John Henry Fleming

John Henry Fleming‘s stories have appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The North American Review, Epiphany, Mississippi Review, Fourteen Hills, New World Writing, and The Rupture, among others. He’s also the author of Songs for the Deaf, a story collection; The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman, a novel; Fearsome Creatures of Florida, a literary bestiary; and The Book I Will Write, a novel-in-emails originally published serially. His first middle grade novel, about a girl in a beach condo full of ghosts, is forthcoming from Regal House in 2026. He directs the creative writing program at the University of South Florida and is the founder and advisory editor of Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art. “Midnight, Florida” is adapted from his nearly-complete novel about Elvis in Florida.

Midnight, Florida

It’s a long time ago on a bus from Memphis.

The night sky was different back then—clearer and wider, flecked with milky drops of starlight that burned your eyes to tears if you stared too long. He doesn’t mind the tears. The windshield’s twin panes are his night-eyes, open to the universe, and his hands grip the broad steering wheel like a plow, the empty road reaching like a narrow, fertile field through the forest. He’s tilling the soil for his next crop of fans.

His father always told him the moon had a blue ring around it when he was born, a sign he was destined for greatness. As a boy, he’d spend hours under the night sky, imagining himself soaring. Night after night, he’d stare at the moon, waiting for the blue ring. Everything would be okay then. There’d be a divine plan he would one day figure out.

He’s still waiting. He’s got everything he could have hoped for except the reason any of it happened.

The motor hums all his hits at once in a continuous loop, two octaves low.

“Look at the Milky Way,” he says now to Cousin Gene in the co-pilot’s seat, slapping his shoulder to wake him. “That’s one thing that don’t ever change.”

“Don’t it suppose I,” mumbles Gene in their secret talk. His chin drops and he’s back asleep.

Already this year he’s filmed movies in California and Hawaii. This time it’s Florida. Somewhere south of Memphis and north of a little nowhere called Port Paradise, he leads a tiny caravan weaving through the night. Alan in the Dodge wagon pulling the new boat. Lamar in the Cadillac, drifting to the shoulder, wobbling at the edge of disaster.

Here on the bus, the guys are sprawled on chairs and couches and the carpeted floor, with Cousin Gene slumped beside him. Sharing the driver’s seat is a globe holding the dreams of his hundred million fans. It rests on his shoulders like a pale, high moon.

He can see it almost as well as he can feel it. It spins and wobbles like gelatin on a pottery wheel. It lifts and falls and presses hard.

He’s tired of its weight. Tired of the way everyone else’s dreams keep him from his own.

He can’t even sleep anymore, at least not in the usual sense. When his schedule requires him to close his eyes and be unconscious for a time, he takes enough Valium to send him down beneath the dreams and just this side of nothing. When he has to be awake, he takes enough Dexedrine to clear the fog but not so much he can’t speak his lines clearly. He doesn’t always get the dosage right, but he’s got a Physicians Desk Reference and he’s learning.

He looks again at Gene, envies the way he can nod off so easily and enjoy the peace of his private dreams.

Is it fair?  Nowhere in any of the contracts he’s signed—with Sun Records, RCA, the Colonel, the movie companies—did it say he had to give up his own dreams for others’. It’s a steep price, and someone should have mentioned it.

He tilts the rearview mirror. The bus is quiet except for the interstate hum. He lifts one knee to hold the wheel straight.

He raises his hands palm-up to the level of his shoulders and feels the air for the shape of his burden.

An airy, confused globe of warm particles, a star unborn. Scent like a summer storm. Its weight just an idea to everyone but him, the dreams’ attachment a mystery to everyone but the dreamers themselves.

But it’s not so heavy he can’t lift it. He eases the globe from his shoulders and up over his head, pressing it against the roof of the bus.

He blinks hard. Last time he dared try this it was daylight and he saw the face of Josef Stalin in the clouds. Then the clouds moved and the face became Jesus’s.

It had to mean something. He just hasn’t figured out what.

Tonight he can see all the way down the black road to his destination, the hotel parking lot where tomorrow the girls will greet him with shrieks and shouts.

He can see in the sideview mirrors his unmade bed back at Graceland.

His mother’s grave in Forest Hill Cemetery beneath the statue of Jesus raising his palms the way he is now. 

Up above, the stars are pinpricks of light he can’t stare at directly. The moon’s surface a dried-up seabed strewn with rocks and deep craters, still untouched.

Everything’s made of diamonds.

The globe’s alive, shifting in his fingers. He presses along its side and molds it against the red padded dash. He’s straining. His palm tingles like he’s placed his hand on a speaker. The bus drifts across the center line, and Lamar and Alan flash their lights.

He curls his fingers away like a magician after a trick then grabs the wheel.

It worked—the dreams are a cat curled up on the dash. A big cat, see-through and slightly nervous. But stationary for now.

His vision is terrific, his thoughts clearing. There’s another car approaching fifteen miles down the road, a Buick driven by a man with a thick moustache.

No, now he’s turned off.

The gas station attendant back in Alabama he autographed a receipt for is lying in bed with insomnia. He spots him in the mirrors. The man puts his hand on his wife’s thigh, his wife wakes and lifts her gown, and he’d better get his eyes back on the road before they make love.

Except he does glance back a couple of times.

The universe opens up for him, wider, deeper than he’d ever imagined it. His burden lifted, he’s afloat, barely in his seat, the bus itself gliding along on a cushion of air.

He remembers what it’s like to have no worries, to be a kid again, having adventures with Gene in the dirt under the porch in Tupelo, or losing himself in his mother’s embrace. At night on the roof, staring at the sky, waiting for a blue ring around the moon to reveal his destiny.

The radio DJ spins one of his tunes, “Surrender,” released just last month. Eyes on the sky ten trillion miles ahead, he doesn’t notice the effect of the pulsing Latin beat on the elongated globe. It flickers in time with the electric bass, its jello motion more frantic until it shakes and hops like the hips of his fans.

The globe oozes over the lip of the dash, tongues soundlessly past the knobs of the radio until it ticks against the floor as it bounces.

He hears the tiny extra beat in his song. It takes him a moment to refocus his eyes from so far away and back to the interior of his tour bus, another moment to process the pulsing light.

He flings out his hand to grab the globe and instead backhands it into the main cabin of the bus, where it bounces off the doublewide ass of The Chief then knocks Red in the ear and Sonny in the shoulder before floating over the fridge toward the sink.

No one wakes up.

He holds his breath, sure the thing’s going to pop when it hits the faucet. Imagine the devastation of a hundred million dreams exploding inside his bus.

But no, the thing’s not a balloon, it just acts like one, the way a dream acts real even when it’s not.

The globe deflects off the sink and heads back toward his bedroom and dressing area. Looks for a moment like it’s going to come to rest there. Then his foot slips off the gas and the sudden deceleration sets the globe flying again, bouncing up through the lounge, rolling over a pair of sleeping feet, and launching up to fill the rearview mirror.

He braces. Alan honks behind him, a shout in the night.

He feels a pressure on his shoulder like a twenty-fingered hand. He’s afraid to look. He’ll keep his eyes ahead, enjoying his last few seconds of clear vision and freedom before the thing swallows him up again like that blob from the movie.

It doesn’t happen. The globe springs off Gene, taps the dash, and settles into the door well, nervous and flickering but snug at the bottom step.

He wipes his brow on his shirt sleeve, relaxes his arms on the wheel.

The DJ’s going on about Pepsi-Cola and filtered Kent cigarettes for an audience of insomniacs and truckers. The night air whistles past the door and through a tiny break in the seal he’s going to have someone fix. The draft blows against his neck.

He reaches for the door lever to pull it snug, and when he grips the knob an idea comes over him.

He’s been carrying all these millions of passengers around, more and more since about seven years ago, though it seems like forever. Maybe here at last is the end of the line.

He thinks about how some of the movies he’s been making seem nothing more than excuses for a few songs and some girl-chasing, how most of the songs he’s been recording lately are just excuses to promote the movies. How both the movies and the songs are just excuses to make some people a lot of money, including himself, and if he’s getting tired of the money, what’s the point?  He can’t even give away Cadillacs fast enough to keep up.

It seems forever ago that he first slinked into Sun Studios to make a record for his mother. A truck driver with dreams, just like anyone. Now his mama’s dead and he doesn’t know who he’s singing for.

When he gets to Port Paradise, the girls will swarm him and pull at him and kiss him and try to tear off his clothes, and the security guards will have one hell of a time keeping ‘em off. When he’s not making his movie, he can water ski on the river or the Gulf. He can play in the pool and have firecracker fights with the guys. They can shoot things with the air-guns he just bought them all for the Fourth of July. He’ll have groups of girls brought to his bungalow, and if he has a hard time choosing, he’ll invite two or three into his room and have them wrestle around in their panties. He’ll stay up all night if he wants and take Dexedrine or Dexamil to make it through the next day. Joe or Alan will burn a pound of bacon to a crisp each morning, exactly the way he likes it, and someone will bring in burgers and shakes for lunch, cornbread and buttermilk for dinner, whatever he wants whenever he wants. He’ll play cards all night and win. On breaks, he’ll play touch football on the beach or on the grass, and his team will score every time. He’ll give karate demonstrations and knock Red to the ground or snap four boards in half with his fist or his foot. Whatever he does, he’ll get cheered like he’s a hero home from war.

All he has to do is say his lines, on the set and off.

And he’s not even sure he has to do that.

He started out a kid from the sticks. Now that he’s become a music star who’s playing a movie star who’s playing a kid from the sticks in his next movie, he’s no longer sure he’s convincing in his role.

Just once, just for a while, he’d like to be free of all of it.

He lets his forearm relax and his hand ease its grip. He closes his eyes, takes a breath, and yanks back on the knob.

The door opens wide. He feels the suck of the passing wind. He’s afraid to look, and he can sense it before he does. A hundred million dreams breaking loose on an empty road in the middle of nothing, splitting like atoms, lighting the night without him. It’s a beautiful and terrible sight.