The ghost of fucking Pablo Neruda
My boy lay sleeping across two seats on a greyhound, beyond him and out the window the desert rushed past, barely lit by a half moon in a cold clear sky. He had kicked off his shoes. His feet seemed so big to me, the ghost of fucking Pablo Neruda rattled around my head trying to recall that poem about a child’s foot. Ghosts lose their memory; they speak in slurred cryptic runic rhyme.
The bus stopped somewhere west of Albuquerque. The air brakes hissed and the chemicals sloshed in the toilet releasing g that smell that’s even worse than piss and shit; piss and shit and caustic chemicals, like they embalmed the dead in there.
My boy rubbed his eyes, sitting up.
“Mom?”
“Smokey?” Little family name, when we spent the winter in Louisville the apartment was so cold I wrapped him in a blanket and put him on the radiator when he was no more than six months. The blanket didn’t catch fire but it smoldered. He slept through it.
“Where are we?” he tugged on a shoe, groped for the other.
“New Mexico.”
“Oh,” he tugged on the other shoe “I’m hungry.”
“Let’s see what they have. It’s pretty late.” I told him as though he didn’t know we’d be eating Cheetos from a vending machine. If we’d stayed in Jackson there’d be cornbread and mustard greens and chicken in the pot. I would have made it. Oh course it’s hard to sate your stomach with cracked ribs.
Prompts
A tea cup of rain water
The quick and the hungry
Shenandoah
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