Dollie swung the chicken basket out of the frier as unnoticed grease leapt up onto her bulging forearm. Her gloved finger waved in Josh’s face. His eyes looked on as more grease gurgled and popped to the beat of the neglected chicken timer. Her choice words lost meaning in the kitchen heat; he tilted his neckbeard a bit higher, out of grease and spittle reach. Her face went blank, losing it’s crimson hue; her bleach white hair glimmered peripherally in the heat lamp. She scrambled off troll-like with her apron strings swinging between her stubby legs.

The country college town was hemorrhaging. It’s foundation shook with the weight of new condominiums. Its roads were narrow and crumbling; their inadequacies long patched over. Creeping dozers barred short cuts like a cruel, ill-timed embargo. The summer — a usual time of exodus and healing — seemed hell bent upon destruction. The blazing sun withered the soil; bone dry forests took fire, blanketing the region in ash and billowing smoke. Hurricanes loomed on the horizon.

Still, investors flocked. Old storefronts came crashing down overnight; shiny new outlets rose — capped by loft luxury suites. Tuition increased, admissions grew selective, but new students and young professionals flocked — riding the wave of recent television and magazine exposure.

Southern intolerance fermented. The new breed of student had grown up without segregation, Jim Crowe laws, and lynchings. They were baffled to arrive experiencing a pervasive folksy racism. Tension bristled ironically in the air, riding a constant wave of mating love bugs.

Forgotten by city officials in chaos, veterans of every war roamed the streets in increasing numbers. The homes they left behind were long gone — bowled over by suburban sprawl — pushing poverty to new extremes.

Josh walked outside with the afternoon sun blazing down on his black visor. He took a drag from his cigarette as he walked slowly down the hill to the two-lane highway below. The remnants of a sidewalk at his feet were littered with fragments of shattered armadillo and broken glass. A muddy creek wound its way up the side of the hill and into anonymous layers of kudzu, bricked off at last by a wide stone wall covered by a mass of vines and tangled graffiti popping vivid from the darkness. Rising high above the wall, Colonel Sanders’s bearded, smiling face looked out over the speeding traffic.