Little Ends of the Earth

the opposite of grateful & blessed

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the air is cool and green

starlight in each branch –

but same old fucking story

you never had a chance.

……

Last week, erosion fences

tomorrow, beeping trucks

diesel growling down

anything that was.

……

The broken limbs of sisters

bulldozed in the clay

loud machines then silence

my forest hauled away.

……

Can’t bear to watch it happen

but I’ll know it when you fall

I’ll feel it in my chest

that bleeding buzzing saw.

……

Instead of wet leaves dripping,

owls that glide like ghosts,

now harken to the traffic

the trash, the mortgage loans;

……

200 rings inside your stump

but what means the most to us

are three rings deep at Chik fil a,

parking lots, and trucks;

……

And all god’s birds at sunrise

and all the fawns at night

high-five man’s domination

O money’s holy light.

……

But my hate—it rolls forever,

rolls over unit lots,

a forever-rolling plastic bag

hate is all I’ve got.

soft shell

Everything is weapons-grade

humankind has curdled

I’ve stopped writing any books

but today I saved a turtle.

3 miles from the nearest stream

an inch from Family Dollar

his ancient flipper finger hooks

paddled trash like water.

Chickens to the slaughter plant,

and all trees must be felled,

but northbound Hwy 27

didn’t split his leather shell.

He turned and turned in circles

waiting to get canned

in a styrofoam beer cooler

I put him in my van.

One wetland they have yet to drain

sunglow upon scum

by some fucking miracle, there

he’ll live to 51.

I fail most days to keep my grip

to not yell at my kids

to notice propaganda—

today, I lift the lid

and down into mosquito mud

his flapping flippers flew

teeming sparkling fauna rot

his spouted nose subsumed

he gave us all the glorious slip

and a piece of me went too;

god shrugs at the buzzing saw,

today, I save you

Episode 3 – Sexual Image Fatigue

Filtered, injected, diet-restricted, omitted – if this is the pinnacle of female power, kill me please. Hollywood has reinforced female self-loathing as an American family value. Breaking rank with it can be a painful process. Luckily, I have some help.

Why Are We Here Podcast

Episode 2: Tryharding

A year after our first recording, we talk about putting aside the pressure to succeed to open up to the pleasures of doing what you truly want to do. Believing in yourself is hard. But so is hiding.

Things that disappear into space

While my house was being looted, I was at a concert, staring up at a beautiful singer. The rows of fans were featureless in her supernova light. We were the extras. We filled the background and lined the pockets.

I was dressed in a big fluffy faux fur jacket from Target, the kind of thing selected for and peddled to the scenery.  Fans.  Followers. People better suited to spacesuit costumes than rocket science. When I left my house that night, I was more concerned with that stupid outfit than the bolt on my backdoor. My children were away and my orbit had become irregular.

Earlier that evening, my friends had picked me up in my driveway. I’d tottered across the cement in high heels, my blowout and my anxiety whipped like stiff egg whites, the daylight shining badly on my array of poly-plastic accessories.

“You look fancy,” my friend Tom said, with concern. “You alright?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying hard to not try so fucking hard. “Of course, why?”

I knew why. My feelings were ajar. My internal state visible to all, just like my house. Just like my blinds left stupidly in the up position, always letting the light in and the secrets out. For somebody so heavily invested in facades, I was not much good with them.

At the concert, I cheered and clapped, the hollows of my body taking up predictable space and volume with all the other bodies that cheered and clapped. We gathered our purses and coats and moved obediently to the merch table in the lobby where the artist posed and autographed. Flashes popped, people jostled to get closer. I planted myself near the water fountain, envying her beanie and her highlights and her devoted hipster assistant and her successful career.

Meanwhile, back at home, my Christmas lights were twinkling over my fireplace, giving the luster of midday to xboxes below. Maybe the thieves had been watching me from the woods for weeks, learning my dull routine. Me, dressing and undressing, curtains never drawn with proper consistency because who cared. Years had timelapsed across my bedroom wall and there was nothing much to show for it. A hard drive full of nudes and unsaved birthday pictures, a laptop on the kitchen table, in a deep winter’s nap. My backporch security light, too, was in eternal slumber. My door knob yielded to anyone’s turning.

On the drive home from the concert, we rolled to a stop at the scene of a car accident. A fire truck was angled to block off the road. We idled in the blinding blue strobes, unable to pass, unable to assess the travesty.  Tom turned off the car engine. All was still and cold. A life-flight helicopter hovered overhead, invisible but for its pulsing chop and single, wheeling searchlight.  It scanned the perilous whips of traffic lights and floated down, down, down into the intersection. Humans disembarked, approached a waiting ambulance and disappeared inside it. The helicopter waited. The police waited. The traffic waited.  Somewhere, in the middle of this steaming ring of headlights, the life of one person slipped closer to the void.  It was taking forever.

When they finally dropped me off at my house, I shed everything inside the front door. I made my way through the dark, tripping over toys and detritus. It was so cold. I couldn’t wait to take off my fake pointy pieces and slip into a hot, quiet bath. Its dim, weightless embrace would shuttle me far far away from light and sound and pressure.  I flipped on the light, turned the tub spicket to hot, and let the warm water rush over my red, freezing hands.  Why was the house so cold?

Right about then is when I saw the back door gaping wide open. It was like a ripped airlock with its tattered screen lifting in the breeze. I stopped breathing and listened. I could hear the furnace straining full blast through the vents, warm air disappearing out the door and into the black night.

My laptop was gone. The pen was still on its left, the empty cup on its right, but in the middle there was a 12 inch by 12 inch empty space.

The bath was running in a totally different sort of house now. There was another empty space where the TV used to be. All the TVs were now empty spaces.  Baskets pulled out of their shelves and ransacked. Strewn wires, plugs ripped of their valuable ends, devoured of their mass, stripped of their contents. To be robbed is to become forever acquainted with the shock of these emptied spaces. How easily all your efforts turn to dust. It can make the order inside you break down.

I listened again. Whoever had bulldozed through my home, was he gone? I could still smell him.

In the room that my kids shared, everything was dumped, yanked out, emptied.  Christmas presents had been harvested and toted away in a missing backpack. Material things don’t matter. That’s what people say. Material things can be replaced. But funny thing, sometimes they can’t. In their place are brand new problems, like bitterness, fear and lack.

But this was my first real robbery, so when the cops showed up I was still in shock. The gaskets in my brain had blown. Outside, their parked police cars, the twin sentinels of Ruin and Plunder. But the neighborhood was still sleeping peacefully, houses shut up tight, occupants unconcerned.  Suburbia is like  living in a colony on the moon.

The police did a perimeter check. They snapped flash photos of my wall-to-wall space junk, piecing together a telescopic image: scuffed walls, carpet stains, nerf guns, school papers, overflowing garbage and kitty litter crunching underfoot. Opened cupboards full of mess, makeup all over the bathroom counter, hair dryer on the floor, bed unmade.  And me, in call girl clothes, hyperventilating.  You couldn’t tell where my life ended and the crime began.

They asked me for a list of losses. They gave me a business card, a case number, a warning about my windows. It was probably just some kids, they said. Kids. Oh good, just kids. Kids. We can all be replaced.

 I was glad to send them off because public violations are awkward for everyone. The way I stood there, ankle-deep in discarded hulls, all the matter sucked out of my airless black window panes, all my particles spewed across the county, it was funny. Me, longing to rise out of this place and shine. I was the headliner alright, but my glow was more like the accretion disk on the edge of a black hole.  Emptiness is a mysterious thing. Nothing can escape, not even light. 

copyright © K. Dawn Goodwin 2016

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Why am I even here? Discuss.

The task was simple: record an audiobook version of my second novel, Crash Bang Burn. I was ready. I had the equipment. I had emotional support. I had technical know-how. I even had a cup of tea.

Go ahead, Dawn. Mic is live. All ya gotta do is read your story in 3…2…1…

Three pages in? Yeah, no. The only thing crash-bang-burning was me. It wasn’t just hard. The soundproof booth became a fiery echo chamber of my own merciless stupidity. My words, my voice, and finally the entire summation of my life’s work: nothing was safe from the brimstone. I collapsed inward like a dying star, dabbing my tears on the print-outs.

Chris sat at the opposite mic, pensive as I withered. He told me to start smaller.  Forget the audiobook. Read one paragraph of something else, something more accessible.  So, I did. I picked one of the first essays I’d ever put on this blog, and read it aloud for him. What followed was a confessional about the futility (and irresistible possibility) of making art, raising children, and trying not to lose hope –  while feeling stranded out here in the middle of nowhere.

I thought about all the other artists who, like me, were also not marketing and business geniuses. For me, the only thing more depressing than hearing another artist self-promote, was hearing myself do the same thing. But at a time and in a corner of the world when art is treated as insignificant, we outliers are often left to ponder the void.

“Why am I fucking HERE?” I asked Chris.

And he said: “That’s a good title.”

It’s not always easy to broadcast a snapshot of yourself wallowing in your deepest fears and frustrations.  But I learned a lot and came out the other end feeling lighter and wiser – which is what I love so much about writing in the first place: absolution through confession.

I look forward to continuing the discussion. For now, here’s Chris and me in “Shipwrecked’ – the first episode of our podcast “Why Are We Here.”

My Process

Turning rejection into creative jet fuel, one couch fire at a time.

When I was little, I thought I was going to rock at relationships.  All the celestial bodies were waiting to orbit around me and my male co-star.

While other kids were focused on their coloring books, I was envisioning a technicolor widescreen romance. I could see the grand establishing shot and everything.

But what actually happened was, I failed at them.  A fantastical, zoom lens faceplant fail, looping over and over.

Let me try to explain, using illustrations.

and by ‘like you’ I mean someday I have a dickpic collection to call my very own!

Have you ever done drugs?

Then maybe you can understand how I got off track. I got hit by the gullible train, and it was packed with fuckable-men-who-didn’t-love-me-back.  If you’re interested in that, it leaves the OKCupid station every day. If you set up a profile now you can probably catch the Fiver.

And when I say “drugs” you should know I mean “love”; and by “love” you should know that that shit’s definitely not love. It’s super attractive; it looks and feels like love, and everyone calls it love so it gets confusing, but yeah no it’s not.

Let’s call it intensity.

Intensity is like pyrite.  As opposed to gold, which has to be painstakingly extracted with dredgmining, poverty and crushed dreams, pyrite is conveniently available in every polluted stream. All you need is a Dixie cup and some imagination. Loneliness works also.

HOT SINGLE LADIES IN YOUR AREA. No seriously, they’re really hot. They need water. And health insurance.

Let’s interject a little context: fast forward from the coloring book about 30 years, because you don’t really know what it means to be in love intensity until you’ve been single for a decade post-divorce while raising three or more kids alone, jobless and broke, thousands of miles from family, and with no unmarried friends.

That’s not the young fun wanna-smoke-a-fatty-J kind of single, where your tits get 300 likes because they’re #aloneandlovingit in #cabo #soblessed.

I’m talking about the kind of  single where you’ve just been released from a #penitentiary made of #diapers and #ingratitude,  and you find yourself swapping nudes with @MuffinThumper88 to resurrect some semblance of “fun” and maybe forget about the custody battle for 30 minutes, okay maybe 10, but you haven’t showered in a month because the babies have been sick so you try to escape the routine with your phone and a shitty app and a deep, hollow-eyed urgency that you yourself  can’t face for fear common sense will prevail, so you jump JUMP out of the frying pan and leap into the fiery thermosphere of online fuckery and WHEEEeee it feels like you’re a FIREWORK! Or a SHOOTING STAR! Or living a teenage dream!

But actually no. You’re just, like, busted space junk.

and so so so so so so in love.

What I didn’t know then, that I understand now, was this: I needed independence and I couldn’t admit it.  I didn’t like that about myself;  assumed it meant that I was destined to be sexless and alone. So I did the next best thing to being alone. I chased Unavailables.

But since I was not ready to accept who I was, I didn’t chase these men consciously. I just had a Pavlovian response to being ignored.

Ugh.

That’s how it would start, every time.  I sensed something in a guy that was completely wrong for me – slightly unattainable, non-communicative, potentially psychotic, something — and that something clicked in me like the pin of a grenade.  Like the lock on Pandora’s box. Next, he’d bust out some heady compliments and throw down his pride and step 3, I’d throw down my panties.  I wasn’t looking for long term so yeah, let’s skip the get-to-know-you part and fuck right out of the gate.

Problem was, during coitus with an Unavailable, something disgustingly special  happened for me.  I bonded.  I saw his true self revealed. I didn’t burn up in the thermosphere. I stayed aloft, gloriously aloft.  And in love.

Houston, we have love.

Roger that. Uh, this is Houston. Be advised, we’re gonna need  you to find some underwear and stop living in a goddamn fantasy world, over.

It was so blissful.  So true. And also the beginning of the end.

Worshiping an Unattainable felt like the way starving people might feel as they hallucinate about hamburgers. Or the way a  junkie feels as he’s knotting the extension cord above his elbow, hurry jump jump jump on this slide feeling, a brief euphoric readout that says, you got this.

After all, intensity isn’t mild, it’s seismic; it doesn’t even need reciprocation or physical proximity to feel awesome. Between our stratospheric fuckfests the Unavailable would do what Unavailables do best – disappear – not just physically but emotionally too.

And in that insecure interim, my longing would unspool like magical kitestring woven from the fraying threads of my purple Walmart lingerie. Every love song would whip my brains into stiff, white, oxytocin peaks. I would masturbate to mental snapshots of his profile, and most importantly, I would project all my unmet needs onto his absent but caring face.

Trust me, she gets it.

Because hey, I wanted to be alone, right? This is perfect, right?

But he was ignoring me. He was keeping me in a mental compartment labeled “Fuck As Needed”.  Worse, he was treating me like a second rate stand-in. I was not equipped to survive it.  And my beloved Unavailables, they were clearly not concerned about my survival.

The intensity was potable, edible, transferable — but not at all sustainable. When I got woke, my string broke. I showed him who I really was.

Once, I told an Unavailable that I loved him (big no-no). I helpfully informed another that he wasn’t over his ex (oh lord no).  Another time? I acted as if I was in charge and started setting the ground rules (BAAAhaha gerrrl, stop).

The endings varied but one thing was predictable.  These dudes got triggered like Old Testament deities. Sometimes they slamdunked my head onto a pike and wiped out my entire city. Other times they would ignore me so long and hard that bam, I turned to stone.  There I was, frozen on my hands and knees, forever begging for make-up sex.

You can’t win with an Unavailable.  They will drag you to their level and beat you with experience; also sometimes they will break down your sliding glass door and waterboard you with Natural Light.

It’s like going to Six Flags one beautiful day, riding the fastest, highest ride in the lower 48 with the hottest guy in a 50 mile radius, and falling off the fucking ride because the attendant didn’t click your safety bar enough clicks.  It was supposed to be three clicks. You only got one. ONE FUCKING CLICK.

Oh and also the attendant is you.

These season passes practically pay for themselves!

Boom. I hit the deck facefirst with all the lost visors and cell phones. I was broken,  hungover, limping away with a Dollar General sack fulla of puke and an empty blood transfusion bag, ready to panhandle for more of him.

They say you grieve a month for every year of a relationship. But me? Nah. I grieved a year for every month because I’m retarded.  A year for every day.

I’m wired wrong, y’all.  My corpse rots in the yard like fermenting pears. Dogs and squirrels get drunk on what’s left of me, post-intensity.

My 2013-14 Sticker Collection!

Alas, what a rainbow of shitty fruit flavors.

But this THIS is where art saved me.

I got so supralow that I had no choice but to reanimate him in a story so we could spend more “time” together, finishing conversations left undone, living out sex scenes with zero repercussions. And that ex he loved more than me? Yeah fuck that. I was now poised to play all three satisfying corners of that awful triangle. I drew in the backdrop and set the stage and started writing.

But the true restraint was hard won. It was role modeled for me by wise women in a 12 step SAA program. They taught me foreign concepts like resting when you’re tired, having fun when you’re sad, and when you’re lonely, reaching out to people who actually care  – and closing doors on those who don’t.

They helped me keep the door closed.  They helped me abstain from dick, and I don’t just mean metaphorically.

If you’d told me back then that I was going to go three years without dick, I would have just sobbed.  Just dropped outta the game and given up. But the thing is, once freed from the emotional quagmires that come with dick, I’ve been incredibly effective.

I’ve gotten so much shit done.

I’ve written my second book, then screenplays based on the book, and then I acted and produced a web series based on the screenplays – all that fueled by fantasies, failures and unfinished business.

I don’t miss it I don’t miss it SHUT UP BOB I don’t miss it

And that stratospheric high I was craving? I found it again years later, acting in front of the camera. True, I wasn’t getting laid, but I was having cake and it was fucking delicious.  I was steady. I was a closed motherfucking circuit. Not only that, I was a better mother.

I know now what I like and what I ought not like. I know what I don’t like, and what I don’t like but should.  I know what works for me and what doesn’t. What to watch for and what to allow.

During this period of sexual abstinence, I’ve been asked the same question on a couple different occasions by a couple different guys (with the purposes of convincing  me to fuck):

“How many years do you  have left?”

As in, you’re gonna get old and that pussy gonna dry up and fall off, so now that I’ve solved your problems, where’s the slot for me to insert my dick?

My reply is some version of: Listen, motherfucker, we come into this world alone. We go out of it alone.  And so will you, with a pick up line like that.

Togetherness is nice, but not if you have to force it or settle for it.  Further, despite what the songs and movies tell you, instant attraction can’t be trusted, period.  If you start fucking someone you have only known for a month or  a day (unless that someone is a blended cappuccino with freshly whipped cream), it’s just a honeymoon, son. It’s just intensity.  And that might work for you bitches but, it sheared years off my life.  I almost died in the name of not dying alone.

And yes while that is a satisfying rant, there’s another less satisfying piece to it. This is the thing I don’t tell those guys.

I may have taken it a step too far. I’ve told myself I don’t have human needs like other people. The truth is, I’ve been afraid that letting someone in would be like kryptonite for my craft.

Did I say  my “craft”? I meant “my cat”.

Maybe it’s possible to have independence and a relationship. To have the fantasies that fuel my writing and real life fulfillment – at the same time. I think it’s time to take a look at that.

What have I been running from? And if I’m no longer chasing intensity, then what am I after?

One thing I’ve learned from acting is that the good stuff comes in the quiet between words, where I’m not delivering anything. I’m not cutting up or entertaining.  I’m just feeling my feelings, here, while you watch.  This is me, open for attack. Open for love. This is me, trying to get to the opposite of intensity.

That’s the way, I’ve discovered, to open up without fucking. You let people see exactly who and what you are, flaws and all, and trust them to not destroy you.   You stand there offering nothing but yourself, in exchange for nothing but a shared moment of being alive, together. It’s terrifying. It’s exhilarating.

That’s not intensity. Let’s call it intimacy.

I’m working on it.

Ok maybe not COMPLETELY myself, but you get the point.

 

CROSSLAND web series releases soon. Click here to watch it.

Read the book here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

copyright © K. Dawn Goodwin 2017

Spring Cleaning with Braylee, 2016

From the fetid archives, here’s a 100% improvised amateur video I made last year on a smartphone. Never underestimate the power of crappy home movies. They pave the way for better projects. In fact, though I’ve penned 95% less blogs in 2016 it’s not just because of book/burnings/house fires/dumpster fires. I’ve been re-acquainting myself with the art of screenplay writing, film production and acting for my, ahem, upcoming professionally-produced six-season web series, “Crash Bang Burn”  – due in early Spring.

So if you’re sick of hearing foul-mouthed rants from Cross and Braylee, ya best hunker down. This 3-ring shitnado fissin to level up.

Hunting Happiness – W. Darling

Edie’s Magical Night with Cross

CRASH BANG BURN – Behind the Scenes

While doing research for my book deep in the trailerrific bowels of Carroll County, I interviewed Cross, Braylee and Edie to discuss important issues at the heart of rural life: love, family and that cheatin ass bitch. Now for the first time, here is the never-before-seen footage of the drama that went down behind the drama. It’s nuggets.

In Praise of Hot Baths and Dick-free Cocks

This Valentines Day marks two years dick free. A dick free diet – it’s kinda like gluten free, only it’s cheaper and doesn’t smell like wet dog in your toaster.  Yep, you heard me. I’m sober in all ways: sex, alcohol, dates, aka getting fucked up, knocked up, fucked over, played out or thrown under.  While I’ve sat restrained in zen restraint, restraining against my restraints, divorcees have remarried and refucked their exes  – and their replacement exes –  in laps around me. They are like Olympic ex-making champions. And I am, well, in the bath.

At first, the rate of reup around me was a bit . . . . bewildering.

 

#ilovemynewhusband? Really, facebook, tell me more

But since we’re coming up on the day of Heart-Shaped Corporate Woe, let me extoll upon you what the Gentle Lady Dickfree will be doing summa cum Sunday.

First, let me briefly luxuriate in the hallmarks of modern datingdom that I do not miss.  Let’s just call them the Shady Tindersexts, et al. The “you’re so important to me/what’s your name again” department. Ahhhh that shit can fly full free bird: away. Because, like Lynyrd bragged, that bird will never change. Until it gets AIDS and its dick falls off. And even then it will be a dickless free-flying douchebird. To all y’alls out there still trading shares on the digital floor of the Relationship Exchange, searching for “the one” while you’re still embroiled with the last two:

how’s that working for you.

I know, not everyone has a bad time in love.

Yeah they do. Yeah, it totally fucking blows.

The occasional sex is like a fun-sized Twix bar in a bowl fulla stale five pound Tootsie rolls, but you keep chewing because you gotta find The One, amiright? The one, the one THE ONE. OH MY GOD where is  THE ONE. Are you the one? How about you? It’s all about the ONE who will love YOU for YOU. The one who, like Justin Bieber insists,  will miss more than just your bodeee. Eeee. ee.

I gots yer ONE right here bbgurl

See, the thing is, if I see a hot man nowadays, my instincts are True and Good.

1. Step one, hit the deck.
2. Step two,  scramble for cover.
3. Step three, watch him at a safe distance from behind a parked car or a clothes rack.

Because when you  see someone hot in Carroll County, the only sensible thing to do is sprint like a superhero back to your crystal jet. Alone.

Netflix…must get…to Netflix…

 

A hot 30 or 40 something dude around here never means anything good. And while they are so nice to look at, they are ALL taken. Even when they’re single, they’re taken because their minds are like an overflowing baggage carousel at Not Over My Divorce Airlines.  And honey those claims won’t be sorted out for another four to ten years.

But people cannot stay single for long. It is absofuckinglutely infuckingtolerable. It’s right up there with carcinoma. Whats that, you say? You’re not sexually or emotionally entangled with a human placeholder? Quick, grab some Tindersext for that deplorable sense of freedom eating away your gut. In fact, I should start a new charity, something like Relay For Misery. Everyone quick, PAIR THE FUCK UP,  grab someone with a pulse and a rack /dick who acts nice to your kids (for now) and stuff him/her  in all your empty holes on the double because your EX  is watching on Facebook and you want to appear to be HAPPY and TOGETHER, don’t you? YOU’RE HAPPYANDTOGETHER and NOTALONE, RIGHT?

Did somebody say PAIN? Oh me me pick ME

 

Because being alone would be terrible, for economic reasons. It’s smarter to be less miserable together, because two shitty incomes are certainly better than one. Don’t forget the Illusion of Family that you can lord over the church set, until you realize that he’s just not that into your kids, or his own, or you. But college sports? Those are fucking fascinating! Try a little harder to like them too. Get more sports related-bumper stickers for your truck and team jerseys for your tits and endear yourself to him and his friends. Then on your way to the store to get some cheese dip be sure and pick up a headstone so you can bury your hopes and dreams.

…and on this one, God hand-drills the cross as a final Fuck You

 

But there’s this thing, and this was my original point. It’s the antidote to settling for half-baked togetherness. It really is. It’s called a tub party.  Tub Parties never cheat on you, tub parties don’t sniff out a sidefuck. Tub Parties don’t even have a phone!

ohgodyesyesHAHAheeheesweetJeezusyesyesyes

See, you draw a bath, just a little hotter than you can stand it, and deep. You light candles.  You get a jar of gooey salt scrub.  Maybe a loofah strap that you can drag across your back, your thighs, between your toes, your buttcrack, wherever you wanna feel loved roughly, and just writhe in it, do floating yoga poses, do whatever the fuck you want. Have a glass of cold water nearby, and a pile of towels to dry your hands on so you can scroll through music on your phone, and set aside a whole fucking hour.

 

just think of all the disappointment you’re missing at a bar right now

Then, when you’re done, you crawl into your warm bed with the cool sheets, where you have arranged all your favorite cocks: the elastomer prototypes, the hands-free ones, the bluetooth inflatables that have Robert Aguirre’s voice asking about your day. You make sure they are all charged and freshly batteried.  And then, at last, you fuck yourself. You go to town girl. You give yourself that goddamn motherfucking happy ending that real life never could. You do that shit. You go.

It’s rainin’ men! (available in gel or polyisoprene)

 

I know it doesn’t sound as exciting as trying not to wonder why he doesn’t text you, or having your computer accost you with HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA. But it really really grows on you. It is highly sustainable. And it gets to a point where, not a lot can top Tub Party date night with yourself.

 

So, happy Schmalentine’s day, fuckers. May you all get some D in your V, and not a VD, and not from an exbf who DNGAF. Because trust me, there are some shea butter-scented rubber alternatives that really have much more promising ROI.

 

copyright © K. Dawn Goodwin 2016

Edie Takes Shot, Misses

On Becoming Someone Else

It’s complicated.

Since the day I  started keeping records, my primordial thoughts were about a Jeff. Jeff, et al. Jeff in all his incarnations. The first diary I ever kept began,

I like Jeff. Jeff is in my class.

And then a quick nod to my coordinates in space: Today is Friday.

Once I even cut a life-sized boy out of a roll of paper and walked around the neighborhood with it, until the real boys who lived down the street saw what I was doing and laughed me back into the house. That’s the thing about boys. Boys weren’t weird. They were practical. They weren’t dumbed down by a love of plastic dolls, ABBA ballads, or a chronic need to tuck blankets around everything until it was nice and cozy. And they sure as shit didn’t walk the block with a paper girl.

Maybe that’s why I got crushes on the mischievous Jeffs of the world, the troublemakers who got sent to the principal’s office, the ones too poor even to be cool. They operated outside the system that had me trapped; they had a nihilist sort of courage to do wrong and the balls to pretend they didn’t give a shit. They didn’t need to be cozy. They probably didn’t even use blankets.

My penchant for Jeffs became a chronic condition in adulthood. They were the type who didn’t care about much beyond their own dicks (a fact they’d never admit). They’d say instead, baby don’t get all deep n shit.  Their aggrandized masculinity contained something frightening and foreign that I wanted to own. I wanted to study their skill set and their physical style, I wanted to be on the winning side of that roughness and intimidation. I longed to absorb their mannerisms, chemically react to their smell and plug my face into their naked bodies. My instincts told me that the only way a girl like me could ever stake a permanent flag on Mt. Jeff, et al, was by fucking it. Et al.

Cross-crawling. It’s like Parkour for lonely people.

really lonely people.

The only problem was that I am in fact, secretly, quintessentially, regrettably deep n shit. I wanted to feel whole, and a relationship based solely on sex left me in roadkill condition. So, at every inevitable break-up, the part of me that had bloomed now receded painfully into hyper sleep. It was the maleness I grieved most – even though it had ignored me and slipped the beloved D to someone else –  I mourned it. I’d felt so alive! And now look at me, half dead. Forgotten. Staring down the void. Wait. I know how to fix this! Let’s find another one.

This is how I got hooked on men.

But don’t take my word for it. Take Edie’s.

Writing Crash Bang Burn was about embracing this alleged half-dead side. Instead of crashing, banging and burning, I made my characters do it – over and over. Poor things. But it was a way of taking my demons for a walk without letting them off the leash. The goal was neither desecration nor worship –  I just wanted to scratch the itch without tearing my skin off for a change.  I wanted to get one teensy step removed from the depression and grief that seemed, for me, to be the predictable and perpetual female experience. Instead of it being my cross to bear, it was now, quite literally, Braylee’s and Edie’s.

But when I was done writing the book, I was by no means done being the puppetmaster. I had just begun. I was compelled to step into their diametrically opposed shoes and gather witnesses for the revival.  I needed cameras because hey, not everyone is a reader. Edie and Braylee would be easy to act out. After all, Edie was a caricature of who I wished I wasn’t and Braylee is kinda who I wished I was.

But Cross. Cross was a different story.

Hell, I’d fuck me/him/it

Cross wasn’t just any guy. He was every guy. He was an amalgamation of all I loved and hated about men, about the south, about sex. He was the street drug I could never get enough of, even as I bled out. How was I going to animate him? I figured I should find some supermale actor to play him. But no, that wouldn’t do. They might get it wrong. Plus I didn’t need real; I’d had enough real to last a decade. I needed control. I needed a laugh. And anyway, who better to nail Cross than the one who’d been nailed the hardest?

What would I wear, I asked myself, if I were a dude?  And so began the experience called “trying on men’s clothes.”

I wiped off all my makeup and strapped on a rubber cock. I found some boxer briefs, buckled on a pair of men’s pants and took a few paces across the room.

The first thing I’d like to note is, wearing a penis is very distracting. Your sex is wagging around like a goddamn panhandler. It wants to proposition everything you’re looking at, even the wall or the door jamb. Dick informs your every step. Dick makes you sit and walk different.  You can’t just put it out of your mind. Dick is always….right…there. It gently carjacks your senses. Or Car-jeffs.

It’s hard difficult to stop touching it

Next I put on men’s boots, pinned on some foam superman muscles and wrapped an ace bandage around my tits. I cocked my jaw, put on a ball cap, checked the mirror – and somewhere in that series of steps, I disappeared.  The same way you might disappear into a hot bath or the driver’s seat of a Ferrari.  I wouldn’t call it transcendent. But it’s the kind of ahhhh that put my yearnings at ease. I felt my whole center of gravity shift. I swaggered. I swooned. Look at me, I thought. Holy shit. Finally, instead of trying to crawl under a man’s skin, I was actually in it.  Behold, my fix was here before me, staring back in the mirror, awaiting orders. But this time there would be no tears upon extraction. The circuit was contained and closed. I could peel him on, skewer him, adore him, and then pack him up in the closet as needed.

I was going to need to. A lot.

Retired mattress is unintentionally symbolic

The first time I walked into a crowded bar dressed as Cross, the thing that hit me hardest was how completely under the radar I had become. Nobody, male or female, sized me up. I was neither bait nor competition. I was the looker, not the lookee.  I had stepped outside the whole fucking female paradigm. I was free.

But I think the really good shit hit the fan after I got a film crew to capture me acting as all three characters.  I wrote the script and then I  buttoned up like sweet naive Edie, waiting for Cross with baited breath. Then I melted down like hot little Braylee and told him to get the fuck outta my trailer. And finally, I glued on my facial hair, spat my dip into a bottle, looked deep into the camera, and became Cross:

Well, y’know. At least that’s how it felt.

When I returned home that night, with my three identities and spare dick in a bag,  I went through the usual motions. I flipped on the light, hung up my keys, bent down by the the cupboard to get out a bowl, and then, unexpectedly, dropped to a knee. I stared into the back of the dark pantry and happy-cried. Hard. Happy crying, how can I explain this sensation? I know all about sad-crying but this shit was new to me. Imagine feeling so fucking complete that you literally overflow with liquid gratitude. I guess I’d stumbled upon a part of me that had been buried for like, 30 years.  Oh yeah, I’m an actor. I’m a goddamn motherfucking actor, people. I forgot. I had three kids, got stranded in rural Georgia and I completely forgot. Then one day, I dressed up like a dude and remembered who I fucking was.

Dear Diary,

I like Jeff. I think I’m going to dress up like him and film a split-screen sequence making out with myself.

Today is Friday.

 

CRASH BANG BURN is available at Amazon

 

copyright © K. Dawn Goodwin 2016

On Becoming Someone Else

It’s complicated.

Since the day I  started keeping records, my primordial thoughts were about a Jeff. Jeff, et al. Jeff in all his incarnations. The first diary I ever kept began,

I like Jeff. Jeff is in my class.

And then a quick nod to my coordinates in space:

Today is Friday.

Once I even cut a life-sized boy out of a roll of paper and walked around the neighborhood with it, until the real boys who lived down the street saw what I was doing and laughed me back into the house. That’s the thing about boys. Boys weren’t weird. They were practical. They weren’t dumbed down by a love of plastic dolls, ABBA ballads, or a chronic need to tuck blankets around everything until it was nice and cozy. And they sure as shit didn’t walk the block with a paper girl.

Maybe that’s why I got crushes on the mischievous Jeffs of the world, the troublemakers who got sent to the principal’s office, the ones too poor even to be cool. They operated outside the system that had me trapped; they had a nihilist sort of courage to do wrong and the balls to pretend they didn’t give a shit. They didn’t need to be cozy. They probably didn’t even use blankets.

My penchant for Jeffs became a chronic condition in adulthood. They were the types who didn’t care about much beyond their own dicks (a fact they’d never admit). They’d say instead, baby don’t get all deep n shit.  Their aggrandized masculinity contained something frightening and foreign that I wanted to own. I wanted to study their skill set and their physical style, I wanted to be on the winning side of that roughness and intimidation. I longed to absorb their mannerisms, chemically react to their smell and plug my face into their naked bodies. My instincts told me that the only way a girl like me could ever stake a permanent flag on Mt. Man, was by fucking it.

Cross-crawling. It’s like Parkour                   for lonely people.

really lonely people.

 

The only problem was that I am in fact, secretly, quintessentially, regrettably deep n shit. I wanted to feel whole, and a relationship based solely on sex left me in roadkill condition. So, at the inevitable break-up, the part of me that had bloomed now receded painfully into hyper sleep. It was the maleness I grieved most– even though it had ignored me and slipped the beloved D to someone else –  I mourned it. I’d felt so alive! And now look at me, half dead. Forgotten. Staring down the void. Wait. I know how to fix this! Let’s find another one.

This is how I got hooked on men.

But don’t take my word for it. Take Edie’s.

Writing Crash Bang Burn was about embracing this alleged half-dead side. Instead of crashing, banging and burning, I made my characters do it – over and over. Poor things. But it was a way of taking my demons for a walk without letting them off the leash. The goal was neither desecration nor worship –  I just wanted to scratch the itch without tearing my skin off for a change.  I wanted to get one teensy step removed from the rejection and grief that seemed, for me, to be the predicable and perpetual female experience. Instead of it being my cross to bear, it was now, quite literally, Braylee and Edie’s.

But when I was done writing the book, I was by no means done being the puppetmaster. I had just begun. I was compelled to step into their diametrically opposed shoes and gather witnesses for the revival.  I needed cameras because hey, not everyone is a reader. Edie and Braylee would be easy to act out. After all, Edie was a caricature of who I wished I wasn’t and Braylee is kinda who I wished I was.

But Cross. Cross was a different story.

Hell, I’d fuck me/him/it

Cross wasn’t just any guy. He was every guy. He was an amalgamation of all I loved and hated about men, about the south, about sex. He was the street drug I could never get enough of, even as I bled out. How was I going to animate him? I figured I should find some supermale actor to play him. But no, that wouldn’t do. They might get it wrong. Plus I didn’t need real; I’d had enough real to last a decade. I needed control. I needed a laugh. And anyway, who better to nail Cross than the one who’d been nailed the hardest?

What would I wear, I asked myself, if I were a dude?  And so began the experience called “trying on men’s clothes.”

I wiped off all my makeup and strapped on a rubber dick. I found some boxer briefs, buckled on a pair of men’s pants and took a few paces across the room.

The first thing I’d like to note is, wearing a dick is very distracting. Your sex is literally wagging around like a goddamn panhandler. It wants to proposition everything you’re looking at, even the wall or the door jamb. Dick informs your every step. Dick makes you sit and walk different.  You can’t just put it out of your mind. Dick is always….right…there. It gently carjacks your senses. Or Car-jeffs.

It’s really hard to stop touching it

Next I put on men’s boots, pinned on some foam superman muscles and wrapped an ace bandage around my tits. I cocked my jaw, put on a ball cap, checked the mirror – and somewhere in that series of steps, I disappeared.  The same way you might disappear into a hot bath or the driver’s seat of a Ferrari.  I wouldn’t call it transcendent. But it’s the kind of ahhhh that put my yearnings at ease. I felt my whole center of gravity shift. I swaggered. I swooned. Look at me, I thought. Holy shit. Finally, instead of trying to crawl under a man’s skin, I was actually in it.  Behold, my fix was here before me, staring back in the mirror, awaiting orders. But this time there would be no tears upon extraction. The circuit was contained and closed. I could peel him on, skewer him, adore him, and then pack him up in the closet as needed.

I was going to need to. A lot.

Retired mattress is unintentionally                                 symbolic

The first time I walked into a crowded bar dressed as Cross, the thing that hit me hardest was how completely under the radar I had become. Nobody, male or female, sized me up. I was neither bait nor competition. I was the looker, not the lookee.  I had stepped outside the whole fucking female paradigm. I was free.

But I think the really good shit hit the fan after I got a film crew to capture me acting as all three characters.  I wrote the script and then I  buttoned up like sweet naive Edie, waiting for Cross with baited breath. Then I melted down like hot little Braylee and told him to get the fuck outta my trailer. And finally, I glued on my facial hair, spat my dip into a bottle, looked deep into the camera, and became Cross:

Well, at least that’s how it felt.

When I returned home that night, with my three identities and spare dick in a bag,  I went through the usual motions. I flipped on the light, hung up my keys, bent down by the the cupboard to get out a bowl, and then, unexpectedly, dropped to a knee. I stared into the back of the dark pantry and happy-cried. Hard. Happy crying, how can I explain this sensation? I know all about sad-crying but this shit was new to me. Imagine feeling so fucking complete that you literally overflow with liquid gratitude. I guess I’d stumbled upon a part of me that had been buried for like, 30 years.  Oh yeah, I’m an actor. I’m a goddamn motherfucking actor, people. I forgot. I had three kids, got stranded in Georgia and I completely forgot. Then one day, I dressed up like a dude and remembered who I fucking was.

And to think, it all started with sad little Edie in a bar bathroom, trying to become someone else.

Dear Diary,

I like Jeff. I think I’m going to dress up like him and film a split-screen sequence making out with myself.

Today is Friday.

 

 

 

copyright © K. Dawn Goodwin 2016

 

 

Fast Lane – Rationale

Dirt Mall

Braylee Does Walmart

Drag King

I attended an arm wrestling benefit (in character) to sell copies of Crash Bang Burn for the local rape crisis charity, and made a little home movie in the process:

 

Soap – Melanie Martinez

Crash Bang Burn, A Novel – Now On Sale

Now that Bro-country rules the radio, songs about dirt roads, tan legs and tall cans have the monopoly on what Love in the American South is all about.

Crash Bang Burn, however, has a slightly different take.

In Georgia, family is supposed to be bedrock, and love a non-stop summertime—but it’s actually more like quicksand and a bad burn, at least for Braylee and Edie.

Nashville might have penned a song or two about the glories of mama, but nobody mentioned the indoctrinated apron strings that keep grown men tethered like pups to a teat. Which works out great for the Mother Knows Best types—not so great if you’re the “little tramp he married,” like Braylee.

And as for a country boy like Cross, sex is as easy as telling a girl to “slide on over” in his jacked-up truck. But what’s he supposed to do the morning after, when doe-eyed girls like Edie wake up with a case of the Post-Coitus Ties-That-Bind? Because son, those ties can cut off your air supply faster than you can say “chew tobacco, spit.”

Set in the ruralburbs of Nowhere, Georgia, and told through the eyes of three lovers, Crash Bang Burn is a dark, emotionally honest depiction of love and sex, birth and motherhood, divorce and revenge that deep fries the delusions peddled on the silver screen of CMT. Because it’s high time that those three-minute anthems about tan lines and tailgates got held up to the light—or got a firecracker stuck up their tailpipe—or both.

Buy On Amazon

Bleeder Barbie

Oh, this is just what he needs.

That’s what I’m thinking when I pull the bloody torpedo-shaped napkin out of my panties – not a sanitary napkin either, an actual dinner table napkin, which is what I wedge between my thighs when I get lazy, sometimes on the third or fourth day, or the fifth. That’s right, five days of carnage seeping out a painhole near your asscrack – every three weeks.  I just wonder how a man would handle that, the dead animal smell, the stains on his pants, on the bed, under his fingernails, the blood red toilet water, the blood bombs on the tile early in the morning, a trash can full of bandages like someone was trying to plug a bullet wound.  Because something about it all is so bonerkillingly apropos; it’s the side of pussy they don’t want to touch. It’s not objectifiable. It’s not chubberific.

And when I say he and him and them, I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about that limpdick side of you, that dead-eyed taxidermied personality that comes out of your thumbs late in the day, or around midnight, when you’ve had a drink or an Ambien and you hit up the waitress you banged last year or that vaguely milfy lady on Match who seems down to sext, or that facebook friend who loves posing with her own tits. It’s that side of you that wants to get these lower tier women to agree to let you borrow their vagina for ten to twenty minutes – just not in those exact words. You know what I’m talking about. I’m talking to that voice in your head that plays it cocky when you feel like a creamy dog turd deep inside. I’m talking to you, Halfassed Fuck Patroller.

HFP: Has life brightened up for you?

Me: Brightened up for me?

You were so bummed when we last talked

No I wasn’t. Oh wait – you thought because I didn’t want to fuck you that I was bummed out about life?

Whoa, I didn’t say anything about sex. Your words not mine LOL. I would never assume anything like that. I treat a woman like I treat my sister. But if it happens, it happens, I’m not in any rush.

Oh ok, my bad, that’s great. I think.

Although I do think we’d have amazing chemistry.

By “we” you mean you?

What, you not feeling it? That’s fine. Can I ask why? I’m not trying to brag but i know I’m not ugly. And my girlfriends have never complained.

In the next frame, he sends me a picture of his penis.

Not so long ago, this shitty sequence of events with an HFP  would trigger a corresponding side of my personality let’s  call the Dumbass Profile Pic. DPP is consummately frozen carbonite smile that is powered by the male gaze.  DPP’s progesterone-soaked neurons really hate for anyone to feel the slightest bit awkward or uncomfortable, even when they deserve to. DPP swallows her disappointment over the dickpic on her screen and swaddles an HFP’s ego like a shiny, rotten easter egg. She ferries it in a spoon  across the landmines of Where’s mine and Your turn now, because DPPs know that the number one rule of attention-mongering is paying back a sad bathroom mirror pic with a heavily filtered tit-shot.

HFP: I don’t act this way with anyone btw. I’m not saying you’re special but there’s something about you that draws me in.

The problem is, when a DPP voluntarily abstains from sex for 18 months, she undergoes a sea change at the biochemcial level. At eight-months, she is fully detoxed from all the foggy, post coitus bonding hormones that led to every bad decision she ever made in her life. At the ten month mark, she stops thinking about the way he said I love you when she was topless. She spends the next two months facepalming over all the stupid, stupid emojis she used to lubricate an HFP text thread.  At 16 months sex-free, she is fully effaced and immune to the Pavolivan dinging in her phone. At 18 months she can soak up silence like a Tesla battery and her bullshit sensors are NASA grade.

Let’s call her Bleeder Barbie.

When presented with an HFP, Bleeder Barbie finds that she has lost her sea legs, and her actual ones. Someone  took a sharpie to her clear hopeful eyes and stopped combing her plastic, life-like hair. Though Bleeder Barbie tries to harken back to her days as a Dumbass Profile Pic, though she searches her database for gratitude and civilty and fuckability, she is instead filled with an apolcalyptic blankness that can only be described as DS or Dryhumped Soul.

She has lost her firm hold on the expectant dick of a HFP. Sadly, she can give narry a half pump fuck.

I consider the unfolded napkin I just dropped into the garbage, its bright red blood arrow now resting on top of an empty box of Special K. I take my phone and zoom in, I want a real up-close high def shot where you can see all the slug-like bloody bits that once lined my uterus to, you know, nourish new life and perpetuate the human fucking race.  I hit send.

HFP: I think I’m gonna throw up.

Yes, yes I figured you would, and you should throw up, because a Halfassed Fuck Patroller’s innocent, well-meaning, treat-you-like-my-sister penis does not like Actual Pussy. He washes his eyes of it and moves onto the E’s in his phone contacts. Bleeder Barbie meanwhile, changes her stained pants and takes out the trash.

Hunger of the Pines – Alt-J

Captive Audience

When the judge handed down the sentence I thought, this it it. But it wasn’t. That was nothing, just a little deafening combustion, just a freight train warming up its engine. After all, I still believed in things; I still believed in my savior, in the appeal, in the last minute witness, in the long-suffering nature of justice. Until the day he visited me in prison and brought my kids and his smiling head – until that moment I believed.

But when I took in the sum total of their little faces – their wheat-colored hair, their scent, their clear eyes against the square dirty grids of  cage upon cage upon cage –  I could feel what five years meant. Five years in an iron box was the end of us, it was the end of me, it was all lines converging into a tunnel. It was a sentence of slow suffocation, stretched out for two thousand days. I froze in the oncoming light and the steel beast took me out.

I buckled to a knee on the visiting room floor. I was a girder laced with explosives or worse, maybe just one faulty piece of steel that collapses the whole bridge. I was making awful sounds too, like the life inside me was being squeezed out.  I tried to resist that shrill tea kettle sound, I knew what waited on the other side if I gave in and let it all empty out.

So I struggled up off the cement and found a chair, so the watchers would think I’d tripped.  I rested my guts against my elbows, kept my head bowed. Still the whining in my throat kept coming, a coward begging help from helpless children, from a godless God.

“I’m going to leave if you don’t stop,” my daughter scolded in my ear, sitting thigh to thigh with me. But in her solid flank I could feel the opposite was true, that she would stay no matter what I did, no matter how I embarrassed her or myself.  She would join me in here if she could, make due with life in a cell if it meant we could be together.

Don’t believe your eyes,  I wanted to tell her. Don’t believe this costume they’ve put me in, just try and feel what’s true if you can. 

Behind us I could hear him joking with a fellow visitor about a chair.  Maybe they’d sat in the wrong one, or taken his, something so forgettable and so stupid but enough for him to boom with laughter like life was just the funniest gosh darn thing.  He was the consummate game player,  he knew how to size up a room and sniff out a weak link, he knew how to nudge it onto center stage so no one would suspect it was him. After waiting so long to see me take a knee, to have a peek at me in shackles, he could barely contain his jangling keys, his metallic chuckle, his tourist joy. He had the best seat in the house after all, and two thousand in cash, and my kids on his arm like three sacks of souvenirs.

K. Dawn Goodwin’s new book, Crash Bang Burn is available now

Maximum Security

The last time I saw Jonathan, she said, was visiting hours.
We were playing cards
and by accident, he put his hands in his lap.
So they strip searched him
and threw him in solitary.
 
I am driving the spine of Lookout Mountain,
just me and the blinking cell towers;
my radio picks up static,
and signals from space,
charged particles,
and her voice:

He was 16 with a 30 year sentence.
He didn’t know what that meant at first,
but after 4 weeks alone he did.
And when the guards changed shifts
he hung himself.
 
I miss my turn. The GPS is possessed
the gold trees look grim, the road eerie, the engine hot.
Maybe my car is about to flame out.
Will this be the last thing I see before I die?
No?
How about this?

I park and ascend the ridge on foot
as if I’m being timed or watched or pursued.
Great Eastern Trail, the sign says.  Cherokee Falls.
Statute numbers warn the Stupid not to pass.
Once, the Cherokee slipped on dangerous rocks to their hearts content
made love in the pools illegally
Where are they now?

I pass a church group, then a cereal box family
A white couple takes a selfie by the overlook
did you get it?…take another
I close my eyes, wondering if he knows how much she hates him.
I leave their conversations far behind
Make way for me, winner of the Great Eastern Spitting Contest,
I am a coal furnace
that might explode
in solitary.

They slide the iron gates across the road at 10 pm
barring entry or exit.
I like this so much, I would extend the quarantine for a week
or the rest of my life if I could.
All around me, you gather in groups by your roaring fires;
Mine glows and dies, glows and dies, like a fever,
like a lone cell tower on the brink.
Searching the grass for more kindling, I find only spider eyes
reflecting light into prisms.
I talk to them like pets.

What does death feel like
when the steppers step on you?
When the trespassers bash their stupid heads
when they march you to Oklahoma
when they seal the penitentiary
and you cinch off your own neck but don’t die —
how bad does it get
before it gets better?

It’s bad, it’s a life of solitary confinement
compressed into 7 seconds;
I know because I punched through and got free of this place
and found
that needing you
is a lie I tell myself
even on the other side.

I toss all night, I am cold, my eyes ache.
Orion makes his way across my zipper.
I dream that teenage boys undress me in my tent.
I dream that Jonathan is visiting from prison,
and as a courtesy would I please fuck him one last time,
before he transfers to maximum security.
I dream that I have just returned from Afghanistan
and strangers leave me fruit baskets,
my mother tells me she’s proud –
of course. I’m a glorious fighter, after all
though I can’t recall any combat.

I drive home
through the arid and ugly Georgia lowlands
an expanse of solitude and sadness.
A green Malibu with Chattooga plates pulls alongside
and I stare at Jonathan and me.
We are cat-eyed gorgeous drunks; we are redneck crazy;
better in still life than in real.

The DOT sign says, Historic Trail of Tears.
that must be it;
It must be pain that saturates the ground here
growing rich crops of cotton,
and meth heads,
prisons,
and my love for you.
The radio is a nonstop corporate playlist. But I stay
because not even prayers                                                                                                  rise here.

Backyard Animals – Max Elto

My Fear of Nice People

Here in the ruralburbs of west Georgia, I’ve tried to practice meaningful human interaction with the nice people in my neighborhood, though after many years they are still highly unfamiliar. Once, back in 2011, I smiled and waved.  I think they knew how hard that was for an idiot like me, because they have stayed away ever since. Nice people prefer to build intimacy with more familiar objects like beer, or Friends From Church, or spacecraft-sized LED UHDTVs.

I prefer idiots. People who – whether by poverty or poetry – brazenly and unapologetically display their failures to the world. The only other idiot on my street is a single mom like me, named Billie. The first time I met her, directly following hi nice to meet you, she immediately came clean about the cysts on her ovaries, her two babydaddies in jail for drugs, and how she had gotten fired for slapping her boss in the face (because she was a fat bitch and she deserved it). After years of failing with the nice people, here at last was someone who didn’t mind if I mowed the shrapnel of our Happy Meal toys into her yard or used hamster cages as end tables. Plus, our kids liked to do the same things, like ride my office chair backwards down the middle of the street.  In drag.

“What on earth are you wearing!” she screamed as her 10 year-old son Jake zoomed past, pointing a plastic gun at her head.

“Oh sorry,” I said, waving my hand over the scene.

I’m never sure why I compulsively apologize, maybe because I exist, or she does. And niceness dictates that idiots, like ticking time bombs, should generally be defused whenever possible.

“Y’know,” Billie nudged me with an elbow, “Jake’s been playing dress-up since he was two.  He used to wear my hot pink panties and his grandma’s bra.  He called my panties ‘plan-plans.’  He used to be like, ‘Me girl, me wear plan-plans’ and I’d tell him, ‘you’ve got a pecker godammit and don’t forget it, ya little titty baby.’  His granddaddy woulda done shit a brick.”

“I dressed like that because I ain’t got no daddy!” Jake called, overhearing.

“Ain’t my fault!” Billie hollered back. ”Now SHUT YER FRICKIN MOUTH OR I WILL BUST IT.”

Where I come from in Whitepeopleton, Connecticut, mothers don’t take pride in the public verbal abuse of their children.  Instead, they abuse onlookers with their PhD in gloaty parenting. Does Petra want a pomegranate? they ask their trendy, Merrell-laden tot in Whole Foods.  I’m so proud of you for making a healthy choice!

“Pray for us,” Billie sighed.

“My Sunday school teacher pinches me on the butt if I pray too long!” Jake added, flashing me a grin full of rotten teeth.

I feel triumphant of course, because my kids’ fillings were paid for with a Walmart credit card.

Sometimes I overreach though. I get uppity and take my Walmart credit card to the Walmart portrait studio so I can assault nice people with photo packages of my precious children. Only problem is I can’t afford photo packages – I have to bootleg them at the Kodak bootlegging machine in the film department.  Nice people don’t understand this discrepancy.

“’Scuse me, “ said associate Wendy. “ Do you have a copyright waiver for those photos?”

I stared back at her.  I stared back with my bed-head, my sweatpants and my stained TJ Maxx purse, which contained two parts chewed Tootsie pop, and one part food stamp.  She awaited my answer.  She wanted to hear me admit that I wasn’t very nice, even though neither of us were paid enough to care.

Do I look like I have a copyright waiver? I said.

Actually what I said was oh sorry!  Then I packed up, backed away and marinated in shame.

But why? Why was I feeling guilty in a store that enjoys exploiting the fleet of 88-year-old underinsured hospice patients they call cashiers.  Copyright infringement should make me feel like Robin Hood.

The fact is, nice people are terrifying. And the most terrifying among them are women who wear scrubs while collecting your billing information.

“Hi,” I said to Rhonda through the little glory-hole in the glass window. “I don’t have insurance. Can I have a discount since I’m paying cash?”

It seemed like a reasonable request, something that could be laughingly blamed on Obama like most nice people problems, while we enjoyed fondling our mutual bootstraps because hey, it takes a village to raise my idiots.

“Ma’am?” She asked, as only southerners can — stretching it into a three syllable word and also an instrument of death. Ma’am? always precedes what is traditionally known as the Trucker Bar Throw-down Stance. Her penciled-on eyebrows issued a two-pronged attack, explaining something about $137.50, and how 100% of 50 minus getajob was office policy, tapping her finger on the fine print in my paperwork specifying No Handouts for lazy Freedom-haters.

This time, instead of immediately tucking into an oh sorry, I said: you can’t treat me like that!  What happened next was, she continued to treat me precisely like that.  Then I bent over while she swiped my maxed out Walmart card through the slot in my dignity. On the way home, the nice person driving in front of me braked cautiously at every green light until my head exploded.

But the worst thing about nice people is when they are nice to you and you don’t even know who they are. For them, every day is a beautiful day for a neighbor, even if that neighbor responds by galloping in circles, spanking her own ass or diving into the shrubs.

“Would you look at that,” said the woman next to me in the Food Depot. She grabbed the jumbo-sized bottle of Hidden Valley Ranch off the shelf and held it up to my unseeing eyes. I withdrew deep inside my own puckered anus.

“My husband can eat an entire half a bottle of one of these,” she explained. “On one salad!”

“Oh I know!”  I said, rattling a bottle of pills as decoy.

“Amber always makes these eyeballs out of white chocolate for Halloween!”

Who the fuck was Amber.  Who the fuck was this lady.

“You mix peanut butter with confectioner sugar, and then dip them in it, with little Life Savers in the center.”

“Dip them in what?” I am too ashamed to make eye contact. The Greatest Love of All is happening to me, and it’s a little like a prison shower.

“For Hallelujah night at my church, silly!” she said, clutching more non-perishables to her bosom. “Do you have kids! There are so many kids at Hallelujah night!”

I knew this church; I’d passed the sign a million times, the one with the cross impregnating planet earth from behind, and a heart drawn at the base like a big sack of balls. In an act of physiological mutiny my hands began slowly wheeling my car away, where I disappeared behind the horizon of a Fruity Cheerios endcap and imploded like a dying star.

“Oh sorry!” I whisper-screamed, careening to the shining solitude of the dairy aisle where I could find a good three-foot buffer between my cart and the rest of mankind.

Until I arrived in the express lane. Behind a woman whose purse was roughly the size of an adult diaper, and whose entire life had existed for this one, shining check-out. Did electronic transactions threaten? Why then she would soak up the evil with a wallet more absorbent than a maxi pad from 1952, complete with straps, snaps, flaps and a special zipper for her check writing pen.

The cashier announced the total, and lo, her pen was removed from its holster. The check register was carefully studied, balanced and deeply enjoyed;  the date was subsequently addressed and then the time, the latitude, longitude, temperature and a full description of the products — Pepsi, pork chops, mega-tub of butter spread – all recorded in cursive at the rate of one metonic cycle per loop. Then the cashier hit 130 keys, jotted down ten lines of personal info, fed the check through 25 different printers, rebooted the computer and summoned an act of God – just in time for the dawn of the third millennium. Then the cash drawer began its slow migration toward opening, and we hovered over the face of the void as she folded her receipt into thirds, unsnapped the flaps, closed the zippers, the caps, the gaps, the straps and JUST! USE! A FUCKING VISA! GODAMMIT!  I screamed, vigorously swiping my card through a slot in both their skulls.

No what I actually said was, oh, sorry because my produce had accidentally touched her produce. I gently backed it up on the conveyor belt with a dopey little laugh.

Life is better this way, with preemptive apologies. Because scribbling all over the rules that nice people follow does not build self-confidence or alleviate existential pain;  Neither does it reverse idiocy or cure cancer. It does however, strongly indicate that one is not getting laid.

“Have a blessed day,” the cashier called to the check writer, as a hint. Somewhere at this very moment, she is still packing up that rolling suitcase of a wallet, because even blessings must wait on nice people and their checks.

The cashier turned to me. She looked tired, her white arms were massive and puffy.

“Long day,” she said to me, sighing.  I arranged my items, salivating. It was MY turn now.  MY turn.

“It’s my chemo,” she went on.  “It’s got me so wore out.”

“Here’s my coupon,” I said with what I hoped was saintly concern.

“At least I’m doing better than my aunt,” she went on.  “She drowned in her own fluids.”

I stared at her and she stared back, and suddenly nobody else existed but the two of us.

“How,” I asked gently. “How did she…drown?”

As the cashier explained the suffocating nature of bodily liquids – thoughtfully caressing my box of Kashi cereal, teasing the scanner but never fully crossing the threshold of checking me out –  all my tension drained away, all my hurrying ceased, and the lady behind me waited and waited and seethed and longed to ram my 12 bottles of Pamplemousse Perrier straight up my pretentious ass.

Lessons – SOHN

Nightcall – London Grammar

 

Anything Less Than I Love You Is Lying

Before dawn, Nathan was a speck at the top of a billboard, unfolding a McDonald’s ad in the spotlights. The cold wind billowed under the vinyl as he released it, threatening to bring it down onto the interstate 50 feet below and make I’m Lovin It the last thing some poor trucker would ever see.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he muttered at the icy gust, bracing the flimsy material in his cracked fingertips, hurrying to sink hooks and pump tension into the ratchet straps.

It was going to be a long day, but it wasn’t the work or the deep freeze that made him feel bitter.  It was having nothing better at the end of it. When the sum total of his life became nothing more than signs along a highway, that’s when memories started leaking from their holding tanks and he’d think about things he didn’t want to. Like Ellie leaning into his chest that morning outside the diner.  The way her cold cheek had felt against his neck, her bones giving way in his arms —  the kisses melted his armor like wax against the sun.  It was like she’d just returned. But that was impossible because they’d only just met.

He unfastened the clips and let the old pictures fall, one after the other, put up new ones and made his way on down the line.   By noon he’d done ten installs and boxed up his feelings too,  just squares on a conveyor belt en route to oblivion where they belonged. He ate lunch at the same drive-thru. He stopped at the same gas station on the way home, bought the same beer, listened to the same station. He parked his truck the same way, the floorboards creaking under the same step as he made his way up to his apartment.

It would’ve all been the same but his next door neighbor, an army man on permanent disability, burst out of his door when he heard Nathan’s footfalls.

“Hey man, what’s up?” the  guy asked, already standing way too close.

Nathan set the twelve-pack down and slid his key into the lock.

“Hey,” he answered without looking up. It was the most he’d said to anyone all day. Maybe all week.

“Ain’t seen your girl come around lately. I thought she was moving in.”

“Nope,” he answered, keeping his back turned, hoping one syllable replies were sufficient warning.

“Oh, did y’all split? I did too. With my girlfriend. Women!”

Nathan didn’t say a word. He picked up the beer and pushed open his front door.

“Did you meet her online?” The man went on, undeterred.  “ Cuz I saw her profile today.  She was hot. What’s her name? I was gonna message her just to say hi but wasn’t sure if —”

Nathan crossed the threshold, turned, and kicked the door shut in the man’s face. He’d meant to say it was fine, have at it, knock yourself out. But his boot had moved first, deciding on its own that the days of being neighborly were over.

Inside his living room, the blinds were shut tight against the light. He never lifted them. He flicked on the stereo to fill the silence. In the kitchen sink there was one glass, on the counter one upturned plate on a towel. He slid the blue box into the empty fridge, took out another can.  She’d left salt and pepper shakers on the counter and for some reason it suddenly bothered him, so he placed them inside one of his hundred empty kitchen cabinets, along with the thought of her, and closed the compartment. He opened another and took out a pill, just in case. Not likely to get that bad, but not likely to get very good either.

In the bedroom  he pulled off his work boots, but instead of dropping them in their usual place he cocked back and hurled them in succession at the opposite wall. He sat down on the edge his bed, chest heaving slow. He plugged in his phone and scrolled silently as he drank. Beside him the lamp was dark. He looked up and stared at the wall. He needed to fuck so badly.

 Ellie.

No, he couldn’t go to her.  She wasn’t willing to give him any assurance, so why should he give her any back. He needed to go somewhere the opposite of  her place,  see the opposite of her face.  He had to get out of this room,  out of the grip of this feeling. And he had to do it now.

**

A hundred miles away,  Ellie had just gotten home with her kids. Their heads came flooding back under her wing in a barrage of laughter and dirty backpacks. But her smile was hollow; she felt dead inside and out, a human statue with a phone fused into her right palm. She knew it was wrong to feel that way, to let it get in the way, but for now nothing short of amputation would make her let go of that fucking phone.

There was cooking and cleaning to do, little faces that needed to feel loved and cared for. But maybe she wasn’t doing it right because their hugs and their chatter didn’t make her feel loved at all. She saw only the lonely job ahead, an insurmountable ascent with no summit. The only love she could feel these days came in the shape of a text message. Love was backwards and upside down.

The kitchen had been the first thing to go.  Papers, bags, clothes, extension cords, groceries –  they’d remained wherever she’d dropped them. The trash overflowed. The closet door sagged on its broken hinge.  It was suspended animation maybe, the dwelling of someone who’d stepped outside for just a second and gotten hit by a car. Or a sign.

For weeks she’d walked on a cloud, the house ship-shape, her heart in the pink – hanging up towels, snapping the sheets, painting her nails, cooking the rice –  it was all neat and pretty. The routine wasn’t a routine at all when Nathan was in it.

You want me? he’d tease with that caramel voice, that curling grin, translucent eyes staring into hers on the pillow, his cinnamon skin between her white legs. Was it possible to come so much that it destroyed your life? It had; her body had reversed polarity. They’d met on a Friday and by that Wednesday food had become an afterthought. He was the main sustenance, her sites set on his scent like nectar. She’d plundered his cock like petals but it didn’t kill the longing, she only wanted him again when they were done. Eye to eye, in the inseparable throes, days disappeared. It felt like love. But how could it be. She didn’t know him at all.

My oh my, you’re so good looking, he sang to her at the kitchen table, strumming her guitar while she put away breakfast.  But I’ve not tasted all your cooking.

Who are you when we’re not fucking? She should’ve sang back, but was too out of it. His nails had felt so good going in her coffin. He’d been hammering them all night long.

Now the picture-perfect table where he’d sat like her own personal Blake Shelton was covered with melted ice cream. She put a sack and a plate down in the chocolate puddle because who cared. Both sides of the sink were a foot high with pots and pans, bowls squished together with stinky soggy sandwich blobs. The floor was so sticky the soles of her shoes peeled when she walked.

She  receded to her bedroom so she could slip away under the blankets, back turned against the sights and sounds of the house, the phone in her right hand like an empty IV.

“Mommy you ok?” her seven year-old asked, peering into her cracked bedroom door. She lifted her face and nodded.

“Just not feeling well,” she told him, and he didn’t buy it.  She hated that it had leaked into his life too. “Do you need anything?”

“What’s wrong,” he asked, hanging on the doorknob, uncertain. “Why are you crying?”

“I’m okay,” she said, but instead of being okay, she put her head down and slept.

She dreamed she’d fallen into the river and someone threw her a life-preserver.  It wasn’t her life she was worried about though, it was that fucking phone. It lay before her on the float, impossibly dry and shiny and black and slim — she had to save it quick.  But as she hoisted her weight it capsized and disappeared down into the dirty water. At first, utter panic — she’d never get his hello! But then relief, because if there was no hello, then there’d be no goodbye.  There was freedom in being cut off.

**

At midnight Nathan was fucking some dark-haired girl from the bar. It was a relief to be thrusting out the aggravation, but it was proving to be its own kind of aggravation. Wasn’t much he could really do with this chick. Anything short of him doing all the work wasn’t really panning out.

“What?” he asked, trying to read her.  Ellie always let loose. Ellie always let him know. Ellie and her stupid face. “You want me to stop?”

“No,”  the girl giggled, a weird thing to do, weird like her perfume. His hands were all over her body, getting her off, but hers were limp and non-committal. The buzz was wearing off and he had work in the morning so he took over and jerked himself off. The rage was gone at least,  and soon she would be too. He staggered to the shower, wondering if it was worth it.  He lathered the soap in the warm water and scrubbed his dick down a little too thoroughly, got that perfume off his neck. He felt a little better, and a lot worse. He stepped out to dry off and glanced over Ellie’s bottles in the trash. She’d be jealous if she knew. Maybe she’d feel as miserable as he had.  But it was her fault for not saying I love you, her fault that he’d shut down, her fault that he was killing pain with a subpar fuck.

He walked out to his truck in the pitch black rain and began the day like always. But he hadn’t gotten his feelings fastened down just yet. The water on his windshield made him think about that night in the woods, riding the mule with her into the river, the  splash exploding like yellow fireworks in their headlights.  The submerged engine had churned, nearly tipping.  His friends had hopped out and pushed it to shore, but Ellie had gone streaking off into the dark, leaving a trail of  jeans and underwear. He’d stumbled after her, peeling off his clothes and wading up to his knees in the current. He’d reached out to her bare, luminescent skin, pressed her goosebumps against his chest. When his friends flashed the brights on their naked bodies,  she’d tried to hide but tripped instead and took them both down hard in the shallow water. He kept trying to get up, but she was laughing too hard. That was how he’d felt with her from day one:  so happy he couldn’t stand.  How can a man live like that, on his knees, clinging to someone who won’t ever let you get a hold.

He pulled his truck up to the base of another sign, took out the next box and climbed up into the dark, disappearing above the hiss of the wet highway.

**

Ellie was in her kitchen making dinner. In lieu of sex she had food; potatoes in heavy cream, a cherry pie the size of a human stomach — carbohydrates were the only thing that could counter the emptiness. She set dinner out for the children and then hunched at the stove like a bundled skeleton. She ate and ate and ate, and then looked at her needful phone, hollow eyed.

She scrolled through the punishing highlight reel on Facebook, reviewing the lives of better-adjusted mothers, intact families who preferred alternative schooling and organic dinners for their better-dressed children. They were traveling to Disney again.

She called her girlfriend.

“I’m in a slump,” she sniffled, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “I haven’t bathed.  I look like a hobbit on meth. There’s a mountain of laundry that’s been on the couch so long it’s no longer clean. There are so many dirty dishes we actually ran out of dishes.”

“Oh girl listen,” her friend replied, “You’re not the only one. Just finding something to wear to the kids’ Christmas party is gonna be a chore, though I’m sure I could bring this house dress I’ve worn for the past 3 days as my plus one.”

“You make me feel better,” Ellie said. “There was half a stick of butter left out on the counter and I just wiped my bagel through it and ate it.”

“That’s not so bad.”

“Oh and a minute ago the mustard exploded on the back of  a chair and I wiped my sandwich through that too.  Incidentally, I found the package of ham under the table where the cat was licking it, and the cheese slices were in my purse.  I just don’t give a fuck anymore. So long as I am eating.”

Her friend laughed. “What about my stained house dress?”

“Please, we both know I’m the official door greeter at the gates of hell.”  Ellie paused. “But hey, you made me smile. I needed that.”

“No problem. What are fellow losers for?”

She hung up and considered  the heads of her children eating dinner in front of the TV.  She would go to them  now,  try and make up for it.

But at night, the thought of him with someone else made her pull the blankets over her head and cry.  She wished she could call a timeout on her life, to put the whole act on pause, to stop all the pretending and the games and  just lift the shade on all the illusions for one second  – and see at last: what was the truth? And not for any magnanimous reason either, but just to know simply, had she ever mattered to him?  Because how could she matter to herself if she hadn’t.

  She drifted off, imagining she was walking through the dim hallway in his house.  There was one glass in his kitchen sink. One plate drying on a towel. In his bedroom he was  sleeping like he always did, on top of the bedspread like a permanent visitor, arms folded over his chest, huddled against the bedside table. It felt so good to see him. It felt so good to forget.

**

After work Nathan didn’t shower or change clothes. He felt dead inside but told himself he was just tired. He dozed off before twilight and dreamed she was standing in his bedroom doorway, whispering his name.  It was such a relief, like none of the bad had ever happened. He lifted the blanket and she crawled in, facing him. He grunted with approval at her scent and her softness, her kisses crackling beneath his ear. He brought the cover up around her like wings, closed his eyes and hugged her tight. This was love, wasn’t it?  Had to be. Couldn’t she feel it too?  But she was wiggling out of her clothes, stroking his body into a silken barb, sliding onto him,  stirring his breath.  And suddenly, he wasn’t so sure.

**

Hero – Family of the Year

F4 via Text Message

I fell asleep on his chest, but woke up to his back.   Everything had been fine an hour before.  But now he was as far away from me as he could get, huddled to the farthest outpost of the bed.

All up and down my body,  a hundred shallow wells were pooling with that sick sick feeling.  I sat up a little, my heart like a block of wood. He used to wake at my slightest stir and pluck me like strings, his touch overflowing onto every square inch of my skin, severe with tenderness.  But now he was stiff and closed.  His mind was on his phone. Each time it chimed, another distant siren.

When he left for work just before dawn, his eyes were as dark as the windows.  I laid awake, following his truck in my mind’s eye. Ten, twenty, now forty miles outside of town.   Beside me on the bed, he’d left not one single trace.

What’s wrong? I texted.

Nothing,  the screen replied, and I tried not to shudder.

I remembered that night, driving together down the highway, his right hand curled around my two left fingers. He’d held them fast even as he shifted gears.  Physical touch was his currency, but words were mine. I would replay and reorder them, pipette their meaning by the ounce and milliliter and  feel them to the tenth power.  But texted words were a different animal entirely, robotic and yet shape-shifting; blooming one minute and metastasizing the next.

Maybe that’s why the killzone of his message was so massive. It arrived in my phone like a drone, time-stamped at 9:15 AM, full of killer e’ s and r’s – ready and great and friends and relationship.  Each one was a corpse stacked on another in a truck bed, a bag of grain dropped from a UN helicopter that couldn’t turn and bail fast enough.

I’m thinking more and more I’m not ready for a relationship.  You’re a great person and I’d love for us to be friends

Inside the hemisphere of my body, the radar lit up super cell red, the kind where the core glows purple, exceeding all known wind measurements. It was the kind where you hunker down and pray because the smooth boards of your home are about to split and explode into jagged projectiles. The kind where you come to in the cheery sunlight moments later, walls gone, bleeding out where the picture frame of your loved one has embedded in your thoracic artery.

Men have a way of just turning off their feelings like a switch,  I’d fretted to him a few days before.

 I’m different…in all ways, he’d assured. Don’t put me in the same category please.

But that was at 2:58 PM, sunny and partly cloudy.  At 9:15 the next morning, the purple eye was directly overhead, the white-hot fear howling like a freight train.There was no negotiating with a screen.  Screens had no stake, screens made no judgment calls, screens were immune.  Screens were there so people didn’t have to be.  They were the weapon of choice for goodbye.  Maybe that’s all I ever had anyway: a relationship with a screen.

But he’d lain naked on the bed, my lover in repose, my lover in the flesh.  I’d taken a sliver of cocoa butter and rubbed it into his dry palm, down deep to his finger bones until the brown crease of his lifeline became glossy and supple. I’d brought the tips to my lips and kissed them as if there was nothing in the world to fear.  I didn’t know I was in the land of frowning emoticons. I didn’t know he could simulate an act of god and issue an apology via SMS.  I didn’t know his hand was just the periscope of a machine, scrolling quick past his brother’s demise and onto something more fun.

.

Daddy – Emeli Sandé

 

The Breakup Junkie

A man passes in the aisle and you shudder. He is the same height, the same hair, the same shirt. Your heart explodes and then collapses in on itself.  Is it him?  No, of course not. Ding dong, the hope is dead. But its carcass limps along.

This is the grocery store, and the first time you’ve left your house since he left you. It hasn’t been this bad for you in a long time. Maybe you’ve air-dropped into civilian life too soon.  You don’t just notice people that pass, you cling to them with your eyes. That is a person, you recite. That too is a person. The fact that they’re not dead inside like you –  it’s a kind of miracle.

You can’t go inside your own head, can’t visit your thoughts for long. Everything that inhabited you has fled. There are carpet prints where furniture used to be.  All that’s left are pen caps and junk mail and the detritus that no one takes with them.  So you keep your gaze outward. You put one foot in front of the other.

Random men keep triggering your parasympathetic reflex, so you brace for the surge and the prickling letdown. It feels like excitement bubbling in your chest but it’s not. Excitement is pink; pink like  cotton candy in your brain, pink like the sunset when you drove to his house, pink like your lips going down on him. This isn’t pink. This is gray. The precise crayon shade would be “aftermath”. This is the graveyard, the homeless shelter for love. This is you, your dry lips parted beneath a gunmetal pipe praying for one last drop. It has to be in there somewhere. It has to.

You peer at a woman near the potato chips. Her hair is tied back, her skin has color and she is frowning at a paper list. Children fuss at her waist. Her life is just a life, but her back bends so capably through it. See how she moves and doesn’t cry? you marvel. See that? You used to do that. Before you met him.

.You are blank as plastic. You are the color of a fading bruise. Cords are still plugged into your heart and they drag along behind you like a busted toy, ends ripped off, wires stripped and frayed.

You open the glass door, reach into the cold for a frozen pizza and put it in your cart.  The wheels turn and you move three paces toward and still he hurts you.  His existence feels like a permanent injury. You cast your eyes onto a teenage girl as she passes. Pink shorts, brown hair, you catalog desperately.  She seems fine. She seems nice. You take comfort in the lines of an old man’s  face. He nods and smiles at you, a giver of mercy. But a young guy brushes by and you flinch so hard the whole world quakes.  Your ears explode.  No one notices.

As you walk to the checkout, you hear a child wailing pitifully for his mother to lift him out of the grocery cart. Let me out let me out let me out!  he sobs, louder and louder. You look around but can’t locate him him. Please! Let me out!  It escalates and pierces and starts a bleed in your brain. Please mama please! Let! Me! Out! Then the refrain changes and it guts you:

I’ll be good for you! he cries. Please! I’ll be good for you! I’ll be good for you!

Something about the order of those words.  Now you are crying too. Almost automatic. Push-button tears. You  wipe them on your bare arm and keep moving.  I’ll be good for you.  That was how you acted, wasn’t it. Desperate like a child. You tried so hard not to grovel. But you did. You begged.  I’ll be good for you. I’ll do anything. Don’t cut me out. 

In the parking lot you unlock your car. You’ve wedged your vehicle in a space between two big trucks that look just like his. It feels safe to park like that, flanked and protected, snuggled up against a lie. You take in the hot, dying breeze. He’s so close, you think. He’s just across town. He’s not even dead. Just a little dead. Just dead for you.

At the red light, you dream with your eyes open.  You have a hundred flashbacks to process, all poisoned bait.  Sometimes you get so starved that you eat one.  You relive him from start to finish, and lick your fingers when you’re done.  You can see him on your front porch that night, grinning down at you with those black eyes as he stepped into the lamplight.  He was so good-looking, like some cocky high school crush. You let yourself crumble because you knew it, you already knew it. The pain of having him in your bed was going to be as bad as the pain of not having him at all.

Go ahead, remember how it felt to touch him. Slide your hand up under his shirt and take in his clean scent, so hard under his clothes. The TV flickers and there is mint on his tongue. Press down on the stiff denim and the metal buckle.  Feel him grip you all over, watch him squeeze your nipples out of the lace and into his mouth.  He pulls down your underwear and towers over you naked. He’s pale and slim like some virgin sacrifice you made up.  It imprints you like a negative.  That cross expression, that frustrated sweetness on his pursed lips as you spread for him, right before he goes in. Long after he’s done making you come it’ll haunt you. The way he shakes his head like too goddamn good. Your body is too soft and slippery inside like velvet and cream and he gives it to you rough and quiet like a man. You let loose all your secret, wicked cries. You let loose all your girlish dreams and hope he can’t see.

It’s just an animal act of course. Sex is just pheromones and molecules and blood and skin, but afterward you rest your forehead on his chest and he feels like the shore.  You drowse as he strokes your hair. I don’t want to leave, he says in the morning, and your heart soars. Wrap that day all the way around you, sell your soul to it because it never will be again.  And the lesson that comes next is the hardest: It wasn’t even true.  It wasn’t even close. It was pretend. It was a very good game. Oh yeah, and you lost.

Text him. One more drink would make it so easy. You finger the latch. You know what he’d do, slip his phone out of his pocket and the light of your name would shine in his eyes.  Maybe he’d write back. Maybe he’d make you wait, maybe he’d drag you open-mouthed through the mud again and not even notice.  Are you up for that again?  The vodka seems to be.

You circle round it, longing to come alive in his hand.  You pull up his name, no bigger than a kilobyte at the tip of your finger. You’ve worked hard to get clean. Are you ready to rip yourself apart for a taste? The almighty send button. It’s the only thing between you and the hell you want so badly. You pause. You sip. The screen fades to black.

So you totter to your car and begin driving toward his house.  Are you going? You’re not are you? You are? You sail through the empty streets with a loopy smile, freed from the shackles of self preservation. Just past the last traffic light the town disappears, and your windshield is as dark as the edge of the earth. You have a cigarette to smoke, so you pull it hard and blow it long, pluming toward him in the dark, your fingers sparking as they skid through the air.  What will you do when you land in his driveway, crumbling into fragments like a half-assed meteor.  Stumble out of the driver’s side, tripping over your shoes, banging on his unlit door like you’re crazy? What is it you think you’ll find?

Maybe he’ll yank you into his hallway and ragefuck you so hard the picture frames drop from the wall and shatter. Maybe you can tear his shirt and pound his chest and rake his face with your nails while he makes your body come, because that’s all you got with him. Fucking bodies. Bodies that fuck. Love is nowhere on the scanner. But you miss his scorpion sting, don’t you? The way it leaves you dazed and paralyzed and unable to function for weeks on end?  Mmm. That’s sort of like love, isn’t it.

You never make it to his house. Your stomach is seizing, temples throbbing with blood like syrup. The nub of the cigarette goes out the window, and then the entire pack with it. You heave up the woozy dream onto the median, frothy and vile as poisonous raspberries. It feels so good to be so sick. It slaps you in the face. It empties out the pink fog, leaving behind the hard certainty of right and wrong, what will hurt and what will help.

You’ve got to replace the gaping hole in your life and the burning one in your bed.  You can’t go back or you’ll have to start all over. So you pick a guy just like him. A little shier, a little softer, a little tamer. A grade B version. He ignores you a little and it weirdly turns you on. You meet him for a drink but he’s not as attractive really, or as interesting. He doesn’t say you’re pretty. He doesn’t say how’d I get so lucky. But he’s here for sex just the same. During a long silence you look over at the bar and see another guy talking to a girl who looks like you.  Maybe it’s you in another dimension, you on a future date with someone who cares.

You look back at your empty replacement and realize you’ve made a mistake. You are sitting in the wrong chair,  trying to fix a shitty feeling by eating more shit. So you take your purse and get up, as if your software has suddenly expired. You walk away from your date and out the front door and never look back.

Hey hottie where u go? texts what’s-his-name. You don’t answer. You don’t answer anyone. You go home and rub one out. You dry your eyes, smoke half a cigarette and wonder, is it time? But you know, deep down, it’s not. Not even fucking close. You crush the butt and contempt burns deeper.

When r we gonna hang out sexy?  Numbnuts texts again.

How bout never, you say out loud, to the empty room.  Because someday you’re going to have to recover.  Someday pushing your broken heart around in a grocery cart is going to get old.  Someday you’re going to have to make room for something good.

“Soon,” you type back. “lol.”

Someday. Just not yet.

copyright © K. Dawn Goodwin 2016

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Eating Your Heart Out

There was a little house in the dark.  It was charred and on fire.

“What happened,” she said aloud. As if she didn’t know.

Flames had turned the dying window frames to sticks, devouring the seams of the attic, engulfing the scalloped roof tiles.  It was all going down. The blackened chips of siding gave way in her hand as she rounded the corner to the front door, smudging her palms.

She mounted the crumbling stairs, felt her way along the dark smoldering hallway and into the center room where he was waiting. The ceiling above him was partly gone now. He settled back calmly into the remains of his burnt chair as if to say, of course. Of course this would happen.  Of course the living room would be an inferno. Just his luck.

She looked around the place, trying to get her bearings. Was this his house or hers?  Had she set it or had he? Probably her. She always acted like she had thirteen other houses to spare. The kitchen behind him was on fire. The pipes were melting. The momentos were ashes, nothing soft left, no signs of home. Nothing left but hard wood. Just fuel to burn. Fuel made of me, she thought and the excitement rose into her neck.  Fuck the house. Her body was shaking with the thrill of seeing him.  She consumed his closeness like tinder, like cigarettes, like curtains, and then when all that was gone, she turned on her own four walls. Nothing was enough.

He stood up, long muscled arms at his sides, eyes trained on her like an opponent. He paced the floor around his chair, in no hurry. The wood underfoot was light gray like barnwood.

“Messed up isn’t it,” he said finally, swinging his arms to present the blaze, like ta-da! Then that dry laugh of his, where all the glee had turned black. That I don’t give a damn laugh. That fuck a buncha this shit.

“Yep,” he said, taking in the scene. “This is pretty much what I get.”

It weathered her, the churning, grinding sound of his frustrated laughter. It felt like it was coming from her own guts, washing away pieces of her as it passed through. Since the first kiss, all her wiring had gotten fused with his, and half the time she didn’t know if she was feeling his pain or hers. A flaming rafter collapsed between them, and neither flinched.

“What was I supposed to do?” she said . “You and your silence.  Hurt me worse than death.”

“I didn’t know what to do,” he snapped right back. “But what do you do? You done gone apeshit. Keep telling me to leave you. I told you I didn’t want to. What is wrong with you.”

You act like you want to, she wanted to say. But maybe he was right, maybe she was crazy.  You don’t care how I feel, she wanted to say, you don’t care about my life. But how could he, when he couldn’t deal with his own. You’re hooked on disaster, she’d tell him, but she’d known that from day one.  Known it and lined up for more.

She looked back at him, emptyhanded.  Shrinking and rotting inside. Any second her floor would give way.

“I told you I would sacrifice what I wanted to protect you,” he said, each word separated so it would ring like a knife across steel. “You accuse me of bullshit on text? After what I been through, you think I’m gonna let you do that to me again?”

He circled her now, light and sharp, with eyes like a hawk.  Sacrifice, she thought. The word had felt so soft when he’d laid it at her feet . Now pointed at her throat it was a very different sort of thing, and she suddenly caught the meaning. He’d throw everything overboard if necessary. He could sever all ties at a moment’s notice. He could snuff out her love in a snap and not think twice.  All he needed was a reason, because he traveled hard and light and would not be trapped again. No fucking way.

I’m on your side, she wanted to say, to calm him. She was crying now, because tears were a way of life with him. Her sheets, her phone, her life was dried over with a tide of salt.

It’s just me. Remember me?

But she couldn’t say that because he didn’t remember her. He didn’t know the first thing about her. All he knew was that she’d hit a nerve and it didn’t matter why.  Fuck her.  And fuck this and fuck you. That’s what mattered.

“I’m sorry,” she stammered.  “I made a bad decision. Tell me what to do to make it right.”

She said it because she knew the opposite side of him too. She knew his charms better than anyone, the pieces were strewn everywhere.  He’d toss her a handful of sweetness like bullet casings and saunter away, crunching them underfoot. He had no idea that she’d pocketed every word he had no use for, all the glimmering stories he’d ever told, as if later on they could all be glued back together and he’d remember who he was. But he spoke of the pain so much he almost disappeared into it.

“Welcome to my life,” he said, turning his back to face the fiery walls. “Same shit, different year.”

That was his chipped circuitry, shorting out at the same dead end, unable to power a clock, let alone a heart.  It was the obtuse handiwork given to him by the iron machinery that’d raised him. Harsh training for a boy whose heart was made for speed and light and laughter.

She drew a step closer, wanting to get right up against his chest so she could anchor him with her wood-gray eyes. The gate inside her was broken too, missing, ripped off just for him.  If he would just look down at her for a second he would see that he could reach into them like shallow pools and take whatever he needed. She’d tip back her head with the pleasure of it all because plundering herself was a drug, a quick bypass around reality, straight into the velvety core of what she wished this could be, even as it all went up in smoke before her eyes. That was the thing about her — if she liked you enough she could ignore the facts so hard they almost disappeared.

He can give back someday, she’d tell herself. He can fix the rafters and the beams and himself and everything.

If she could just get him to kiss her, he would melt, he would radiate that tenderness and play the sweet badboy and it would all fit perfectly with the story she wanted.  She could forget the rest, she could curl up real low  where the smoke wouldn’t cut off the air, and disappear into her dreams about him. Pull a version of him around her body like wool.

He looked down at her and softened, shaking his head. The fire boiled all around, eating the cracks and crevasses.

“What’s it like?” he asked, expressionless.

What’s what like?”

“Walking around being so beautiful all the time. What’s that like.”

But underneath the flattery was his pain. His honest need to know. How had she ended up with such dumb luck while he’d been dragged through the trenches.  Where do people get these lives?  he’d asked her once, with that unhappy laugh. Like maybe it was a checkout line he’d missed. A ticket he’d accidentally washed in the pocket of his jeans.  Maybe that’s why his eyes glazed over whenever she talked. Why he walked out the back door or looked away or changed the subject.  He kept her on mute. What right did she have to say shit anyway.

But  she’d clung to his back for dear life anyway, hooked on the weathered rock of his body, the permanent fighting stance, the rhythmic cadence of his voice. Maybe she was just like the monkey in a lab cage, refusing food and water, clinging instead to the stuffed replica of another monkey. A false thing could keep you alive, so long as it felt like the real thing.  So long as you overlooked the details.

He can never love you back. That was what the fear whispered when it crept in. It was there when  It was in the way he’d dropped her off and rushed her bags inside. It was in the songs he’d played on the way home. Songs about the past.  Songs about the pain.

He doesn’t have anything left to give you.

Bullshit. She could cook, couldn’t she? She could listen, she could shore up his supplies. She could peel off her clothes and coax his attention back to a full color spectrum. That look on his face while she watched him shower, my god it had seared her. He’d been hard as an arrow, hadn’t he? Looked and smelled so good as he dried off and shaved. He’d ripped off her shirt and fucked her by the sink hadn’t he. Grabbed her soft swollen tits with his rough hand, one palm steadying her face as he kissed her harder and harder and then just barely grazed her lips. We’ve got all afternoon, he whispered against her jaw, and lightning struck right outside. That wasn’t nothing, was it?  The sizzling rain, the scorch drifting in through the open window, was that the moment the end began? She was so high on his tongue, on the way his eyes furrowed with longing while she rode him, killed him dead with every thrust. Oh the relief when he did it back. That pleasure, that can’t get enough, that was love, wasn’t it?  What about the good morning sugar. What about her sink full of clean dishes. What about the, you better not hurt me. He’d said that hadn’t he.

Can a person be addicted to pain? She texted her girlfriend late at night, crying again. Does that make any sense? 

Maybe for the attention, came the answer. Maybe they don’t think they deserve better.

He’s the former, she wrote back, uselessly. Am I the latter?

Her mind obsessed on him in fruitless circles. But what the fuck did it matter if she’d lost her grip. All she wanted to do was lay with him now amid these crackling walls, basking in the orange glow as they slowly burned down. Her drowsy lips were wet against his chest. She’d ask about it again. Tell me how how she broke you. Tell me how everything got so bad.

“Can’t never get away from it,” he’d despair, stretching each syllable across her like piano wire. And he’d tell her the story again, his voice low and rhythmic. Each detail crisp, each line spoken precisely as it had been said ten years before, each ending worse than the one before.  She could listen to him talk til the sun came up and still it wouldn’t fix anything. Every molecule of air on earth could be dedicated to it, every ounce of sleep incinerated, and still nothing would fall into place. The telling left him empty and dilated, even as she stockpiled her chest with the traumas, busting at  her own seams with adoration and jealousy and interest and still empty as hell deep inside.

“Let’s go outside,” she said finally, leading him.

The house was done. It couldn’t stay anymore. He followed her down over the blackened planks, outside where the night air sparkled with crickets and cold.  She looked back at the blaze, imagining the whole thing sliding off its foundation and vanishing backwards over a cliff. All that would be left was an outline of ashes.

Or maybe she could push the rubble over just a hundred feet or so, just to be near it but not in it. She could put up something else in its place: some placid, dull, lacey-curtained kitchen where she could sit at her silent table by herself, beside an unbroken window , and finally stop weeping over him. But she knew what waited. Her ears would still perk for every engine that drove by, waiting for the one that would sound just like his, the one that would  purr slowly into her drive.  Her delusions would bloom in the night, laying naked in her empty bed, reliving his smile, wanting his body like a half-dose of morphine, writhing instead against a rigidly cheerful, plastic replacement. She’d sit up in the darkness, certain that shadow was him. Was it him? Had he come for her finally? And then she’d realize.  And check her phone again. And turn over in the dark, sick from withdrawal.

If she could have him just once more. Just one more time it would stop hurting.

He’ll just punish you again, and next time? It’ll be worse. 

“It’s all got to go,” she said out loud.  One of his eyes was shadow, the other embers, just like the chambers of his heart. She seized the fabric of his shirt in her fist, pulling his chest toward hers.  This hold he had on her. This fixated desire. These stupid ruined houses, her head full of phantoms. Everything had to go. She’d sleep on the wet ground if she had to. Anything to not be tattered and on fire.

But instead, she stood there clutching his shirt, her feet heavy as  iron.

“Well okay then,” he dared, stepping free of her grip. “Go.”

copyright © K. Dawn Goodwin 2016

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Fantasy – MS MR

This.

The Love Lives of Spiders

Around here men and lifted trucks were like kudzu. The only difference was, now she noticed every single one,  every bed full of machinery, every drop of mud on the chrome. It made her swim with hope like poison.

It wouldn’t even be him driving it, just some camouflage lid helping himself to the tops of her thighs, as if sex was a drive-thru rodeo or a box of fries.  She turned away, serious as a heart attack.  Sex wasn’t like that for her, even if her favorite songs said it was. Sex was a stolen briefcase shackled to her arm, glowing like Marcellus Wallace’s soul. You didn’t want something like that falling into the wrong hands. You didn’t want the whole reign down with vengeance deal.  Maybe that’s why she missed his truck so much, because she missed his heart. It’d been heavy like hers, heavy like a trapdoor.  It had felt so good slipping through it into the dark, so familiar and breathless, like a ruse she’d planned herself.

Most of the time she didn’t make a peep, she went home and perched up high like a spider, watching the town from the rafters, sucking off the blood of her losses.  Years of solitary spinning had left untold volumes on her desk, her routine, her whole heart like a dusty cocoon.  Nothing in real life came close to her recollection of it.

So that’s where she stayed. Mostly.

If I were a boy, she thought, looking his picture over from head to toe, I’d wanna look like that.  What an empty notion. But his original incoming message, his hello, how are you? was so innocuous, a bird on the other side of her window.  Two different worlds pressed eye to eye for a half second, completely safe from one another. But suddenly there was movement in the outliers.

His messages came in reasonably, like rations, once a day.  He was playful, had good manners, and was unwilling to come close. She liked that unwillingness best of all. That was what she was good at: laying out love like bait, measuring the quivering strands to a satellite and two million miles of outer space and back.

I’ve seen a lot of bad things at work, he typed. I’m a little gun-shy.

She soothed him with her smartphone and her shorthand, as if his shyness could be patiently cured, and he lured out over time, a controlled burn. But she noticed, not without concern, the way she leaned away from her loom to check her phone. One thing was certain, his gun-shy wasn’t like any kind she knew, the kind where you just flinch a little.  His gun-shy involved actual guns, and sleeping with an eye trained on the clock and the door, a head full of violent ends, fists on flesh, fingers wrapped around his forearm like a slipping knot, blood spraying on his shirt. In his world, car roofs were peeled like open heart surgeries in the middle of a freeway.  In his world, love wasn’t just hard, it was cataclysmic, and he beckoned like cornfield full of ghosts. But she didn’t want sex that ended in a bloodbath.  She just wanted to know what he looked like in the sunlight. Someday.  And right then, right in the middle of enjoying the neverness of someday, he was ready. To meet. The way gun-shy people do:  In a Kroger parking lot.

She left the web, she left the loom, wrote Tennyson. She made three paces thro’ the room.

This is retarded, she thought, scrambling to go.

The first thing she noticed was the lift kit on his black pickup truck, like something out of Godzilla vs. The Tarantula. He’d parked it ass first so he could survey the parking lot from the  all-seeing eye of his towering, tinted cab. Maybe that was his rafter. Or maybe he was a brown recluse type, wanting to see his victim without being seen. But how could you not be seen in that, the ridiculous toothy tread on those sick tires, extended shocks glinting like the ribs and tendons of a great shell-shocked beast. 

Ohmygod, she thought, taking cover behind her steering wheel.  One of those?

But too late, he was coming straight toward her, a thin man, shaved head, worn collared shirt and jeans, black sneakers with fluorescent laces.  She couldn’t breathe, what was it, the shoes maybe, or the sunglasses.  He was intended for someone else. A Scooby snack for the local pussy, for cute young girls full of sunshine and down-home. Not for spiders.  But here he was anyway, with that fearless gait, like he was ready to burst right in and tear all the lattice work down, and offer himself as sustenance.

A few feet from impact, he lifted up his plastic shades and his eyes were all she could take in, the kindness in them so palpable it pinned her back with the force of an arrow, a gentle smile and worried, opposing lines on his brow.  Wiry arms like driftwood that had baked dry in the wake of some tsunami, and all that were left now were tattoos like scars.

“I just shaved all my hair off,” he said, running his hand over the curve of his skull. He was tall, but bowed himself a little, as if eager to come down to whatever height was required. “I didn’t know what hell else to do with it.” His chest faced hers squarely, a socket you could plug into. He was so wiry-waisted that the breeze rippled his shirt near the belt.

“I like it,” she replied, grasping for an opener. A silence filler. “So. You live in the same county as the Grand Dragon. That’s gotta be a great feeling.”

“Yes, he lived not far from me. The old KKK headquarters.”

“Wait what?” Hot June wind tore across the black asphalt and blew her hair into her eyes like straw. She tried to part it with her hand. “I was just kidding. You mean that’s real? I thought the KKK was like rural legend.”

“It’s gone now. But you can still see the old sign. Actually, I was the one on call when their house caught fire.”

“What?”

“Yes ma’am,” he said. Ma’am, she thought.  Southern boys sure did know how to talk.

“Did everyone make it?” she asked, grinning.

“Yes.”

“Dammit,” she kidded.

He looked away, stopping short of agreeing. His hands were on his hips.

“I don’t think like that. I’m trained to help everyone.”

She fell silent, soaking up the convergence of the two realities: one where she sat alone in her house, surmising about local life. The other where she intersected it like a bullet.

“I don’t know how I ended up out here,” he said finally, sweeping his hand over the whole town, as if it all just brought him down. “I’m not even from here.”

Her ears perked,  now fully aware of the problem, other than his adorable bewilderment, like the south had him hostage. The actual problem wasn’t that, it was  that minutes had turned into a half hour and they were still in the middle of a stupid parking lot, unable to follow protocol and just leave.  She summed up the facts in her field of vision, eyes sweeping back and forth between the two:  boy in the foreground, truck in the back.  The front bumper had the plate of the fireman, the red stripe across the black rectangle. She’d seen countless plates around town — the Georgia dawgs, the Alabama whatevers — at least here was someone more interested in actual emergencies than staged ones. Someone who would run toward fire, while all the others ran away.

I’m a fire too, she thought. And there it was again, the sucking feeling in her chest, as if the doors were burgeoning and all the pressure and light on the outside was about to obliterate the seal.

“Well it was nice meeting you,” she heard herself say, eager to be good. She hugged his neck, all numb and nervous like. And then: 20 more minutes of small talk. It wasn’t the words that made it hard to leave. It was that exquisite feel of his presence, like honey and sunshine, all the things that spiders don’t need to be happy. It was all making her so happy. Happy like a fucking drug.

“Call me some time,” she said finally, “we should meet up.”

He smiled at the offer, but couldn’t be coaxed into agreeing to it. But whatever, she could wait.  She drove home on the same road she’d driven for years, the straight shot, the one with no lefts or rights, and promptly took two wrong turns. In some right hand lane, blinker blinking, she forced herself to take stock. Okay, maybe this was cute. It was cute, right? Cute to get all flustered. But that’s how deadly things always started out: as super cute things, and then someone leans in to say awww and the next thing you know everybody is dead.

And that’s what she was doing one week later, sitting across a table from him at sunset, a string around her neck and tits pressed against the straps. It was macabre really, getting all pretty to get all dead.

“You got me.” he laughed, nodding at the outfit. “I ain’t going nowhere.”

“You like it?” she went back. “I call it stripper Barbie.”

Her heart was thrumming in a purse under the table, and above the tablecloth she was absorbing every last detail. He’d made her laugh more than once, and the sensation was so unfamiliar that her entire system recalibrated to receive more of this drug called he makes me laaaaugh. But then, without warning, he switched over to a voice so quiet she had to strain forward in her chair. And all the laughing stopped. His stories dropped a wavelength and widened to a low level earthquake, to exploding meth labs, gunshots to the head, a trailer where a child had burned to death.  His stories came in a torrent, one after the other.  She could see it all too, his uniform rushing into black smoke, flames curling around the edges of a door, explosions imminent, more fearsome than the gates of her own heart.  His was the world of actuals. Of actual pain, of actual work, of actual life.  She could feel her life, so soft and virtual, disappearing in his stories, her eyes like two butterflies, wicking up the sweat and the mud under his tracks. He asked no questions about her, and even if he had, there was suddenly not much worth telling.

But it didn’t matter, because afterward he didn’t want to go home to his solitary confinement, and neither did she. He drove her through the town, around and around it in 10 mile increments, back and forth toward no particular destination. High above the cars, high on his deafening engine and his thudding bass, the clock scrolled forward to 2 am. She let her hand rest in the open window, the silk flying free. When was the last time she’d felt this at home? She couldn’t remember.

“Damn, this is nice,” he confessed. “Just being with you.”

“Same here,” she said, and their glances caught in the shadowy cab, and stuck.

A few days later, his truck was owning all the space in her driveway, sitting there like a mythical creature that needed hay or water.  She came out the front door, squinting at it in the hot sun, knowing that this was somehow going to ratchet up everything until he disappeared, leaving nothing but blood and an oil stain. But for now, here he was, slim as a cross-tie, hard-boned as a piece of Georgia granite, walking toward her in a sleeveless shirt, shoulders popping like a teenage boy.

“Hi,” he said, bag in hand, smiling at her like he was her best friend or something. For a solitary moment she mistook him for a kindred spirit, miraculously unscathed from a trip that began halfway across the galaxy. He cut his eyes up and down her street, all the identical houses like cardboard cutouts, or a collage of a world he had heard about, but never known.

“People gonna be like, who that redneck?” His throaty laugh. His drawl had a lightness about it, like he was aware of it.  Like he could lift it off anytime he wanted, maybe try on another. He did that sometimes, talked like a yankee, and it made her laugh. She took him inside, into her messy web of cords and laundry piles and anemic houseplants. She skated right over his disparaging self-appraisal, so endearing. Maybe it had been a warning, if only she hadn’t been so busy touching his skin, studying his tattoos like petroglyphs on a cave wall.

“What’s it say?” she asked, tilting her head to try and read the letters that scrolled down the length of his forearm. They were placed on the outside of his bone, as if to be read by an enemy in the final throes, right before the sword comes barreling down on your head.

“It’s a Psalm,” he said, suddenly earnest, and quiet.

“What’s the verse?” She mimicked his quiet now, eyes fluttering at this, the first of many impasses.

“The Lord Preserves me.” The quiet voice again, the one she almost couldn’t hear.

The Lord Preserves me, she thought, moving her fingers along the  barbed font. Funny, seemed more like a warning than a  blessing. It was all over him, this petrified tenderness. She moved to the firefighter tattoo, the whirling bladed insignia on the shoulders, then back up to the features of his stubbled face, back down again to scripture.

He went back outside he took the mower out of the bed of the truck, and showed her the hammer he used to drive the nails into the crossties when he worked railroad jobs. Almost the length of a man, he swung it high over his head and down into the green of her subdivision sod, good-natured entertainment for the privileged white people.

“An actual pickaxe!” she squealed, grasping the weight of the steel head. “Just like in minecraft.”  There it was again: his life and hers, one real and one simulated, a disparity that could never be reconciled, but maybe it could. Maybe it could.

“On a job, we go through two a these a day,” he said, with that accent. “They just break.”

The thought of hammers breaking in his hands made her feel pain, like she wanted to own it by kissing him. She wanted to kiss him so bad.

But he’d come to mow the lawn as a favor. He didn’t know it was more than that to her. It was a sign.  While he sweated back and forth through her yard, she paced in circles inside the house, wringing her hands around a rag, peeking through the blinds.

So sweet, she sighed, deeply perplexed.

Afterward he turned the mower upside down over a pan that she brought him, hot oil pouring out like cream soda. She crouched nearby to steady the sides, fascinated by all the boring mechanics of lawnmower maintenance, all the gears and drive shafts and bolts and springs that wouldn’t matter but for his human life, his sweet smile, the engine pieces in his arms that shone with stories, even if the roof above him was held together with his last piece of string. Droplets splattered, burning her bare legs but she didn’t move an inch. Another tiny sting, then another, and still: right there. Watching, awaiting further instructions.

That night the storms came, rain pouring into the open window. She laid under him, learning about his face. A first kiss and then another, his lips parted, setting history aside, allowing her to reach in. She thrashed like a filament while he pinned her wrists, eye to eye, downloading every detail until she couldn’t take anymore. The stubble on his face stung like needles, and she raked her lips across anyway, inviting more.

The rain came in sideways, filling up the oil pan until it overflowed the sides, seeping into the mossy ground outside the bedroom window. In the morning the blades of clover glistened like toxic gold, the ground saturated with the poison. She stood barefoot on the wet ground, looking at the oil spill, at the polluted green moss of her heart. Even the concrete foundation had soaked  up the stain. The spiders didn’t stand a chance.

I get it,  she thought, chest aching, black water coursing through her own veins. But that doesn’t mean I can fix it.

.

copyright © K. Dawn Goodwin 2013

You Know Where To Find Me – Imogen Heap

The Epoch of Blahh

On the drive over, I came upon two dogs humping in the road. Their retinas reflected my headlights, refusing to move aside.  The last time I’d driven to a man’s house for sex, I’d passed a dog that had gotten run over on the double yellow lines.  So maybe this was a step in the right direction.  Or at least that was slightly less  dead.

Don’t be shy, he’d texted me, twenty minutes before.   You may get a kiss at the door.

A kiss at the door, huh. Cue the  release of adrenaline-laced butterflies, just south of the border.

He was from the Epocch of Suches – such a face, such a body – physical attributes that incite saliva and blood and elicit cell memory and blot out the decision-making sun. Those things had left such a fissure behind, dragging across the landscape like a melting glacier.  The Epoch of Suches.  Almost grown in now, filled in with shrubs and weeds, and soon: one black minivan.

I’d only seen him once before – supple lips and saturated forearms and silence, eyes shaded under a ballcap, all the trappings of the instinctive and careless, hot southern boy.

At the stoplight I checked the dials in my dashboard: all read-outs steady. The clock said 11:30. Meanwhile the ones on the inside were looping round and round, losing altitude.  His texts had come in hot and heavy all afternoon, driving me to distraction, eventually driving me to his door, leaving every important task undone.  Not just undone, completely invisible.  Lust was like that, your very own internally manufactured nicotine and dopamine and ephedrine supply.  My charged electrons were bumping into his,  equally excited and equally opposed, unable to power anything.

In a few minutes he was going to undo everything, he was going to get up on the inside, I was going to touch whatever I wanted, orally fixate to my heart’s content, and in the process lose my groove, my composure, my self-respect, strewn out my open car window like paper as I politely excused myself down into the ditch.

Oh but it was all so new!  And also, the same as always.

Most days weren’t like this. Most days, young men were a thing of the past. Most days consisted of  plastic bags and car keys and my hair like an old scratchy blanket. The choking smell from the plastic factory nearby. The  dead cement depot overhead, on the hilltop by the railroad tracks. The trains always heaving forward, always leaving, then coming right back. They  were so identically plain that I completely forgot: I was young too.

It’s not that I didn’t notice men. Men outside the  pawn shop awning, smoking and staring.  Men laying concrete, men driving trucks, men loading equipment, men with their girlfriends at the store. I deflected eye contact; I only did doubletakes from behind the safety glass of my minivan.

“Almost there,” I texted.

 Hmm, he replied, lighting up my screen. Can’t wait.

In his driveway, I stared long and hard at his pickup, an extension of his naked body.  A porch light came on, casting a cold light. His unfamiliar form appeared in the opened screen door.

“I saw these dogs…in the road,” I mumbled, nonsensically, climbing the cement steps.

“Yeah,” his voice was so gravelly, like the air in his throat was dragged down a dirt road too. “I was worried it would be hard for you to find.”

The initial arrows of conversation had each missed their mark.  There was no kiss. Inside, a mud room with an  old washing machine.

“Hi,” I said finally, and cracked a joke about something, anything.

He said nothing.

“I’m keeping the light off, it’s a mess,” he said, and turned his back to lead me through a cold, pitch black room. I soaked him up from top to bottom, t-shirt, and a muscly, narrow ass in soft sweatpants.  Sleeping clothes.  Taller than before.  His hand reached back for mine, to lead me through the dark.  Startled by the gesture, I reached forward and took it, shockwaves rippling up my arm. All the prior digital sex, the robotic syntax and exposed pictures, all of it safe and non-tactile, nothing approximating a held hand.  It immediately flooded my circuits. Everything I really wanted,  previously on lockdown, was suddenly set loose in my system.

The darkness gave way to a tiny warm bedroom and a glowing space heater.  Gray light from a murmuring TV flashed from an adjoining room. His sheets were pulled back, his phone near his pillow, waiting on my texts. And whoever else’s probably.

I froze, not knowing what to do.  He maybe said something then, something obtuse and dumb, but all I heard was the gritty growl.  My purse and my clothes, where to put them?  Where to stand, what to do. I could barely see his face and body it was so dim, I needed more light to see. I slipped off my boots and sat on the edge of his bed  as if it was the deep end. He sat next to me, and after one long awful awkward silent moment, there was one little kiss ,then another.

It felt like nothing at first, like kissing a wall. But only because of the delay while serotonin and dopamine dumped hard, polluting the bloodstream with fog and bliss.  My god, it was so good to sweep pastthe boundaries of appropriate distance, erode the mile high walls with a fingertip.  I slid back on the bed and watched him undress, the shadows hiding behind the ridges of his bare chest. He had a good body, but so what, big fucking deal. But  I stared hard, memorizing.

I shed mine too, and slithered up on top of him, eye to eye, skin on skin, ready for the intake, the uptake, the all-consuming meld. He reached his fingertip and tucked back a loose strand of my hair. I froze, still as a mouse, letting him.  What was that supposed to be, exactly?  Tenderness? Some  mutation therein?  A bomb went barreling down to the core, burrowing below the magma. It registered a direct hit to my fortress, but I covered it up with my teeth,  slipped it under my tongue, overrode it with purring, writhing hips.

He was getting it in now, and I was awash in the body buzz that comes from being roughed up, hollering out a year of pent up days. But all the sound and fury was predictable novelty really, stuff  worthy of an omg in a forgettable email. But his fingertip on that lock of hair, imitating love. His hand holding mine, as if he cared — these tiny insignificant variables were the ones you had to watch out for. These were tricky.

And then it was over.  Thirty minutes, maybe? Forty-five?  Somehow, I had actually believed it would go on forever. Or at least an hour.

I laid with his arm under my neck, chest heaving, blood in my ears, breathing long and deep. I wanted to curl into the heat of his right flank, to cool into a pretty mess and light down on a placid lake of Twilight-grade togetherness. For a minute I skimmed this ridiculous  yearning, gliding face to face above it, longing to  rest fully on his sprawled body, and sleep.  But my mouth was dry, so instead I swallowed.  It was the loudest sound in the room. He stirred, and I lifted my head and sat up, looking around, wondering what to do. I did not belong here. I wanted to belong here. I was rendered into a statue, hovering slightly outside my body.

“You can stay if you want,” he said. And I grabbed with both hands at this chance to get my cool back.

I stood up beside the bed and began picking up my clothes, readying to leave, watching him watch me.

Only when I was fully dressed did he flick the bedside light.  Strange. I could see his smile for the first time, white teeth  in the warm yellow light.  Stupid hot boy. An effortless checkmate. I kissed him at the door. He didn’t kiss back.

He never came back for more.  I was so sure he would.  I was so sure that my splendidly ecstatic nude form had created a disturbance in his force.  But no, not even a smallish one.  He’d finished the race while I tumbled off the track. It took a full week to get the outstretched hand out of my system, the feel of an actual arm under my neck, his mouth taking me down.

“I know him,” my hair dresser told me a few weeks later. I’d forgotten the cardinal rule of small towns:  they are very fucking small. “Only wants one thing, okay. When he gets it, he’s gone.”

I guess I’d known that. But what about me being the exception. What about me being sexually exceptional. What about me and my sex-ceptional self.

“Trust me,” she said, reading my face. “It’s not just you.  He did the same thing to me. And one of my friends.”

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copyright © K. Dawn Goodwin 2016

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