Joseph Lyttleton
For a few days in his twentieth year, Brian Castle found himself the target of a manhunt.
Here’s the story as it was reported in the immediate aftermath: At 2:17 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, an arsonist set ablaze the First Baptist Church of DeVane, Alabama. The historically Black church, where Martin Luther King Jr. once spoke, had mercifully been unoccupied at the time.
Here’s what didn’t get reported: At 2:17 a.m. on that Wednesday morning, Brian had been three sheets to the wind—four even.
Contrary to what law officials and news reports initially claimed, the destruction was not racially motivated, though that presumption was understandable. Brian, never the brightest kid, though occasionally quick on his feet, had been in the woods directly behind the church that night with a cigarette lighter, a backpack full of aerosol cans, and a gut full of bourbon. Upon seeing the work of his idle hands, he sobered up enough to hastily spray-paint the letter “K” in triplicate across the lawn and stumble deep into the wilderness. Later, when interrogated about why he had sprayed those letters, Brian admitted he had hoped it would throw authorities off his scent.
Even if the subterfuge would have worked, it didn’t matter: Brian turned himself in after seventy-two hours. It took twenty-four for him to sober up enough to comprehend what had happened and another day to convince himself that he, in fact, was responsible for the destruction that had made national news. The final day he spent debating his next move, and though a range of options came to mind – move to Mexico, stick his pa’s rifle in his mouth, drown himself in bourbon – he ultimately decided to do the shockingly forthright thing and cop to his actions. No one was more surprised than Brian.
Because he confessed and convincingly demonstrated that his actions were not the result of an evil heart but, rather, a weak mind – it’s not often a person is legally proclaimed a halfwit – Brian received a light prison sentence (too light in the opinion of the local paper’s editorial board): two years. This was reduced to fourteen months upon appeal and eventually shortened to nine months with good behavior and another two years of parole. Nonetheless, Brian celebrated his twenty-first birthday in Elmore Correctional Facility with nearly 1,200 inmates, not a single one of whom bought him a cake.
When, during those alternating lonely and terrifying months in prison, he looked back on his confession and considered what it had cost him, Brian could only avoid spiraling out by reminding himself that the authorities would have found him eventually. They had forensics and DNA tests and advanced science stuff like that. It was better that he hadn’t made the cops chase him down. He might have gotten shot. In a short life of dumb choices, this had been a smart one.
Upon his release, Brian had no choice but to move back in with his parents, and they had no choice but to allow him. His relationship with Carl and Maggie Castle had understandably soured some since his arrest, though it probably didn’t help that, as a character witness on his son’s behalf, Carl couldn’t manage anything more laudatory than, “He’s not a bad kid, just basically an idiot.” Since Brian’s lawyer couldn’t locate anyone willing to offer a more full-throated statement of support, that sufficed as his entire defense.
As a teenager loosely in possession of a personality, Brian had mostly hung out with fellow low achievers in high school. When he returned to DeVane as an adult felon with few job prospects, though, his already small circle of friends had shrunk to a period. Since no one visited while he was on the inside, other than his ma (thrice) and pa (once), the lack of a warm welcome upon his return didn’t upset him. What did bother Brian, in ways inexpressible but deeply cutting, was how many “friends” had blocked him on Facebook. At least forty people were no longer in his already paltry tally, and of the remainder, at least half were people he had never met in real life. The far too quiet voice of his rational mind told him not to get worked up by internet trivialities, but he couldn’t help himself. With no job and little human contact, virtual interactions were everything.
Following prison, the internet’s chief allure was its anonymity and offer of a blank slate. Those were hardly the only draws, though. As a stipulation of his parole, Brian was not permitted to leave the state. Like kids growing up in small towns since time immemorial, Brian’s youth had been spent dreaming about the larger world and imagining the day when he would see it all. Yet, at twenty-one, he hadn’t even visited the Gulf. To sate his wanderlust, he scrolled through satellite imagery of the planet, a bleak substitute for a plane’s window seat.
When not viewing the exotic topographies of central Africa through a browser window, Brian occupied himself with message boards for fans of horror movies, adult animated TV shows, and alt-comedy podcasts. Having unfettered time, his avatar, Futzy Holly, a cartoon beaver in thick, brow line glasses, became a regular participant on these boards. Mixing topical or non-sequitur pop culture references with self-depreciating jabs and the occasional blistering rant, Futzy grew in recognition. As all groups develop hierarchies, Futzy rose rapidly to the top by sheer force of presence. No one posted as much as Brian.
Across his open tabs, he would riff in one pun-laden comment thread while eviscerating a moron’s uninformed opinion on the recent Batman movie or reading someone’s tale of being ghosted. The one thing Brian had in common with most of the commentators on the message boards was a woefully inactive love life.
Since his parole officer insisted that Brian make an effort to find employment, he started each morning by opening the job offering pages and scanning for one or two ads to respond to with his lackluster resumé. He didn’t have the skills or education for most of the jobs, but he sent out emails anyway to reach his quota. He had sent his CV to twenty companies before he noticed “diploma” was misspelled (he never did catch the “attention to detail” typo under “Special Skills”). By ten most mornings, he abandoned his perfunctory job hunt and was back on the message boards. Day after day, that was his life.
~~~
Roughly four months after exiting the clink, Brian met a girl online. He had drifted through 120 days of unbroken tedium – sixteen weeks without a meaningful interaction with a corporeal person outside his home – before something good finally happened in his life.
She went by the name “Hannah Mantegna.” Her avatar was the pop star Miley Cyrus with a scraggly, gray goatee photoshopped on. After nearly a month of replying to each other’s comments with increasingly flirty quips, Futzy and Hannah moved to private messages where, for the first time since prison, Brian revealed his real first name to someone online. Her name was Dani, and she lived in the suburbs of Atlanta. Brian’s infatuation with her and their hours of conversation grew so immense that fellow commentators on his regular message boards began commenting about his absence. One late night when Brian was, against house rules, quite drunk, he suggested that they meet up. Dani liked the idea.
The next morning, the flaw in this plan dawned on Brian: he couldn’t leave Alabama. He didn’t want to confess this to Dani, not in a PM. He would tell her the truth, absolutely, but only once they had met. That kind of information was better delivered in person. So as not to have to get into the matter online, he invented an excuse for why he couldn’t get out to Georgia: he didn’t own a car (technically true). He then worked to convince Dani that DeVane would be a fun place to visit.
“I’ll take you to all my favorite spots.” It would be a short tour.
They spent days planning the visit, settling on a weekend in late September. For the first time since that drunken night by the church, Brian felt the thrill of anticipation for the future.
Then Dani’s replies started to peter out.
The first day she apologized, explaining that she had fought with her boss at work and was feeling depressed. Stretching himself mentally, Brian offered comforting words. She thanked him for his kindness, and he immediately felt like a hero. He started to think of their connection as a relationship; Brian was buoyant. But the next day, she wrote back only a few times, the replies hours apart. After a week, she stopped replying altogether.
“U there?” was the last message he sent her. He sent it five times.
Dani had given no hints of what had changed, so Brian’s mind raced through possibilities. The pendulum of theories swung wildly from concern (“maybe she’s sick”) to anger (“she’s just a bitch”) to rationalization (“probably a catfish”). Then the worst option occurred to him: He had told her his name and hometown. She must have googled him.
In fact, Dani was twenty-seven-year-old Danielle Rollins, a 5’3”, 240-pound African American woman. Since her avatar featured a sexualized white girl, most men who interacted with her online treated her as such, and her virtual persona developed to match. As her two sisters pointed out constantly, Dani’s tastes in pop culture weren’t typically “Black,” so on the boards she frequented, there was a default level of assumed whiteness that she never pushed back on. Technically, she never lied because no one ever asked.
“Would you send me a picture of you?” Brian asked that night he suggested meeting in person. Dani had resisted, citing her legitimate concerns about revealing too much online. Brian, equally protective of his anonymity, didn’t press the matter. But that simple request had punctured the illusion of their computer-generated romance. If they met in the flesh, he would see the real Dani and everything she hated about herself. Which was everything. So, she ghosted him.
Though their digital dalliance lasted not even four weeks, when it was over, Brian felt its crushing absence like it was the end of a years-long relationship. He played gray-toned songs with titles like “Without You” and “I Should’ve Known” or furious Scandinavian metal with indiscernible lyrics. His online posts lost their sense of humor, transforming into screeds without a target. Though no one on the message boards could have known about his abortive romance with Dani, he sensed in their confused and defensive responses that those posters he had come to think of as friends were choosing her in their breakup. He felt banished. He stopped commenting.
When he did visit the boards, he found Dani was no longer posting. So, he scrolled through old discussions and down voted Hannah Mantegna’s past comments.
Brian stumbled upon other online communities, ones that were less concerned with pop culture and decidedly more obsessed with women; specifically, what their deals were and how they were whores. Now, his open tabs were more educational. He learned the differences between Alpha and Beta males – he feared he was a Beta, but surviving prison was pretty Alpha, so? – added terms like “cuck” and “feminazis” to his vocabulary, and began religiously reading blogs by men who professed to have unlocked the secrets to the female heart (or anatomy). Women, he discovered, had evolved to confuse and subjugate the opposing gender. Alpha males weren’t fooled by their treacheries.
In a subgroup of a subgroup on a pick-up artist’s website, Brian found an anonymous collection of ex-inmates sharing their experiences and openly discussing the circumstances leading up to their arrests. On the inside, Brian had kept to himself as much as possible so as to not invite anyone’s attention. For those nine months, he had avoided the types of people that occupied this subgroup. Now, they were the only ones he could relate to.
There was DDtranq, who had broken a man’s nose and arm in a bar fight, and Cloud69, who, wasted at nineteen, had crashed his mother’s van into a parked Lexus. MewMoonity had sold speed to an undercover cop; JohnHenryAintWeak had done the same, but meth. AuAgCu1488, who insisted he was innocent – they all insisted they were innocent, but he really insisted – had done time for battery of his girlfriend, which was obviously a crock of shit because they were still together, and why would she stick around if he’d done what they said he’d done?
Brian admitted committing arson, but he left out two details: first, that it had been the drunken act of a listless fool, not a pyro-anarchist, and second, that he had torched a church. When pressed, he said it was an abandoned building. The group agreed that was hardly worth doing time for.
Brian liked these guys, in part because there were members in it whose pitifulness dwarfed even his own. Also, there was no judgment here, no subjects off limits. It was liberating. A couple of the regulars proudly claimed they were in the Aryan Brotherhood and referred to other people solely by their corresponding slur. Brian found some of their words distasteful, but he never objected. Free expression was a sacred tenet for these men.
He was happy to belong.
~~~
Maggie Castle noticed the change in her son. The boy had come out of prison quiet and pensive, which she took as evidence that he had gained some perspective. Brian was served well by admonishment; she clearly hadn’t provided enough. Now, more than five months since his return, he was talking more, but only in pointed remarks and dismissive, haughty tirades that she couldn’t follow. Everything irritated him, and absolutely nothing elicited even a spark of joy in his perpetually heavy-lidded eyes. She wanted him to see a therapist.
Carl Castle didn’t notice any difference in Brian, but if his moron of a son insisted on sassing his mother, all he needed was a fist to the teeth, not therapy. His wife made everything so damn complicated.
~~~
One afternoon, nearly six months after his release, Brian was in the middle of typing out a lengthy exegesis on female disloyalty when his ma knocked on his door.
“Phone for you.”
Though he wasn’t allowed a cellphone, Brian had an extension of the family landline in his bedroom. He picked up.
“Is this Brian Castle?” The man had an accent that Brian couldn’t place; maybe Russian?
“It is.”
“Hi Brian, my name’s Arjun Raj. I manage the Express Mart on Court. I have your resumé here and was wondering if you were free to come in for an interview.”
“For what?”
“For an interview?” the voice repeated.
“Oh, um, sure. Yeah, I can do that.”
“Great. Would this afternoon work?”
Brian paused for a moment, almost reflexively saying he couldn’t make it before remembering he had nothing else to do. Ever. Doing nothing had become such an intricate part of his day, it’d come to feel like a responsibility.
“I can do that. Maybe three?”
“Three works. You know where we’re located?”
“I do.”
“Great! See you at three, Brian.”
Brian wasn’t sure how he was supposed to feel, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t depressed. He’d gone so long without a response to his emails – he didn’t even remember applying to Express Mart – he had given up all expectations. What was he supposed to do now? Sitting back in his chair, he stared at the block of text he had been about to send. He deleted it.
Following a still intact reflex, he entered a few keystrokes and was suddenly staring at Hannah Mantegna and a screen of their private messages that had ended with his repeated (needy) “U there?” His fingers hovered over the keys.
Dani had known he was looking for work. Brian mentioned it early in their exchanges, and she had been genuinely sympathetic (“looking 4 work is the worst”), which had made him feel less pitiful. Maybe his good news would bring her out of hiding.
“I got a job.”
Sure, it was premature, but it was the Express Mart. He’d have to be a complete dipshit to not be able to land a job there.
His ma made lunch for him, as she did every day, and left it on the counter, expecting him to grab the ham sandwich and chips and retreat to his room. Instead, he sat at the kitchen table. Having forgotten the protocol for such an event, the two of them sat across from each other in silence, Brian chewing with child-like, oversized bites. He didn’t mention the job interview.
After that ten-minute break, he returned to his room and immediately checked his PMs. That was how he’d spent the last week of his flirtation with Dani, compulsively checking his messages every few minutes. She hadn’t responded; she wouldn’t respond. He berated himself for allowing false hope to bubble up.
Just a bitch.
~~~
At two, unable to focus on the message boards, Brian left his room and slipped out the front door while his ma watched TV in her bedroom. By bike, it would take him ten minutes to reach the Express Mart, but there was time to kill, and a walk would help clear his head before the interview.
It had been a few weeks since Brian last spent a sustained amount of time outside. The temperatures had dropped. It wasn’t exactly cold, but having rushed out the door without a jacket, his hands quickly grew numb and red in the brisk air. It was quiet; all the kids were in school and everyone else was working.
The neighborhood where he had grown up, where he had first ridden a bike and learned the rules of baseball and taken his first punch at the age of nine, was no longer his home. He didn’t know when that happened. The familiar houses were still there, the mailboxes with the same names – Nolan, Jones, Williamson – and the front doors were the same colors as he remembered from elementary school. No, the neighborhood hadn’t changed; he had.
Unmarried Graham Coulson stood on his porch in overalls and a flannel button-up. His salt-and-pepper beard had grown whiter and mangier since Brian last saw him, while his pocked skin still looked like stretched leather. The man always had a cigarette in his hand; there it was, pressed between his forefinger and a coffee mug (probably filled with whiskey). The old man eyed Brian suspiciously as the ex-felon crossed in front of his lawn.
After fifteen minutes, Brian was in sight of DeVane’s Main Street. The town’s commerce district was ten square blocks of shops, restaurants, and offices. It began with two banks on opposite corners and a weathered, wooden sign that announced, “Welcome to DeVane, Alabama, Est. 1878.” In its century-and-a-half of history, DeVane had once been a seat of influence in the state; those days were long gone.
It was two thirty by the time the Express Mart came into view. Still having time to kill, Brian entered Kramer’s Hardware. The shop had stood on the corner of Main and Court far longer than Brian had been alive. The one employee on duty acknowledged the bell chime of Brian’s entrance with a nod in his direction, but he was occupied helping Ruth Humphries, the sixty-eight-year-old widow of Glenn Humphries, whose family had lived in the area since slavery was legal. Brian slipped down the far row to avoid any interaction.
Brian’s pa used to bring him to Kramer’s for lawn care products or whenever the toilet needed repair. Brian had looked forward to those trips because they meant listening to the radio – his ma didn’t like music in the house, it gave her a headache – and because the wrenches and gruesomely sharp tools hanging from the walls fascinated them. He used to press the tip of his finger against the teeth of the saws until it pinched. Now, staring at the back wall and the same old assortment of handsaws, he felt the piercing metal calling out to him.
He spun away and marched out of the store. He was sweating.
He decided to show up to his interview early. That’d be a good first impression.
“Great to meet you Brian,” Arjun greeted him. The man, who Brian had pictured in his fifties, was maybe two or three years older than him, and good-looking, with long black hair pulled back in a ponytail and dark, lustrous skin. Brian felt intimidated in the man’s presence—did that make him a Beta cuck?
“You’ll have to give me a second. I’m waiting for one of my employees to arrive so he can cover the counter. If you want, you can head back through that door.” He indicated the “Employees Only” door next to the restroom. “Take a seat and I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
On the other side of the door, Brian found a narrow, claustrophobic hallway, made narrower by a set of half lockers lining the right wall. On the opposite wall was a cork board with a set of notes and announcements hung haphazardly on it, and next to that, a gray and faded poster explaining the federal minimum wage.
Against the wall were two metal folding chairs. Brian sat.
“Did you bring a copy of your resumé?” Arjun asked once he came back ten minutes later.
“Oh, no, I didn’t.”
“Okay, well, I think I have it somewhere. Remind me of your name.”
“Brian. Castle.” He was suddenly assaulted by a flashback to his parole hearing.
“Castle, right,” Arjun said as he shuffled papers on his desk. Brian saw his name in the pile.
“Uh, there it is,” Brian offered, pointing at a dolefully bare sheet of paper.
“Ah, yes. Thanks.” Scanning the resumé, a cloudy, ambiguous expression fell over Arjun’s face. Confusion? Maybe annoyance.
“So, not a lot of work experience?” Arjun said after skimming it.
“No, um, just working at my pop’s office during the summers in high school.”
“‘Cleaning, sorting files,’” Arjen read from the paper.
“Yeah,” Brian offered sheepishly.
“Okay, well, let me tell you what we’re looking for before we go any further. We have overnight shifts available on the weekends. These shifts are from ten at night to six thirty in the morning, Friday through Sunday. Obviously, not the most popular shifts, but they pay an extra two fifty an hour, and in a few months there’ll be the possibility of switching to day shifts. Does that interest you at all?”
No, actually, it didn’t. At all. It sounded miserable. But what else did Brian have going on? The last time he had gone out on a weekend, it was dinner with his parents, and he’d fought with his pa.
Brian nodded.
“Great. We’re looking for someone that can start right away. This weekend, preferably. Are you available?”
“Y-yeah. I could do that.” Brian’s heart felt like lead as he found himself accepting the job he absolutely did not want.
“That’s really great. Well, look, why don’t you come in on Friday, around nine thirty, and we’ll have you fill out the paperwork, your W-2. We’ll also do a background check. That work for you?”
Brian nodded mechanically. The words “background check” had interrupted his cognitive function.
All of a sudden, he was standing outside. He couldn’t remember how the conversation had ended or what he had agreed to. All he knew for sure was he hadn’t told Arjun that his record included felony arson.
He walked home in a fog, unsure whether to go back and explain or just leave it. The information would be revealed in the background check. And so what if it did, he didn’t want the job anyway.
Thirty minutes later, he entered the family home through the back door. His ma, who was washing a dish over the sink, was startled by her son coming in from the outside.
“Where have you been?” she asked.
Brian ignored her, slipping past and returning to his shelter. In his computer chair, he made up his mind: he wouldn’t even bother showing up on Friday. It was a shitty job, anyway. Something better would come along.
Moving the mouse on his desk, his computer came back to life. On his screen was the last thing he had viewed before he left, his exchange with Dani (because of course he checked it one last time). To his astonishment, there was a new message from Hannah Mantegna waiting for him: “Congrats! That’s GREAT News! What’s the job?”
Brian stared at the words without comprehension, gallons of acid churning in his gut. He felt like crying. He always felt like crying.
Brian clicked on the “x” in the corner. Hannah disappeared.
~~~
He took the job. If the store manager did a background check on Brian, he was apparently unbothered by his stint in Elmore Correctional.
Friday to Sunday each week, Brian manned the till at Express Mart, the only store in DeVane that stayed open twenty-four hours. He worked on his own, mostly restocking the shelves for the morning rush and shooing two inebriated homeless men away from the entrance. By the third week, he knew both men’s names, Milton and Dixon. They provided intermittent distraction during the shift.
The weekend gig allowed no room for a social life, which, it turned out, was a relief. Brian had an excuse to continue his slide into obscurity. Also, the job was easy. A night shift that no one else wanted was hard to screw up. The worst reprimand he ever got was an unnecessarily long lecture from Arjun about ensuring the dairy products weren’t left out. Other than that, so long as he showed up on time, his employment was secure. Punctuality was one virtue Brian had learned at Elmore.
For the next half year, Brian worked at the store without event, without issue. He was able to pay a minimal rent to his parents and save a little, all while regularly checking in with his parole officer. It wasn’t a particularly fulfilling existence; that would have been too much to expect. But it was uncomplicated. He still spent most of his free time on the internet, frequenting the ex-cons group, though he lurked more, commented less. He would also check his former online haunts to see if Dani had started posting again. She hadn’t. No, Brian’s life wasn’t great, but it was unremarkable, and that was the best outcome he could allow himself to hope for under the circumstances. He could live with it.
One Friday shift in March, roughly a year after his release, he was flipping through a Playboy magazine when a man entered the store. It was just after three. No one was around, not even Milton or Dixon. The man was wearing a puffy black coat, an all-black baseball cap, and a wool scarf pulled up to cover his mouth. The only identifiable characteristic was his piercing blue eyes. He was jittery. Brian immediately understood the situation: a robbery. Even before the man pulled it out of his pocket, Brian knew he had a gun. He had been trained for this. Arjun told him he should not be surprised if such a scenario arose. The manager didn’t say this, but it was obvious: This was why no one else would take the shift.
“Empty the till,” the gunman demanded in a husky voice, handing over a plain tan tote bag, his black pistol pointed at Brian’s chest. Brian followed his training: obey the robber, hand over any easily accessible money, don’t be a hero. All things he could do. There were multiple posted signs that explained the employee on duty couldn’t access the safe. This guy was going to take away, at most, a few hundred dollars. An acceptable loss, for the store and Brian.
Brian set the bag on the counter, and the robber picked it up.
“They’re gonna catch you,” Brian said, surprising himself.
“Excuse me?” the robber barked through his scarf.
“I’m just saying,” he shrugged. “They have, like, ways of tracking you.”
The robber stared at him, and for a moment, Brian wondered if the man was going to shoot him. He didn’t feel afraid, not really, more intrigued by the possibility.
“No they won’t,” the robber finally said, confident. He turned to the door.
“How do you know?” Brian asked, sincerely curious.
“Because,” the robber said at the door, “I’m not a fucking idiot.” Seconds later, the man had disappeared into the night. Brian closed the till drawer and looked up at his little reflection in the convex security mirror over the entrance.
“Oh,” he said to himself.//
About the Author
Joseph Lyttleton studied creative writing at the University of Kansas. Following graduation, Lyttleton created the self-funded travel project 10 Cities/10 Years.
For a decade, he lived in a new U.S. city every year, including San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, and Brooklyn. He has written about his project for The Washington Post and Newsweek and was featured in U.S. News and World Report.
He has been published in Third Wednesday, After Dinner Conversation, The Lit Nerds, and Across the Margin, among others, and won the 2012 Abstract Quill Short Story Contest.
Following the completion of his 10 Cities project, Lyttleton moved abroad in 2017 and now lives with his partner in Madrid, Spain, where he is a freelance editor and writer. He also currently co-hosts the Madrid Writers Group. You can find him at
https://10cities10years.comhttps://10cities10years.com
About the Author
