Tag: small town

Everything Must Go

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She woke before dawn to secure the sign into her yard. “EVERYTHING MUST GO!” it said in large, block letters she had traced from a stencil. “EVERYTHING” was waiting under blanketed tables in the garage, which she trundled out into the driveway as the neighbors’ lights clicked on for the day. She sipped from a thermos of coffee, breathing heavily with the strain of lifting and the uneasiness of letting go.

When folks arrived she greeted them with a smile, saying, “PRICES NEGOTIABLE!” with the same enthusiasm as the sign, as if stenciled. She watched the knickknacks dwindle down throughout the day, tallying each purchase in a ledger. In her heart was another ledger, taking toll in a different way.

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Amish Tracks (Part 1)

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Note: This is a WIP. I haven’t shared WIPs in years, but I am hoping that doing so inspires me to keep going and see the thing through to the end. The best comp I can give for this piece (and hope to achieve at the conclusion) is Perks of Being a Wallflower set in a small Iowa town. Please let me know if you have any parts you like, or things you want to see in future sections!

I hand Nick the nearly-spent joint, watching his thin lips puff at the damp butt; I imagine the molecules of our saliva mixing in the paper fibers, against my better judgment.

“Careful, Trent! Squirrel!” shouts Veronica from the back seat.

I swerve just in time to dodge the skittering creature, the neon contents of our Big Gulps – blue raspberry, lime, tropical punch – sloshing from side to side in the cupholders of my ancient Mercury.

“Jesus,” Nick coughs, hacking out a cloud of smoke that quickly vanishes out the window, into the golden-hour light. “I swear they’ve got a death wish. Remember how Mr. Larrabee would say the wildlife around here have scrambled brains because of the chemical runoff from the factories out east? God, I miss that guy.”

“Dude, didn’t he get, like, sent upriver for sexting Jenifer O’Hair? He’s a fucking creep,” says Veronica.

“There’s beauty in the breakdown,” I reply, pointing to the cassette-to-aux converter plugged into the dashboard tinnily playing “Let Go” through the car speakers.

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/homeaway/

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The drive home is a rabies shot, agitated,
you twitch from state line to county line
to places in between,
the coordinates slipstream daydreams —
You remember the road numbers:
145th, 194th
impossibly lengthy, made of pulverized
bonemeal and crunch coat,
those steel-cut graveled byways

You remember the inhabitants
rendered from bacon fat and ham hock
tourniquets and night shift salt licks
Or those pubertied boys and their
percussion kits behind the old band shell,
blasting canonfire flams back there
on Thursday nights, before the
sweating, stinking performance

of pops classics, patriotica,
the flags swatting the air,
or was that the yellowed sheet
music, free from clothespin
bondage?

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One Shotgun, Two Ways

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Uncle Leroy’s bare arm was pressed against the vinyl seat cushion for so long that when he unstuck himself to stand and deliver Cousin Darryl’s eulogy, the creases that remained were shaped like the design on a fresh-opened pat of butter. But what could you expect, wearing a cutoff shirt to a funeral? We tried telling him each time we had one of these damn things (the number was getting up there now) that they were supposed to be places of respect, but he always responded that Cousin Darryl (or Sister Patricia or Grandma Diane or Toothless Jim, whoever might be sunnyside up in the casket that week) wouldn’t have gived one fuck what he wore. He had stumped us there, so we let him dress how he pleased.

Hell, he’d likely be laid to rest sleeveless—and soon, by the look of him—so we took the whole ordeal as a premeditated dress rehearsal. Today, for added style, he wrapped a tie around his neck (knotted that fucker, all right, just like you’d tie a noose) and let it hang between his apish tits like a pendulum counting down his final days. It featured a selection of music notes cascading out of a trumpet, overlaid on a pastel gradient. Nobody knew where the hell he got it, but there was something about how it clashed with the dirt and grease stains on the rest of him that made it work.

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