Rusty Barnes's Blog: Fried Chicken and Coffee, page 35

Don't Die Before Your Mother, prose by Mather Schneider

Outside the hotel two little old ladies climbed into the back seat of the cab and felt the air conditioner.

"2212 North Inn Road," one of them said to the driver.

"Are you sure it's not North INA Road?" the driver said into the rearview mirror. He had long scraggly brown hair and his eyes looked as red as a sunset.

"No, no, no," the same woman said. "2212 North Inn Road. I should know my own son's address, shouldn't I?"

The other woman was silent.

"2212 North Inn is the South Lawn Cemetery," the driver said.

"No it's not, it's my son's house," she said. "What's your name, Sir?"

"R.C." the driver said.

"Well, R.C.," she said, "when we get there you'll see."

R.C. drove to the end of North Inn where the cemetery started and then drove around and showed her that the road did not continue.

"What else can happen, Linda?" she said. "We came all the way from Chicago, we put an ad in the paper that cost me a hundred and forty dollars, and now the cab driver doesn't know where John's house is."

"Ma'am," R.C. said. "You have the wrong address."

She exploded. "I DON'T HAVE THE WRONG ADDRESS! JESUS! What's going on? First my son goes and croaks on me, and now I've got to deal with all this."

Linda nodded and kept her fat hands in her fat lap. R.C. called my boss at dispatch.

"They've got the address wrong," R.C.'s boss blurted over the crackling radio. "She must be talking about North Ina."

"You tell that lady she is in the wrong business," the old woman said, pointing her wrinkled old finger at the radio.

"She's been driving a cab in this town for thirty years," R.C. said.

"Look," she said, "my son is dead. I have to find his house and sell it. Ok?"

"I'm sorry."

"Do your mother a favor," she said. "Get a wife. Get a wife so your mother doesn't have to deal with it when you croak. You married?"

"Yes," R.C. said.

"Good boy," she said.

R.C. pulled into the parking lot of a gas station and parked.

"John ate fast food every day," the woman said. "He was a bachelor. He moved here when he was nineteen, and that's just what bachelors do, they eat fast food and don't worry about it."

"Can't you call someone about the address?" R.C. said.

"I don't have a phone," she said. "Do you think everyone in the world has a cell phone?"

R.C. handed her his cell phone.

"Who am I going to call?" she said.

"You could call Melanie, Diane," Linda said quietly.

"I guess I could call Melanie," Diane said.

She managed to dial the number in 3 attempts.

"Be there, Mel," Diane said, while it rang. "For once in your life, be there—Hello Mel, it's mom…" She sighed as she realized it was only an answering machine.

R.C., frustrated, pulled back onto the road and headed back toward their hotel.

Then she got busy with that phone.

"Isn't anyone home?" she said.

She finally got a busy signal. She waited a minute and then called the number again. It rang, and rang, kept ringing.

"It was busy a minute ago," Diane said.

"Some vacation," Linda said, looking out the window at the brilliant day. Three blocks from their hotel, at River and Campbell, by miracle a human being was contacted. However, Diane couldn't seem to get the person on the other line to understand the situation. So she handed the phone to R.C.

"Hello?" he said.

The other person on the line turned out to be a ninety three year old woman in Summum, Illinois.

"Do you know where we are going?" R.C. said loudly.

"Yes," the old woman on the phone said.

"How do we get there?" he said.

"Where are you now?" the old woman said.

"On River Road."

"That's not where it is," the old woman said.

"You don't say," he said.

"It's a long way from there," the old woman said.

"What's the closest cross street?"

"It's off of Park Avenue…"

He hung up.

"Well?" Diane said accusingly. "You figure it out?"

"It's on North INA," R.C. said.

Diane sank back in her seat, and braced herself for the g-forces of R.C.'s u-turn.

Linda had a slight smile on her face.

R.C. dropped them off at 2212 North Ina. The meter said $74.45. He only charged them 50 bucks because he felt sorry for them.

Diane told R.C. they needed a ride back to the hotel at 4 that afternoon. They were not going to sleep in a dead man's house. It would be another 50, so R.C. agreed.

When he showed up at 4 to take them back to the hotel, they were standing in the yard behind the closed security gate. It was heavy steel, about 6 feet tall. When he had dropped them off Diane had pointed the little hand-held remote and the gate jumped to life, sliding slowly against the 6 foot cement wall which surrounded the rest of the property. Then they had walked in and shut the gate behind them.

Now the thing wouldn't open. There was no other gate to walk through, which seemed odd. R.C. wondered about the strange son who had died before his mother. He pulled up and got out and looked at them standing in there like captured animals, half blind in the afternoon sun. Diane had white, short cropped hair. She reminded R.C. of an effeminate man. Linda was Hispanic. She had dark skin with hundreds of little brown moles all over the sides of her face and neck. She used a cane because of a bad right hip.

"Damn thing won't work," Diane said. "Can you believe this?"

She asked R.C. for his phone and while she used it he tried the gate-opener, pressing the single button on it over and over like an idiot.

They stood there, looking at each other through the bars, R.C. on one side, them on the other.

"I can't wait here all day," R.C. said.

"Go on, go on," Diane shooed him away. "We'll call the fire department and they'll come and get us out of here."

R.C. stood there. They didn't even have a god damned phone.

He climbed over the fence with some difficulty.

"There must be a switch or something," he said, out of breath.

They looked everywhere, inside and outside the house. No switches.

R.C. saw a ladder in the back yard of the neighbor's house. He knocked on the door but no one answered, so he went around back and grabbed it.

"How's Linda going to climb a ladder?" Diane said.

"We could try," R.C. said. Linda gave a small nod of consent.

He leaned the ladder against the wall and held it.

"Ok, Linda," he said.

"I've got you," he said, holding the ladder while Linda slowly lifted her left foot up to the first rung. She reached the second rung and then the third, one at a time, each a great effort. If she toppled backwards with her weight there wouldn't be anything R.C. could do about it.

At the top she celebrated with a "Hurrah!" Then she realized she could not lift her leg up over the wall.

"Try going up backward," R.C. said.

The slow process began again downwards and then she turned around and started to put her foot up backwards.

"Like this?" she said.

"You can do it."

She did it. At the top, she moved, one inch at a time, her fat ass onto the wide flat top of the cement block wall. R.C. put his hand on the pendulous waddle of her upper arm. She got both her legs over and was sitting on the wall with me and was quite happy about her accomplishment. She giggled. He moved the ladder over the fence and hopped over and situated the ladder under Linda from the other side.

"Ok," he said. "Come on down." She began to lower herself and we held our breath.

All this time Diane was talking on the cell phone.

"Yes, Mel," Diane was saying, "we tried that. We've tried everything. No, I can't get hold of Bill. I can't get hold of Bill and the cab driver's here and it already cost me 73 dollars for the cab ride, and he couldn't find the address and then we stayed out here all afternoon and no buyers showed up…"

R.C. noted what she said about the fare being 73 dollars, instead of the 50.

"…they got a ladder," Diane said, "What?…Yes, Linda's going over right now."

Diane smiled at Linda who was just then reaching the ground on the other side.

"Land," Linda said, like a sailor after months at sea.

"…Ok," Diane said. "Bye."

Diane handed the phone up to R.C. "My daughter," she said. "She lives in Michigan. I thought she might know something. But of course she didn't. Watch, she'll die on me next."

She nimbly climbed up the ladder and over the wall, a regular gymnast.

"Now do you see?" Diane said to me, shaking the gate controller at me. "Can you blame me? What else can happen? I can't believe this."

"Some vacation," Linda said.

"But you climbed the ladder," R.C. said.

"I can't believe I did it," she beamed. "What was I thinking?"

"Let's get the hell out of here," Diane said. "If John was here I'd kick his ass, I swear I would."

They climbed into the cab and were laughing by the time they were half way back.

R.C. radioed dispatch and they talked and joked about it. The dispatcher said, "I guess we all learned a little lesson today."

R.C. showed Diane and Linda a bakery near their hotel and suggested they have breakfast there. He rolled up to the hotel doors. Diane paid, including a tiny tip. They moaned and groaned with the creaking of old bones as they climbed out of the cab and stood on the sidewalk. They waved goodbye and disappeared into the resort lobby.

"232 Clear," he said into the radio mike.

"10–4, 232," the dispatcher said.

R.C. sat there for a minute. Then he slowly drove over to Jacob's Park, where he found a shady spot and parked the cab. He dialed a number on his cell phone, back in Illinois, and put it to his ear.

 

I was born in Peoria, Illinois in 1970 and have lived in Tucson, Arizona for the past 14 years. I love it here, love the desert, love the Mexican culture (most of it), and I love the heat. I have one full-length book of poetry out called DROUGHT RESISTANT STRAIN by Interior Noise Press and another called HE TOOK A CAB from New York Quarterly Press. I have had over 500 poems and stories published since 1993 and I am currently working on a book of prose.

 

The Ballad of Billy Joe Fitz, fiction by Misty Skaggs

"Well that was a blast!" My fiancée exclaimed as he stuffed his long body and tight Wranglers into the passenger seat of my beat up Ford Focus.

I rolled my eyes in a big dramatic way and turned the key in the ignition. While I tugged at the straps of my black sundress and regretted not wearing a bra, Bill stuck his shaggy head out the window like a half-blind sheep dog. He waved wildly to the gaggle of relatives once removed gathered in the grass of the yellowed front lawn to see us off. He shouted his best twangy "Bye ya'lls!" and "Take cares!" at the top of his lungs. I didn't look back; too busy fighting the lump in my throat. The trusty little motor groaned, but then sprang to life.

"Funerals are not fun," I replied, wiggling into the seat, finding the worn out spot where my bony ass belonged on these long drives south to my grandparents' defunct farm.

The drive was becoming more and more familiar because it had been happening more and more often lately. Bill seemed suddenly excited to interact with my family. The same ones he'd referred to as "brainwashed redneck hicks" the first time he met them. We'd slept in the barn on Easter and on the foldaway couch for two nights of Memorial Day Weekend. Christmas was coming up quick. I sighed.

"Ooh. No. Well, I didn't mean it like that…" He awkwardly twisted at his bushy, trendy mustache and searched for the right thing to say. "I'm sorry your Papaw passed, Carlene."

"Wasn't my Papaw no ways." I asserted as I lit up a Kool and inspected my French tips.

I couldn't stop the small smile that snuck across my menthol flavored lips. Maybe funerals were fun after all. My grandmother had looked happy for the first time in my lifetime. My childhood tormentor was finally vanquished by old age. Bill laughed. Big and loud, breaking my concentration. I glanced over at him, taking my time as we chugged slowly up the road — watching beams of late-fall sunshine dance down through the canopy to flatter his face. He was handsome, but still. Bill was no Burt Reynolds. In spite of the luxuriously hairy chest and upper lip and the charming smile sparkling in his eyes. No matter how many Western shirts he bought at the Goodwill. Even though he found that tacky gold chain at the flea market. Bill was no Bandit.

"I love it when I get to come home with you. The vernacular really comes back. You said 'no ways' and I counted like, four 'aint's' today! And a 'reckon'. My little Ellie Mae!" he reached out to lay a heavy hand on my thigh.

"Fuck you and fuck the Clampetts," I meant it.

I swatted his warm palm away from the knee he found under my black skirt. That shut him up for the first time all weekend. The next few miles were quiet except for the half-broken buzz of the heater and the crunch of gravel beneath my tires. I hated that sound when I was a kid. I squeezed my eyes closed tight and imagined a monster, grinding bones between his false teeth, wearing overalls but no shirt. That sound meant coming back to the only horrible place I could really call home. That sound was a sickening grumble, leading to a sharp right turn that followed a dirt path back in time where women were property and what went on behind closed doors was nobody's business. I heard it for the first time when I was four years old and my mother packed her bags in the middle of the night and pointed her VW Rabbit forever north. Frankly I don't remember much about Mommy.

The stories Granny told were idealized. At night, especially in the fall like this, she'd talk for hours on end about my mother while the brisk wind was creeping in through cracks around the foundation and freezing our toes. When we were huddled together in the same broke down bed my mother was a prodigal daughter, a flower too beautiful to flourish in the used up dirt of our craggy bottom land. She had to be forgiven for allowing her roots to spread. In Granny's mind, she would return to us someday. Save us both. Carry us off like fallen petals to a far more, delicate place

The stories Pop Orey told were demonized. They were lurid sketches of my mother the whore, caught in her bikini, grinding up on some farm boy next to the cow pond. His anecdotes were relayed in the most uncomfortable places and ways. His anecdotes were designed to make me squirm and feel sick. He would laugh hard at the dinner table and rub at his shriveled up eye, pressing it closed with a wrinkled fist. I knew he could still see her there in that dark place in his mind, young and lithe and compromised. By him. I remember thinking that she must be able to feel his dirty, half-blind glare no matter where she was. That was our connection. I grew to know and dread that look. I learned to sneak out the window almost every night to escape into the arms of some good ol' boy and the cab of his truck.

My one and only first hand memory of Mommy was the way she ratted her bangs up even bigger on the front seat of the tiny green car that morning when we slid into the muddy driveway of Granny's house. She was frozen in my mind, puckering in the rearview and dragging the slick, scarlet point of her lipstick across that funny face. It made me giggle then. My mother is the lingering smell of Aqua Net and cheap perfume poured on too thick. A young stranger in acid wash and a halter top.

Bill brushed an arm against my body reaching for the radio and I jumped out of my skin. Hot ash bumped against my fingers and dribbled down to my leg. I smashed it against my black jersey skirt and made a hot gray smudge.

O that old rugged cross, so despised by the world, has a wondrous attraction for me…

Strains of a hymn everyone knew blasted out of the huge speakers Bill had installed in my trunk back when he was so into industrial music. The voice was a high lonesome whine, quivering with the fervor of the Holy Ghost.

"Where do they find these people?" he asked.

"That's Mrs. Marlene Reynolds-Rowe-Wright." I mumbled.

Bill guffawed. I can't think of any other word for it. He brayed like a damned donkey.

"Are you serious? How would you know? That name is pretty priceless though." He smirked.

"I lived here for sixteen years with no television. And on a Sunday afternoon Mrs. Marlene is on basically every FM station. Her daddy and both of her husbands preached. Two out of three were evangelists." I cracked the window and tossed out my cigarette butt. "Good money in it I guess."

Mrs. Marlene had finished up, but the old rugged cross was getting no rest. Reverend Wright dramatically hiccupped for air, engulfed in the will of the Baptist Lord and spreading His gospel in gasps over the air waves.

"Jeeeeesus Christ!" I complained instead of exalting.

My long fingers darted out and mashed the button closest to me. The voice of the guy from Swap Shop two counties over droned on ten decimals too loudly about mixed Beagle pups for sale or trade.

"You're no fun." Bill pouted.

I wondered why he still thought that pouting was cute as I fumbled blindly in the console for another smoke and paused at a shot-up STOP sign. Then I wondered why my radio favorites were tuned to the local stations here instead of the trendy college stations back home in our trendy college town. Bill reached for the dial and turned down the volume, he flipped through the fuzz and pop country.

"I'm in search of more Mrs. Marlene. And I'm also going to start calling you Ms. Carlene. Ha! You keep smoking those old lady menthol lights… " He reached into his shirt pocket for a pack of Lucky Strikes.

It had cost him two extra bucks to look like coolness unfiltered.

"Don't." I snapped. "And Mrs. Marlene Wright would never smoke. It makes a woman look old."

"How would you know? Did you ever meet her? She's a local act, right?"

"Granny knows her." I said and laughed at the idea of Mrs. Marlene referred to as an act.

It came out more as a cough meets grunt.

"Whaaat? Iva and Mrs. Marlene are friends? That's got to be hilarious. I bet she has big hair. And lots of make-up, Tammy Faye style."

"She makes the best potato salad on earth," was all I could think to say.

We pulled out onto the main road and Bill was quiet as he stumbled upon Mrs. Marlene doing her trembling soprano version of Amazing Grace. He stared out the window at the scenery, stroking his mustache one handed and smoking with the other. I could tell he was trying hard to look pensive and reverent when he checked himself out in the passenger side mirror.

I thought back to Mrs. Marlene standing in Granny's quiet little kitchen slicing up carrots and shelling beans.  She was the only friend I ever remember Granny having. And Mrs. Marlene wasn't Tammy Faye. She was natural and ethereal and graceful. Her manners and personality were as sweet as her voice. I stared at her fingers as I leaned on the counter and she hummed some old country song. Every single bean snapped and shelled perfectly to the will of her delicate touch.

Bill was distracted gawking at trailer park residents as we neared what passed for town. I rolled down the window and exhaled deeply, mapping the place in my mind. First you drive past the Dairy Queen on the left and a parking lot packed with bored small-town teenagers. Next there's the high school. And the brand new, state of the art, public library — half-filled with the same smelly, moldy paperbacks from the old public library. There was the nursing home and a low income housing complex; the "Get TAN! And Video!" and the only drug store I know of where you can still get floats at the counter. I didn't tell Bill about that. That quaintness was strictly for me to share with chocolate soda. Two gas stations, one of which was also a general store, were placed strategically on the far ends of the main strip. As we pulled up past the first gas station, I breathed in Brazier and had to lean towards the evening air.

"Let's get milkshakes!" Bill suggested.

"I'm going to puke." I retorted.

"No. Fucking. Fun." He slumped in his seat, drumming his long fingers on the dash and pulling one knee up to buff a spot out of his snake-skin cowboy boots with a napkin he found in the floor board.

"Can we at least stop at the general store? Your cousin said they sell plug tobacco. That twisty kind your Granny chews," he continued.

"Wild Duck," I said flatly.

"Why thank you, Ms. Carlene, darlin'! I had plumb forgot what it was called," he fake drawled. My stomach made an angry rumble in response to his giggles.

When I met Bill, he was William. William Joseph Fitzwell Jr., a history student with a pony tail and an acoustic guitar and a dog-eared, paperback copy of Howl in his cliché back pocket. Now I lived with a monster I had probably helped to create. It suddenly occurred to me that I planned to marry a fictional persona. Billy Joe Fitz. I was riding through my home town with a suburbanite skater boy turned wannabe hillbilly and I felt ill. The guilt reminded me I was a sell-out. A traitor. Too good for my raising. I escaped and left it all behind, without the courtesy of looking back. I was my mother. Only worse. Now I had brought in an interloper, someone to cash in on the novelty of my culture. An outsider to laugh at how excited my Granny was about her new indoor toilet.

"Yeah, we can stop at the gas station sugar." I fake drawled back.

The gears were in motion. I had made up my mind.

"That's more like it, woman!" he chuckled.

He didn't even notice my hands shaking on the wheel as I whipped into the busted asphalt parking lot. Bill bounced out of my car and swaggered into the store. Iridescent threads glittered in his new but vintage "cowboy shirt". As soon as he had mounted the steps and cleared the screen door, I rummaged through my purse until I found a piece of paper, a busted pen and a rubber band. After jotting out a note, I wrapped the white scrap around my cell phone and snapped the band into place. With barely a grunt, I kicked three big plastic suitcases out of the back seat and dropped the phone on top of the pile. I saw him in the rear view as I pulled out, trotting down the wooden steps with a chaw in his mouth. I turned back the way I had come. His jaw dropped and his chaw dropped and tobacco juice dribbled from the corners of his hip mustache as he read the note I'd left behind -

It's over.

Don't try to call.

You know me and Granny ain't got no phone out here in the sticks.

Triple A will be here to pick up William Fitzwell in the next two hours.

Billy Joe Fitz might be shit out of luck.

Now that Pop was dead and six feet under, Granny and I wouldn't hide under the covers and whisper in fear of repercussion anymore. The normally drab little house would be filled with the smell of funeral flowers and rebirth. Tonight Granny and I would sit at the kitchen table in our pajamas and turn on all the electric lights like Pop would never let us do. We would drink sassafras tea and eat blackberry cobbler and listen to Mrs. Marlene's old timey hour at ten p.m. Tonight we would get out the farmer's almanac and get into the moonshine and decide which vegetables to put out by the signs of the moon come spring.

 

Misty Skaggs, 29, currently resides on her Mamaw's couch way out at the end of Bear Town Ridge Road where she is slowly amassing a library of contemporary fiction under the coffee table and perfecting her buttermilk biscuits. Her gravy, however, still tastes like wallpaper paste. She is currently taking the scenic route through higher education at Morehead State University and hopes to complete her BFA in Creative Writing…eventually. Misty won the Judy Rogers Award for Fiction with her story "Hamburgers" and has had both poetry and prose published in Limestone and Inscape literary journals. Her short series of poems entitled "Hillbilly Haiku" will also be featured in the upcoming edition of New Madrid. She will be reading from her chapbook, Prescription Panes, at the Appalachian Studies Conference in Indiana, Pennsylvania in March. When she isn't writing, Misty enjoys taking long, woodsy walks with her three cats and watching Dirty Harry with her ninety six year old great grandmother.

 

 

 

Angels and Angels, fiction by Caroline Kepnes

Auntie Lee has all day parties and Mama says it's got to be a hundred degrees outside. That's how I know it's summer again. Mama says next summer we'll get air conditioning and next summer we'll take a big vacation, cross country, with Auntie Lee to California where we'll go on a game show and win red cars. The she huffs and says, "The big 'if' being if your Auntie Lee can sober up." I want to believe her, but that's what she said last summer, and this summer we're not going so I don't know. She says it's because our financial flowers haven't yet bloomed and then she scratches her head and smiles quite unconvincingly I must say. Tomorrow is the Fourth of July and we're not going to Auntie Lee's to see the fireworks. Mama says Auntie Lee gets fireworks all year long from her dope. It's funny though, I didn't know Auntie Lee had a dope because I never met him and if she lived with someone else I think I'd know.

Sometimes I stay up late and listen to Mama talk on the phone to the friends we got. She says if Lee don't stop shooting up she's gonna die soon, even with all the money she made from dealing because money can't go into your arms and save you. Mama says all she does is deal and shoot up and deal and shoot up over and over again. I'd like to think I know Auntie Lee pretty well, but I never knew she liked shooting guns up in the air. When I ask Mama about Auntie Lee's shooting up Mama says it's not what I think, and I'm too young to know it. Mama tells her friends that she should know it's a hard thing to stop doing, she says one time a long time ago she couldn't stop either. Mama says it gives you a feeling like nothing else and that she misses it every day. I know lots about my mama, but this shooting up, it makes me wonder. I can't picture her with a gun.

I might go to Auntie Lee's while Mama's not looking. Mama doesn't like me to be there. I snuck over once before, when Mama was talking about Lee's angel dust friends. I love angels. At Christmas, Mama and I cut up angels out of paper and tape them all over the house. When I asked Auntie Lee about angel dust, she said it's a different kind of angel, a better one. Then she gave me something and made me cross my heart and hope to die before I told Mama. She called it angel dust. Angel dust makes me feel very free, like a bird, with all things bright and beautiful and rainbows and unicorns. Mama says Auntie Lee does it to escape reality, like that Uncle Jack is gone and now she runs around with Hell's Angels. I didn't know that angels can come from hell but I guess it makes sense if you think about it. Hell and Heaven are both out in the beyond where you don't have leaky faucets or overalls, you just have what's you on the inside. Mama says it's good to escape from everything and we all need to once in a while and that you can't go around judging people for how they like to escape. You can only worry for them. She also says it's dangerous and that cops don't like it and they'll lock you up for using it. It seems crazy that the police would not want people to be happy because happy people don't do bad things. I still have a little angel dust left and Auntie Lee says to save it for a time when things get so bad that I want to go away to peace and love. Then all her weird friends with the long hair and the loud leather laugh and laugh about nothing. They say they're high but I can see that they're right here near me.

So I wake up early the next morning and I watch the big boy on the corner sell stuff. Maybe he's selling angel dust, who knows. He once gave me a sticker and told me that holding the sticker would take me on a roller coaster of rainbows. Actually, no. that was the first boy. One night I heard a loud noise like a firecracker and lots of sirens. I never saw that boy again. Then one day there was a new boy, like the old boy, only smaller, with new stuff that Mama said was the same as the old stuff. That was when Lucy and Susan stopped coming over to my house because their moms said it wasn't safe here because of dealers and crack houses. None of the houses on my street have cracks in them. Some have boards on the windows but no cracks. What crazy mamas Lucy and Susan got.

I walk to my Aunt Lee's house and knock on the door. She has lots of friends over and they're all tripping or something. They drink punch that makes them trip but they don't fall on the floor. My mama's punch doesn't make me trip and Auntie Lee must not know how to make punch right. She comes up to me and picks me up and swings me around so that my feet fly. Her eyes are all fuzzy and she must have had lots of punch because she can't stand good. She's like a baby learning to walk and I ask her about shooting up because I hear her friends talking about that but the music is louder than I think it's ever been and she can't hear me over it.

She puts me down and yells. "What?" And she takes some sugar and puts it in her nose. She calls it coke which is stupid because Coke is brown and comes in a can. She says I might like it and I am thirsty so I say okay and we go into the other room where there are mirrors on all the tables and people sit on the floor. The big Hell's Angels look funny on the floor, like they have so many muscles that they can't sit normal Indian style or anything and Auntie Lee tells me to sit down and a guy with a great big mustache gets up as soon as I sit down as if I have cooties and tells Auntie Lee that she's a sick woman and she says to forget about him and she gives me a straw but I still don't have a glass of coke but she says the straw goes in my nose. We do this at school sometimes. Well, mainly the boys do it. They stick straws in all the holes on their faces and wave their arms around. Auntie Lee says I'm supposed to breathe in the sugar on the mirror into my nose and it will make me feel really good. Maybe if you bake a can of Coke it's just sugar and I want to ask her but she's napping so I do like she said and–

Suddenly the room is everywhere and I cannot stop laughing and I am the best girl in the world and it is almost too good to be true that I get to be me and then it's gone and the room is black and bad and I am on the ceiling looking at me on the floor. I look dead. Like I'm playing dead in a murder mystery game. I try to pick myself up but I don't know how and now Auntie Lee is awake because one of the Angels kicked her and she's trying to wake me up and she's crying.

"Wake up, baby. Wake up."

But I am not waking up even though I'm awake on my insides because I know I am. I can see. Nothing looks the same now. It's like watching a screen and sometimes I am the movie and sometimes I am the audience.

The next thing I see is the graveyard near my school. The weeping willows are all there, swishing. My family is there, swishing. Everyone is swish, swish, shake. Some of my friends from school are there but not all of them. Mama is giving Auntie Lee evil eyes and I don't understand why they didn't bring me here. Where am I? Who's watching me? Mama never lets me stay home alone. Then I remember the last time I can remember feeling something in my body. It was when the big Angel stood up fast, when he was mad at Auntie Lee, and his boot touched my book and he said sorry right before he went.

I stay in the sky now and I wonder and I watch and I wish I had some of that special coke but I know I won't ever have it because I don't have my body anymore which means I don't have my nose. I wallow. I'm lazy bones and if Mama were here she'd yell at me to go out and build something in the backyard. Sometimes I see angels, the ones with wings, all white and delicate. They don't have angel dust. They don't make me feel unicorns and rainbows. They're like the ones you try and make in the snow when school is closed and you're in your snowsuit outside on your backside looking up. I'd rather have the other kind. I can't help it. The angel dust, or the Angels from Hell who put you on your lap and let you sit on their bike. My baby sister would think I'm crazy. She's just a toddler so she still thinks these angels are the best, you know, because they're good and innocent and all skyward and pure. I wonder who would win in a fight, one of these or one of my angels. It's pretty boring up here. I have time to think about this stuff. And I guess if I have to stay here forever, well I guess if I could go back I would stick to coke you drink and angels you make in the snow. Not that it matters. If I went back now, Mama would be so mad at me for going that it wouldn't be much fun anyway.

 Caro­line Kep­nes has been splitting her time between her home in Los Ange­les, CA  and her parents' home on Cape Cod, MA. Her fiction has been published in or is forthcoming in The Barcelona Review, Calliope, Dogz­plot, Eclec­tica,The Other Room and Word Riot. She spent the past few months writing a young adult novel The Dig that's available on all e-book platforms. Her YA pen name is Audrey Hart. In her spare time she enjoys reading about meth lab busts, Floridian criminal activity and wild animals.

Party Parasites, fiction by Misty Skaggs

When the day slips away, the mosquitoes come out. And bare skin brings the bugs. Not so far in the distance, she can hear them shaking off stagnation among the cattails and she wishes wistfully that her jeans weren't shoved down around her ankles. The buzzing comes drifting to her even over the bland and labored breath against her eardrum. The buzzing comes over the stink of Skoal spit pooling in the delicate pit where her shoulder meets her neck. The frantic beat of the winged cloud rising from their cool roost in the moist mud is loud, louder. Loudest. And the country air is clear, carrying the sound of the insects unobstructed. Aside from a fervent grunt and an echoed, half-ass, half moan. It occurs to her vaguely that they want her blood. Mosquitoes are party parasites, she thinks. They live short and drink hard, ten days to exist and to fuck and to die.

There's a light tickling touch on her skin when they get brave enough to land below her waist. It isn't unpleasant, but it never lasts. What she feels deeply is the sting of penetration and the desire to scratch an itch. And the fleeting fear of disease. She tries not to scratch and slap at the probing pests. She thinks of afternoons on the creek bank with a good looking felon who had the decency to keep a blanket and cold beer in his Mamaw's wicker basket. She's covered in sweat but not sweating. The bugs can smell it.

 

Misty Skaggs, 29, currently resides on her Mamaw's couch way out at the end of Bear Town Ridge Road where she is slowly amassing a library of contemporary fiction under the coffee table and perfecting her buttermilk biscuits. Her gravy, however, still tastes like wallpaper paste. She is currently taking the scenic route through higher education at Morehead State University and hopes to complete her BFA in Creative Writing…eventually.

Misty won the Judy Rogers Award for Fiction with her story "Hamburgers" and has had both poetry and prose published in Limestone and Inscape literary journals. Her short series of poems entitled "Hillbilly Haiku" will also be featured in the upcoming edition of New Madrid. She will be reading from her chapbook, Prescription Panes, at the Appalachian Studies Conference in Indiana, Pennsylvania in March. When she isn't writing, Misty enjoys taking long, woodsy walks with her three cats and watching Dirty Harry with her ninety six year old great grandmother.

Highlight of the Day, poem by Sheri Wright

Her youngest crawls through the dog's dish, then back again to retrieve a red Fruit-Loop floating in water. She sits underneath her crackle of blonde hair – three shades of peroxide streaked like chicken trails through straw, while the TV screen flashes her time like riding out the weekend on the fumes of her clunker […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Home Invasion, fiction by Timothy Gager

The mountain lion that could kill you in the woods, instead races past, leaps over a rock and devours a small dog in the scenic yard you're squatting behind. You feel like Dwight Gooden sitting on a dirty old sofa of his drug dealer, watching the ticker tape parade on television after the Mets won […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Half-Life, fiction by Kurt Taylor

The dented front fender of Danny Mather's gold '89 Cadillac Eldorado and the dead armadillo cracked and steaming along the roadside a half mile back were not unrelated. Danny was tapping the steering wheel, saying the issue was premeditation. "I see a 'dillo crossing the road, I don't try and hit 'em. If you're tryin' […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

The Jeep, by Mather Schneider

It's an old army surplus Jeep. My dad traded a Billy goat and 12 egg-laying hens for it. He just drove it home one day, we saw him coming down our long driveway. Lots of people have long driveways in Arkansas, but not many people have one as long as ours. It's about 2 miles […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

High, West and Crooked

That's how I feel right now after trying to manage my time in the last few days since I found out my chapbook Broke was going to be published (and quickly) by Didi Menendez and MiPoesias, the same folks that brought you Redneck Poems. That great news, combined with the home situation in which my […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Quick Impersonal Update

I've updated the FARE page (Dennis Mahagin's chapbook from Redneck Press due out 12/9/11). We have new work forthcoming from Mather Schneider, Jeff Wallace and Kurt Taylor. As well, I've updated the interviews and publications pages listed under my biography. Mostly Redneck is selling well, thanks to all of you buyers and readers out there. […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...