Finish Me.

The secret was once hot and juicy inside a red and white paper bag now crumpled into a ball and thrown in the back seat. It was shoved beside the console making translucent oily splotches. It was being picked out of teeth by a tiny wooden spire controlled by nauseous regret. It wafted out of a car with the scent of hot fabric and vinyl every time the door swung open and slammed closed again.

It was packed away inside a neon colored thermal lunch-bag and floated above the parking lot dangling from a hand with short bloated fingers. It went into the community refrigerator and every time the bag came out and went back inside, it was lighter. The secret got heavier upon mixing with saliva, breaking down into less complex structures while shooting into mouth reactors that caused tiny explosions of joy, pleasure snapping and popping between ears.

Jingling money went into a slot on a machine with a clear glass window and the secret inched forward in a shiny bright wrapper, falling a few feet into a contraption where it landed with a crackling crash. It took flight through an escape hatch in the clutches of its defiler. It later got stuck to office doorknobs and keyboards and adding machines and made appearances during staff meetings while handing out documents.

It came to the doors of apartments and houses in flat square boxes and the gooey masses arrived in perfect rounds to deliver the secret on cardboard platters. Cut into various shapes and sizes, it was too hot for fingertips and burned delicate skin on roofs of mouths.

In every instance, the mechanical motion of jaw clamping and moist rapture mixed with salacious gurgling ...and the secret made itself known with a tiny voice whispering, “Finish me.”

Letting Go

Daddy never gave her no discipline. Daddy never gave her nothing to keep her there, to make her feel safe, to let her know that she was secure and protected in his house that he owned, not her mama. Daddy only gave her a ball of twine and a knife and said go for it honey I love you. Into the wild she went out with bushy tangled hair and a dirty mouth casting nets into every bay catching all the fishes she could, scaling them one by one and gouging out their eyes like $5 cubic zirconia studs.

Along came the man with the bowler hat and the walking stick and he said baby I’m gonna give you the world. I’m gonna knock you down and drag you back to my cave by those sweet silvery blond locks. I’m gonna toss you on your ass and hold you down until you surrender and beg me to give you the loving home you deserve. I’m gonna take care of everything, picking out one little thorn in your soul at a time.

She felt the sting of a strong hand smashing into her buttocks like a crash cymbal at the grand finale of a great symphony. Vibrations of the sharp cracking sound resonated through her backside up her spine to her ears and out in flickering sparks through the top of her head and she whimpered stretching her fingers like webs on the edge of the bed. Letting go with a moaning exhale, she felt it again. She was a bad girl wild child who needed to know her place in this world - right there, bent over and crumpled like a sleeping new born underneath his hot face as he thought baby I’m gonna make you come home.

On Time For The Last Time

The ambulance pulled up slowly without lights flashing or sirens blaring. A kind looking young gentleman in an EMT uniform stepped down from the driver’s seat and shut the door of the cab, sighing.

Inside the house, the old woman died. There was a 911 call in a calm and iridescent voice, floating through telephone wires on grumbly vibrations to alert the world of its weight loss. Twenty-one grams lighter, the body felt like a thousand pounds as the EMT picked up her stone cold stiffness. Her eyes remained open like black sea-shell marbles. Her chest was still wet with her husband’s tears as he watched from the corner of the yellowed living room with his elbow connecting to a hand hovering over his eyes. He wept.

They were married for forty-one years and never had a baby. Their house was a grandfather clock in the neighborhood as they exited and entered the garage in a blue 1984 Cadillac Seville. They would return with groceries in brown paper bags, silently lifting them with spindly arms. He opened the knob, she went through the door, and it clicked shut behind them. They wouldn’t come out again until the clock donged next.

She left the house for the last time on squeaky wheels under a white sheet. The Seville hovered closely behind her as they went soundlessly in the direction of the hospital. And the neighborhood was five minutes late forever after.

It's a girl!

She used to be somebody. She used to walk into a room and people would look to her to find out what was going to happen next. She was loved by everyone who knew her and she was the prettiest and smartest person in the place. The sincerity of her importance would make you look twice at her deep painted face and three times at her clever droll jokes. She could stare you down and drag you around for days. She was the last person up with a bottle of warm straight in one hand and a long ashy cigarette in the other inviting whoever and whatever to early morning parties where we hated when those birds would chirp.

And then her brain exploded and colorful bits of flesh splattered all over the walls of her tiny universe leaving trinkets of suicide for everyone to remember fondly like ski trips and beach vacations on mantles all over the Norman Rockwell nation. She died at the end of the summer when people were still wiping sweat from their brows and their balls and hanging on to Indian days like it was the last season of life on Earth. For her, it was the last season of death.

She came flying out of the vagina of stark raving sobriety like a blue baby without crying or gasping for air. The doctor with the head mirror and the cigar held her by her feet, slapped her on the ass and said this one’s gonna take a minute to catch up with the rest of us. She coughed up the blood of her mother and took a breath, screaming into the night for hours, days, weeks, months. She woke up from the nightmare of being the center of the universe and something clicked. Click.