by Dustin Triplett
Everyone in town called her Saint Julie.
Saint Julie of the Holy Beer Breath. Saint Julie of the Burnt TV Dinners and Backhanded Blessings. Saint Julie, who could flick a cigarette at you from across the kitchen and hit you right in the childhood.
But when she died—when her liver finally gave out like a bad knee on a long run—we made her a saint for real. Because that’s what you do in a town like ours. You canonize the abusers and barbecue the victims. You hold a potluck for pain and ask folks to bring devilled eggs and forgiveness.
I gave the eulogy. Said she was a “pillar of the community,” even though that pillar was cracked, crumbling, and stained with years of spilled vodka and bingo rage.
I said, “She raised me right.”
I said, “She loved hard.”
I said, “She had her demons, but who doesn’t?”
Then I vomited in the parking lot behind Saint Mary’s and blamed it on the heat.
**
The truth was: I was six when she first knocked me into the wall.
Eight when she said I ruined her life.
Ten when she started calling me Gary, my dead father’s name, during hangovers that made her sweat holy water.
Twelve when I learned to lie better than she ever could.
She died in ‘98, in a hospital gown that had more dignity than she ever wore in life. The nurses looked at me with tilted heads, like maybe they’d seen her soften for a second—just long enough to call me her “little lamb” before spitting blood in my direction.
“You must’ve meant the world to her,” one of them said.
“Yeah,” I replied. “She was my everything.”
**
After she died, I started seeing her everywhere.
Not in a sweet, sentimental way. No, nothing out of a Hallmark card. More like she was haunting me from the discount aisle of the afterlife.
She showed up in gas station bathrooms, humming Patsy Cline. I’d be taking a piss and hear her crooning behind the paper towel dispenser like it was an altar.
Sometimes she’d show up in dreams, wearing her old blue Walmart vest and a crown made of beer tabs. “Tell them I was good,” she’d whisper, peeling an orange with a switchblade.
And I’d say, “You weren’t.”
She’d grin. “I know, baby. But say it anyway.”
**
There’s a lie that crawls under your skin like a tick. The one where you turn a monster into a martyr because it’s easier than admitting no one was ever coming to save you.
I believed the lie because it meant I hadn’t wasted my childhood begging for love from a blackout.
I believed it because the truth would make me flinch in grocery stores whenever I passed the whiskey aisle. I believed it because lies are lullabies for adults.
You hum them in therapy.
You sing them at funerals.
You pass them down like recipes for dysfunction.
**
I met a woman named Amber in ’99. Told her my mother died a hero.
“She must’ve been amazing,” Amber said.
“She was,” I lied.
Amber had a laugh like radio static and a tattoo of a cartoon devil on her wrist. She smelled like menthols and supermarket flowers. We got married in ‘01 and divorced in ‘03, mostly because I was chasing a version of myself that never existed. The kind of man raised by a woman worth remembering.
Amber called me out once, right after I woke up screaming from a dream where my mother tried to drown me in a baptismal font.
“You ever think you don’t miss her—you miss what you wish she was?”
I told her to fuck off.
Then I cried in the bathroom, sitting on the closed toilet lid like it was a pew.
**
One day, I drove past the house I grew up in. It had a new coat of paint and a plastic flamingo in the yard. The porch swing was still there, probably still unbalanced, always leaning to the side like it had been drinking too.
I parked across the street and watched a kid ride his bike in lazy circles around the driveway. The kind of lazy that comes from safety. From knowing no one’s going to scream your name like it’s a curse word.
I saw myself in that kid. Or maybe I saw the version of myself that never had to lie to survive.
And for a second, I wished I could break into that house, peel the drywall back, and show the world the truth. The holes in the wall. The empty bottles in the vents. The cigarette burns in the linoleum that looked like constellations when I was too afraid to sleep.
**
But nobody wants the truth. They want the myth.
They want Saint Julie with her Sunday smiles and casserole dishes.
They want the woman who worked double shifts and taught Bible school and wore sadness like a second skin.
They don’t want the woman who once made me kneel on rice for spilling her gin.
Or the one who called me “a little bitch just like your father” and laughed as I bled from my nose.
No. That version doesn’t fit in the photo albums.
**
They say grief is love with nowhere to go. But I think it’s more like a drunk driver.
It doesn’t care where it ends up,
doesn’t care who it hits,
just wants to keep moving so it doesn’t have to think.
Saint Julie was my drunk driver.
I just happened to survive the crash.
Dustin Triplett is a creative Swiss army knife who specializes in poetry and fiction that isn’t afraid to get its hands dirty. His work explores the messy middle ground between love and loss, memory and myth. When not writing, he’s probably overthinking something that happened ten years ago.
This piece was selected as a winner of our ‘Lies’ writing competition, and will be published in diceroll magazine issue II.
diceroll press 