Book Description

Ok. I’d miss these prompts if I didn’t use them now. I don’t hold things very long or very deep. So we’re calling this flash Sunday, we meaning me. I can’t tell you the time per flash, but I started at Nine Fifty One and the same clock says 10:55 right now. It syncs to the computer and picks up the satellite feed of that world clock that doesn’t lose time; I can’t recall its name.

I also did this now because my heart swells for this community; because I want the flash give and take to keep momentum, because I’d proud to be a part of this number.

An hour for three; these aren’t polished, but they might be honest. I don’t know, I’ll read them later.

rumination, doomed, gifted — Numinous

I was watching the stars. I didn’t hear her small bare feet on the decking and flinched when she put the body-warm quilt over my bare shoulders.
I turned and she kissed me drily with her thin lips.

“Whatcha doin?” she asked

“Ruminating”

“ If you tell me one more god damned time about the brightest stars being long dead I might have to hurt you. Wait, I have a fancy word — Grievous, yeah, I’ll hurt you all grievous and shit.”

She kissed me again. I felt my limp cock swell, dusted in a fine white powder. It’s been like since … since things went sideways.

“What? No, I was just … “ she straddled me, holding my face. I let her. She kissed me for a few minutes and then held my eyes.

“When you’re ruminatin’ I get this feeling we’re all doomed” she looked at me seriously. Holding my eyes without blinking.

I had nothing to say. She leaned back let her hands fall.

“I might be leaving when the light comes up,” I said. I didn’t hold her face. I didn’t let her see my eyes.

“Where we goin’?”

I wasn’t taking that bait.

“I have to see what’s out there,” she had a why written all over her face, “I have too. Maybe everywhere else is … different”

“Doomed,” she said.

“Maybe somewhere else is different”

Her hands were busy tugging at me. I didn’t have the heart to say no.

round bales
whole natural almonds
pale moon rising — Witm

We drug a few pallets along the tracks, over the trestle to the clearing. It was the far edge of a corn field. The sun hadn’t quite set but a pale moon was rising, looming large on the horizon. In a few hours it’d be a fat yellow harvest moon, people would be pulling over on Mt. Hope, getting out of their cars and pointing and gawking.

A few square acres to the south round bales of Hay freshly rolled would be sitting in the now brown crew cut fields. Down at the Feed and Grain the old boys would be arguing whether square or round kept the core hay fresher. They never had those arguments until the hay was baled and bundled.

It was a certain blasphemy to used hay as kindling. Yeah, we were kids, and sacred things need a fresh coat of paint and an ass-kicking, but still, you didn’t fuck with corn and hay. Peeing in the gas tank of a tractor was one thing, fucking with the winter food a different thing altogether.

When we heard the stumbling along the tracks we knew the beer was coming, the sky already dark except where the yellow harvest moon lit it up. Our fire was already two pallets high; corn husk is fine kindling and no one needs the husk for anything.

Two kids skidding down the rocks, I didn’t know the one, the other I didn’t know her name. They both looked like wharf rats. If you can’t dance across the trestle you got pitch and tar, bugs and scraped knees. We didn’t let them get the beer because they were the best at getting; we let them get it because they were buying. Molson’s. The good stuff. The one kid had a six of that Canadian stuff with the elephant, a creamy malt liquor. Nobody else was going to drink that shit.

By the time the Harvest moon was overhead like a Chinese lantern over the whole world, we were drunk and fire jumping. Like kids everywhere; half immortal and half suicidal in the harvest moonlight. I never did much more than burn the hair on my legs. That one kid always tried to step on the center pallet beam. We’d put him out more than once. You could do it but only when the fire was high — it looked more courageous, but it wasn’t. The trick was when everything was burning like that it was still solid, when it settled down it was halfway to being ash. Maybe a good metaphor for the cycle of life if you weren’t a drunken double dog daring kid.

barnacles cabbage dirt cheap — Northern Teacher

I was just south of Yakima, picking baby’s breath, following the harvest north when I hooked up … no, aligned myself with the widow and her kids. From the get go we acted like a family, no, we were a family just without all that messy stuff it takes to make one. I kept them from being taken advantage from, well, taken less advantage of, and they kept me honest and fed.

I mean out of trouble, maybe the opposite of honest. They kept me low profile. On my own I sometimes got a wild hair and would start stumpin’ ‘bout the UAW, honest wages for honest work. I’d get run off, the kind of run off where you can’t even feel what’ll need stitching until you get gone, get good and god damned gone.

The widow could make bull-ya-base outta barnacles, stew out of dirty rice and cabbage, tortilla and egg, take the cheep out of a chick and handful of dirt and make chicken soup.

Mostly all I had to do was stand up and shut up and whoever was trying to mess with her or the kids suddenly remembered things they had to do somewhere else, somewhere out of the firelight.

A few weeks later we were picking apples near Spokane. I remembered the seasons from old song lyrics — Peach’s in the summertime, apples in the fall, if it weren’t for shady grove I’d have no love at all — A few thousand miles east and decades ago, I rabble roused the fields up through the blue ridge’s. Never a fire without a fiddle. Just as dirty, just as back broke, hungry, calloused, but those folks had to sing and fiddle. It either was a way to praise the good lord or a way to say fuck you to the straw boss. For me it was half of each. Then. I seen a lot of straw bosses, I know, that ain’t what the good folk what need baby’s breath in their bouquet call em, that’s what I call em. I ain’t never seen a lord good or otherwise. There might be one, but he ain’t fool enough to pick baby’s breath in the thistles in the noon day sun. Not on any crew I been on.

She was a good woman, they was good kids. Sometimes we tangled up the bed rolls and slept in a dog pile. There wasn’t no family making, just comfort. We was more intimate than the dark shapes grunting desperately under blankets or lean-tos. There’s all kinds of different love. My conscious don’t cringe when I say I loved her, when I say I loved those kids. We headed south after Spokane, where the winters weren’t too harsh. They was this man brought a bus, he built tract homes, needed cheap labor for clearing the grounds. Somewhere without a name west panhandle in Texas. I got on the bus one day, came back and the camp was gone. Hundred and fifty souls disappeared like the town in Virginia, or the place from Scotland or that ship with the dead crew. Just gone.

I ask wherever I go. First year or two I just asked after the widow and the kids. Later I’d ask about any and all of the one fifty I could do a fair to middling job of remembering. Gone, like, hang on, Ro-no-kee, bridge-dune or that flyin’ dutch. I like to fall down flailing. I miss her. I don’t eat too good these days, and I ain’t eatin’ too much. Like I swallowed a burning thread. But it ain’t the hurt in the belly, it’s the hurt in the heart. I seen my face in the still water, somewhere in south Oregon, one of them valleys between the rocks, A hood and a blade and folks’d think I was death hisself. I might be death hisself.