Renee LaBonte-Jones

 “Undue Opacity”

News came to town very late at night about the death of Old Doc Flynn, who had been driving out on the King’s Highway in one of them hellish motor cars— crashed into an embankment with almost no regard to the scores of people whom he’d birthed and healed and operated on for almost fifty years, and who needed his services still. 

The undertaker had been saved by Old Doc Flynn as a boy from a nasty bout of croup. The pallbearers had each been delivered by him in their mothers’ brass beds. The minister who performed the service that sent him on his way still had both feet because Old Doc Flynn had drained the milky white pus from his infection at the very crucial moment years and years before. And the man who owned the scrapyard, and had picked up his wrecked heap of a car at a bargain, would die about a week after the crash from a fall off his roof because the new doctor wouldn’t arrive from Oak Ridge until Thursday.