Gospel For the Wayward Daughters

Preface and writer’s note:

“How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?”

I recently read an excerpt of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. Having come across themes of the Southern Gothic in my school studies of Tennessee Williams (who is quickly becoming one of my favourite playwrights) and authors like Flannery O’Connor, I wanted to write a piece inspired not only by the Southern Gothic aesthetic, but by the feelings it embodies: the ache of decay and the search for meaning or the divine.

Southern Gothic is a literary tradition that subverts the romanticized antebellum South, peeling back its glorified image to expose a haunting core of decay, violence, and profound social unease. It is characterized by a pervasive sense of destruction—often presented in crumbling mansions, sweltering towns, settings where the past still linger in the present. The genre explores timeless themes of isolation, trauma, and the search for grace in a world where traditional Southern gentility can no longer survive. You might be able to see inspirations from some Southern Gothic writers—such as Blanche DuBois’ yearning for lost love and a genteel past, Faulkner’s idea that the dead are not gone but constant, and O’Connor’s fusion of the sacred and grotesque. Ultimately, the love story here is a tragedy. It is an intimate connection that is, from the very first line, destined to be mourned. I hope this piece will allow you to feel the love between those who are fundamentally solitary in spirit.

Artwork: ‘Christina’s World’ by Andrew Wyeth (1948)

Sometimes, I do believe that the dead see the way we love.

When this thought hits me, we are hiding in the barn’s ribcage, where the white-washed walls are splintering and the hay smells like sweat and summer’s stale air. Giggling, I watch as you tightly hug the basket of apples we stole from the Old Man’s fruit stand. And before I know it, you are pressing one to my lips, and the juice runs down my chin. My skin burns as your thumb catches it. 

In this town, the dead are all around us, even now. They crowd the supper table while we help your mother set the china plates. They know which one of us will marry the preacher’s son next spring, and which of us will vanish into the kudzu-choked clearing one night like a spooked mare being swallowed by the humid dark.

They watch us from the rafters where the spiders spin lace webs, from the warped floor boards, from the rusted nails that snags your dress hem when you move too fast. They are watching. Oh, god, they are watching. 

They’ve been with us since we were girls; since the summer that boy drowned in the quarry. I still remember the townspeople pulling him up with riverstones in his pockets and his bible bloated with water. Accident, the sheriff called it. But we knew better. We’d seen him lingering behind a tree, watching older boys dive shirtless into the murk. Now those same boys toss coins, beer cans, and the occasional bouquet of carnations into the water. Their laughter ripples across the surface.

Turn the light off, you whisper. I oblige. I know what you’re afraid of—the way the light might catch the sweat on my collarbone, the way my fingers tremble when they graze your ankle. The dark here is different. It’s thick as baptismal water, or the quilt your grandmother stitched from scraps of her wedding dress to keep you warm during the winter. And the dead don’t warn us. They just watch, their breathless mouths parted, as you stretch across the warped floorboards, your hair fanning out like a stain.

The dead know how this ends. They’ve seen it a hundred times before—girls like us, loving in dark places, loving like it’s something to be survived. One day, you’ll pack your mother’s car with everything but me. You’ll leave me standing in the yard, the porch light buzzing like a fly trapped in a jar. I’ll lie to myself and refuse to breathe as your taillights disappear.