Jackson
“Five hundred today, five hundred next week,” I dryly told the woman who kept beating her fake eyelashes toward me. She tried her best to push out her chest in my direction, but it was pointless. I’d already seen what was under that blouse, and there wasn’t much for her to push out.
“But…” She started talking, but I tuned her out. Nothing she could say would interest me. Nothing about small-town USA interested me in the least.
Everything about Chester, Georgia, was a pain in my ass, and I hated that I somehow got trapped there.
It was all so damn annoying, from the small-town gossip to the small-minded folks. The people acted as if they were straight out of a cliché movie with every corny, fictional small-town stereotype, though I supposed the stereotypes had to come from some truth. Maybe Chester was the case study for those shitty films. Either way, I hated the place.
One couldn’t quite call the people of Chester ignorant to the realities of the real world outside of their small quarters because they weren’t unaware of life in the real world. They knew what was happening outside the town.
They knew the current state of the union was a disaster. They understood the poverty sweeping our nation, the drug trafficking stories. They damn well knew about the wildfires, school shootings, marches at the nation’s capital, and rallies for clean drinking water. They knew about our president, both past and present. Yes, the people in Chester, Georgia, knew all about the workings of the real world, they simply much preferred to speak about why Louise Honey wasn’t at Bible study on Thursday night, and why Justine Homemaker was too tired to make homemade cupcakes for the church bake sale on Friday.
They loved to gossip about shit that didn’t matter, which was one of the many reasons I hated living there.
For all the hate I had for the town, it was nice to know the distaste was mutual. Chester’s townspeople hated me just as much as I despised them—maybe even more.
I’d heard people’s whispers about me, but I didn’t give a damn. They called me Satan’s spawn and it had bothered me when I was younger, but the older I got, the more I liked the ring of it. People had harbored an unnecessary fear of my father and me for fifteen or so years. They called us monsters, and after some time, we stepped into on the role.
We were the black sheep of Chester, and I didn’t mind one bit. I couldn’t have cared less if those people hated me or not. I wasn’t losing any sleep over it.
I kept my head down and ran my dad’s auto shop with the help of my uncle. The worst part of the job was dealing with people from town. Sure, they could’ve left Chester to find another auto shop, but alas, to them, venturing into the outside world was even more terrifying than dealing with my father and me.
That was why my current situation was so damn annoying: I had to deal with idiots.
“I’m just sayin’ you owe me five hundred dollars by the end of the day. I take Visa, Mastercard, check, or cash,” I told Louise Honey as she stood in front of me in her pink dress and high heels, tapping her fake nails on my desk.
“I thought we made an agreement last Thursday,” she asked me, confused by my coldness. “When I stopped by to talk…”
By talk, she meant fuck, and we’d happened to do that all night long.
That was why she had missed Bible study—because her small tits were bouncing in my face.
The women of that town had no problem hating me when the sun shone while moaning my name when the shadows of night fell. I was the secret escape from their fake realities. A challenge for their well-behaved Southern souls.
