All I remember from that morning...or was it afternoon...it's hard to tell...it was hot. Damn hot. I remember that much. Freakin stupid hot. Who walks all the way to the library when it's this hot! We do. Poor family. No car. WE walk to the library.
But, you know what? At least we could read. Lots of families can't read. We are blessed
That's what Mama always reminds us when we start complaining. Macka bitches and Mama says "How many people aren't blessed, my girl? How many people don't get to walk to the library...how many people don't even have a library to walk to. We are blessed.
She was right and we knew it. Sometimes it's just easier to complain.
But for this moment, blessed is a matter of subjective reasoning.
I'm no longer twelve. I don't have to walk to the library. I don't even go to the library any more. Mama is six feet down with worms and crawlies. She's been quiet for ten years. It's not ungodly hot where I am now...though there are plenty of people that would declare that based on who I am and what I do..where I am... it's the hottest place in imagination, if you get my drift.
I really don't care. If they can't take a joke, I say, "Fuck their mother"
Oops! Did I say that out loud?
I did. Yes, I did. Fuck their Mother.
If that is offensive? If it is, you might wanna drop this book off at the nearest brothel or funeral home that you know of. The sexy ones will get a hoot out of it and the dead...well, the dead can't read..but you have never known a better bunch of sexy partiers than undertakers. I swear. And they love my stories.
hey! You're still reading...cool.
Now, where was I? Oh, right! Hell! Yes, that was what I was alluding to..I'm a regular visitor to the Tight Pants Leather Gods Disco otherwise known as Hell but Earthers. I'm such a regular that they have a nickname for me now... they call me Meth. And no, not for Crystal Meth but for Methuselah...they like the word play and I don't mind.
Looking out the kitchen window, one bright morning in Greenwich, Connecticut, the woman I'm going to tell you about now, she was staring into the fence line bushes...a disheveled border between the house she lived in and the next house.
She couldn't quite make out what she was seeing.
A bird? A shadow? Or was it a chipmunk.
She leaned in against the sink...and waited til her eyes adjusted to the light...next thing she knew...she knew what it was.
He eyes widened..her lips formed a circle...taut.. little smoker lines drawing her lips in like a purse...
EARLIER that WEEK...
The air, crisp. Fall coming. We hadn't talked about it, but it was in the corners of all the conversations. Do you know what I mean?
I mean, we'd talk and we'd sit or we'd walk and we'd look around, like you do when you're walking and talking...and all the while, we'd notice the leaves had begun changing or the air was cooler and we wouldn't say anything about it...not yet...it wasn't enough to bring up in conversation...not yet....
That's how things show up in the corners of conversations.
Blank wall staring at me now.
I don't have any one thing to say at the blank wall.
Rather unlike the perturbing notion that the blank wall has ever so much to say to me.
What does one do with a quizzical paradox like that?
STILL EARLIER...
These words fry...inside me...without oil, of course. It's like I'm an air fryer, you know? Just dry air frying the words...and then tasting them and wondering...who I was when I put them in there...and if I'm still the same person who took them out and tasted them.
It's all too disturbing to think about.
And yet, of course it's worth thinking about...it must be thought, in fact.
It must.
And I am the one to do that thinking. There is no one else. No one else inside my mind. No one else managing the air fryer in my brain...in my alphabet mind air fryer where the delicious words I'm finding keep seem to be getting made.
What do you do when words..you didn't know you'd strung together show up in your mouth or on the end of your pen...
or on your screen?
What do you do...then?
