Second Generation, fiction by Misty Skaggs

I guess the neighbors mostly thought we were dykes, Dolly and me. Dolly and I. She was always correcting me like I was one of her students at the junior high. We’d get stoned and she’d preach me a nerdy sermon about the balance between good grammar and getting to be too good for your raising. Once, when we were all sprawled out on the back porch drinking boxed wine and smoking my homegrown, I asked her if she was named after Dolly Parton. She denied it. But that’s not what her Mommy told my Mommy when they worked together “waiting tables” at The Dance Barn back in the eighties.

My Mommy told me all about Dolly’s Mommy. And about how bad she had wanted to get down to Nashville and break into the country music business and quit shaking her shit for coal miner money. She told me about how Dolly’s Mommy was stacked liked the Dolly, how she’d come to work with her double d’s decked in sequins and tassle and hidden under a gingham shirt. I found a picture of them together once. Our mothers, two slutty looking girls with their hair teased up to high Heaven and their roots showing, leaned back on the hood of some asshole’s Cadillac. I hated that picture. They were frozen in time, young and beautiful and stupid and trapped in the frame of a Polaroid picture, wearing nothing but Daisy Dukes and coked up grins. Dolly says she’d call it “burlesque”, our mothers up there taking it all off on a grimey table top for every redneck in three counties. She wants to imagine it all into something harmless. I tried to bring her back down to earth, back down to the holler where the nosy neighbors strained to listen in on our back porch conversations. I tried to tell her the Dance Barn was a whore house. But she never would come right out and call her Mommy a whore. Even though that bitch named her Dolly and passed down the double D’s to match and then took off and left her to fend for herself in a dirty world.

We weren’t. Fucking, I mean. Lesbians. Once or twice we wound up rolling around in her frilly, queen sized bed in our underwear, grinding and groaning. And I’m not saying my drunk ass didn’t give it a try. She was generous and sweet and smart as hell. There was something sexy about her crooked smile and nervous eyes. But she wanted a big sister more than she wanted to cum. She wanted a badass, big sister. Dolly called it “street smarts.” I thought that was cute.

Her Granny raised her and that old bat was tough enough. But it was a different kind of tough. People around here mostly just thought she was uppity, even though they never would have said it to her pinched-up face.When I wandered into her life, Dolly wanted someone to show her how to sound convincing when she cussed, someone to protect her and teach her to protect herself. Dolly needed someone to tell her to quit wrapping her milk jugs up in that oatmeal colored sack she called a cardigan. She needed someone to show her what a quarter bag of weed is really supposed to look like. And to teach her the hard way not to take in every damned stray that ends up sniffing around her back porch. Sometimes they bite.

I wrote a note and packed up every trace of myself while she was at work one day. I hate it when people leave their shit behind, laying around for you to discover after they’ve disappeared. Like it’s all supposed to mean something, like some dirty laundry flopped out in the bathroom floor is gonna’ make me cry and rethink my life. Dolly called it “sentimental” when she’d ask me to softly smooth out the tangles from her wavy, dishwater blond hair with her Mommy’s comb. I wasn’t gentle, though. I snagged the knots and jerked them free. I pinched the fatty part at the back of her arm for squirming. I gave her something real to cry about, a painful excuse for the tears trickling quietly down over her cheeks.

I left a note, but I took the television out of the guest bedroom. And a fist full of uppity Granny’s gold jewelry. I loved her and I left her, just like her Mommy did. I left, but I laid out that crooked little comb on the dresser and filled her favorite vase with purple irises cut fresh from the front yard. It made the whole, stale, house smell like grape candy.

Misty Skaggs, 34, is a three time college drop-out, an avid reader and an independent, Appalachian, scholar who currently resides out at the end of Bear Town Ridge Road in Elliott County, Kentucky. Her poetry and prose have been published in literary journals such as Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Still: The Journal, New Madrid, Kudzu, The Pikeville Review, Limestone and Inscape Magazine. She is currently and compulsively editing a collection of short stories with far-fetched dreams of publication dancing in her head. For more of Misty, click on over to her blog – http:lipstickhick.tumblr.com