot swim. He starves without air caressing his face, tousling his arms, tangling his beard. All Butch can do is wallow in the shallow weeds, waving his bare arms and glimpsing flashes, white as mist, of the man under the tea-kissed water.
The man emerges, sputtering, with tannin dripping from his skin.
I thought you were dead, Butch says.
I was looking for freshwater pearls, the man grins. The pearls glisten in the gaps of his teeth, and he reaches from the water for Butch’s hand to spit them across his heart line, christening his palm with naked beads of nacre.
Blake HC Mihm is a basketweaver who lives in southwestern Virginia with his two dogs. His work has been featured in Lilac Peril, OUCH! Collective, Dishsoap Quarterly, Short Reads, and West Trade Review, among others. Blake is an alumni of the One Story Writers Conference, a 2026 Abode Press Summer Fellow, and a poet for DC Pride Poems 2024. blakehc.wordpress.com
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