There She Stood with Defiance Written in Her Eyes

If I slit my wrists , whiskey would surely flow out like a sticky amber river and an exhaust of smoke would likely plume and draft through this wall-papered room. But I'm way too selfish for that sort of nonsense. It's merely a thought. Is there anything more unsettling than waking next to a flaccid blob paler than paper with a mouth yearning for you to prop it open and fall into, desperately? Is there?! What burns my skin is that she was once a ripe little peach, curved and taut. Full of the juice that churns and bleeds into your heart and pumps your organs alive. So willing to be ravaged. Oh, how time stole that spring in her, that elasticity, and dropped her ass nearly a foot. Those cumbersome breasts , at least another foot. Her gut gives like a squishy pillow and I lay there sometimes and let her stroke my thinning roan-colored hair as we fade into another muggy night, where all is taken and none given. She often pleads for me to climb her rear, that waking mound, and stab with ploy. I give in to her rarely. Most of the time her ass rolls back on me in waves and I eventually puke on her back. She doesn't mind much though. A real marriage.
Sixteen years, I'm forty-one, she's fifty and looks older, and I'm still sharing a roof with this aging lady, with her hoary, short hair like a silver flame caught fire to a haggard and carved face. Abrupt lips scarcely hide her yellowing teeth but she smiles often, proud that she still owns her actual teeth. Through our bedroom window an orange sun slips in and it's Monday morning, 7:16 AM. She's up already and on her second Camel sipping her black coffee with a slight sucking noise, airy and annoying. For the life of me I can't figure why, but she sleeps nude and her heavy body looks sloppy posted up there against the headboard with her knees drawn up, squeezing herself into a mushy, pasty ball. I yawn and rise and head to the bathroom where life seems a little more pleasant. Even though the bright bulbs poke at my sleepy eyes. Even though the ice-like tile floor stings my feet. Even though. I turn the shower on and the plumbing creaks and moans itself awake from a long slumbering sleep within the walls, and below the alluvial earth. I feel a little guilty for bothering them, the pipes, at such a time, but the stench of last nights sex and sleep is crawling over me like insects.
Life seen through fresh eyes is more promising. The shower inspired me a little so I shaved and dressed in the cleanest jeans and T Shirt I could find. A little loose and a little tight in all the wrong places. The broke can't sift through trash and find gold. It's not feasible. I understood that, so I was slightly freer than most.
"Your eggs are on the table"
"Thanks, Dear." I shouted as I vacated the bedroom.
She was always good like that. The cooking, and the fucking, unfortunately. If there was food to be made she would have it ready for me, magically, without me ever seeing her in the act of cooking. A phantom chef. I wonder if she hummed to herself or pressed one bare and gnarled foot on top of the other while patting the beat of a song on her puffy hip..Did she also cook in the nude? So much I didn't know about this familiar stranger.
I peeled off a scab from my elbow and staunched the flow of blood with a napkin as I dragged on a fierce Camel in between bites of fried egg. Cross-legged at the table, with my morning alone to think and talk myself out of things I know I should do, I was in reverie. The newspaper spewed with the usual bullshit it seems to print these days, but the day still held promise. If only to give me a couple more breaths in my own drab company, or a couple more bites of these delicious eggs, or a sip of whiskey in the backyard under a melting sun. These small things pushed me through an existence of mostly uphill climbs and downhill tumbles. But who was I to complain? I had a real marriage. And good eggs to eat. I couldn't help but picture Charlene, that's my wife, in our bedroom, still naked and smoking. Maybe crying because she could feel how much I didn't need or want her. I began to feel cruel and and selfish and thought that maybe I could re-learn to love her. Love is a disease and it spreads like a fever. It catches hold like a lie. A very sickening burden. Maybe I'd take her out to dinner tonight and let her hang on to my arm, and not be ashamed at all, or walk through the park and kiss like lovebirds, or see a movie like we used to before she filled out so much and ballooned into a flab of flesh. I could promise her I wouldn't act like we weren't together. That I'd be all over her , mauling her with the love that she wanted. I felt better. Knowing that I was working towards something. Not nothing.
The hallway was dark but I still saw her pallid moon-face appear, wobbling into the kitchen from the bedroom. Her bad knee being the cause of that shaky strut that bounced her cheeks like jello. She had her old brown leather suitcase stuffed tight in her left hand and a rainbow colored scarf wrapped around her stubby neck. Partly covering her chin. It was already 84 Degrees outside so I was a little puzzled. Who would wear a scarf in this weather? But there she stood with defiance written in her eyes.
"Hey, Darling. What's going on here?" I peeped.
"I'm leaving you Otis. I've met someone else."
That's me. I'm Otis.
"Ok, Darling." I dragged on my cigarette and clapped my hands and held them together. A loud pop echoed in the silent kitchen.
How could I argue with that?

The Avett Brothers sing "Bella Donna"

Math's & Path's

I make lists of all the things I want and then figure my budget for the month to make those things happen, or appear. It's all maths. Everything. Each month is equally exciting with its own anticipation. My apartment is littered with half-full, or half-empty notebooks scrawled with my haphazard interests, ideas, and ciphers and dated accordingly very neatly in the top right corner of each page. They peer at me accusingly while I type away on a non-existent novel I believe I'm writing. A bildungsroman. I have nothing to prove but an urgency to do something great is constantly stirring in my underfed belly. A plume of smoke rises and darts and then disappears into the air above my frizzled hair from an exotic cigarillo my girlfriend gifted me for my seemingly forever-looming 30th birthday. It came and went very insignificantly. Unlike the expectations I had for it. I assumed an epiphany would plop into my lap and i'd venture onto a life-adjusting journey where I'd find validity and that fulfillment others shout about when I'm near. Those lurking in the wing with twinkling eyes and flashy wrist watches that they glance at while they babble with the other blithe folk. You know them. Their shoes are shinier than yours and shirts less wrinkled. Their path is righteous. My path, so far, has been unstable and at times it has branched out into smaller paths, in turn leading to a path that will return me to my original path. It's all paths. One amazing circle where small feats are rewarded with a pat on a stooped shoulder. Friendly but ashamed. Yes, my shoes are scuffed and my twills are rumpled, maybe stained, but I've got hope for myself and my heart burns with love. The velocity at which the fire falls from the sky and scorches us does not concern me to any degree. I'm more concerned with minutes, maybe even seconds. How many seconds do I put into a thought thats actually worth a single breath? How many seconds does it take to build a purposeful life? To construct it from nothing. We're measured in seconds it seems. A mere joke of a military career was mine to hold and cherish. A flash of a college life. A blink of existence sliced like an apple and handed over to me all too willingly. My fingers tapped and my glasses held fast to the tip of my aquiline nose as I saw both clear and blurry editions of my manuscript. Eleanore, my girl, refuses to read it. She is not apt to giving positive criticism and she knows I am rather weak and sensitive when it comes to the subject of literature. She is by no means armed and ripe with ruthless adverbs used only to deteriorate my words. She is just not quite so passionate as i for the written declarations I speak of. Books, stacked ceiling high from the floor, surround me like a barricade waiting to flutter open and glance off my brain, or penetrate it. To be of some use. Poor artwork adorns my four walls, cock-eyed and frameless. God bless the soul of Eleanore, but the purple walls she has imprisoned me in shall be her last flourish of color here. Her move-in has been at a pace which appeases us both. Gradual as an ascending sun. If a sun took three years to rise. An axiom we frequently visit is the letting of things happen naturally. It's hideous. I know. But true. Honestly.
I need the lights that flash through my windows and the noises of the city are a welcome lullaby. I need to spy on street walkers and bums and police officers and cab drivers. I need the dregs as I need the sugar. I possess the obligation to be a student of the criminal. The urchin. My quest for the absolute profundity of human kind requires a central placement in a culturally thriving dystopia. You might say I inhabit a neighborhood of likely risks and peril. Sure, the danger is here. But I see the beauty in the poorest of light. For a room lit by candle is definitely more strenuous to the eye but surely is more pure and virtuous than the artificial brightness of a high-watted bulb.
Knock! Knock! Knock! A thudding, high in timbre, beat the door thrice. The thinness of the fingers and knuckles could be heard in the rapping. A certain feminine characteristic. We all have our own tone. I turned the Yale bolt and unlatched the two chains and twisted the brass knob as Eleanore squeezed through the crack before I had the door completely opened. Her slender cheeks were rosy and damp and her abrupt black eyes were wide with emotion. A frantic joy, I discerned. Her feral hair swept in all directions and her clipped bangs fell just short of her theatrical eyebrows. Very European. A gasping rush of heat punched through the chink along with Eleanore and fogged up my glasses. The dark and musty smell of the hallway breached the apartment with alacrity and forced the ancient air-conditioner to wheeze to life as it felt the sudden rise in temperature. The very core of summer attacked us from all angles, never letting up. We will always be slaves to the weather down here. She paced to and fro and threw animated gestures with her hands wildly. Complete abandon of self-consciousness . She was speaking but I could not hear a word she said. It was all a humming drone.
"God, Penn. Did you hear a word I said?"
"Hmmm?"
Her bare shoulders were freckled from the sun and her feet bronzed and wrapped in Roman sandals with unpainted nails that were short and functional. She wore a short black skirt that gripped her rangy legs tightly and a heather gray tank-top hung loose over her unfettered breasts. Also, very European. My girl with the swaying breasts. Her milk white teeth were packed taut in her mouth and encircled by puffy lips chapped from the gusty elements of a southern morning spent running on sidewalks.
"Penn!"
"Yes, El. What is it?"
"Amazing. I just gave a strident Faulknerian-like speech and you totally ignored me!?" she pouted, very visually.
"Sorry, babe. Please enlighten me again."
She sat down at the piano and lightly struck the keys while she re-iterated her news. She spoke somewhat in time with what she played, to the unheard beat, so that the words coursed off her tongue like song. A lyrical sweeping that peaked with the more earnest parts of her saga and became less dramatic with the feeble filled fragments of the tragic telling.

Forwards, Not Backwards.

Outfitted with a carton of Pall Malls and his Desert Storm zippo, Ingram was contented to the very marrow of his brittle bones. With accord, he kept company with his dark and brooding thoughts as the drone of pelleting rain drummed the roof of his trailer. The color TV flashed and showed deep rivets in both cheeks. Carved by puberty. Two skinny stick-like legs lay twisted on the gashed coffee table, beset with an array of remotes and ashtrays, almost exhibited; while the ceiling fan whirled and rocked above and lifted the weightless strands of thinning hair off his clammy forehead. A familiar feeling settled on him like a water logged blanket and a lumbersome urge to scour the creeks for rebel trout came like an epiphany. Swift and promising. He rose and snatched his fly rod and slipped into his boots and bursted out the front door as the rain simultaneously yielded to a burning sun aglow with orange tones. Not prone to superstitions, he didn't blink at the coincidence. Shadows from slim trees slanted onto the overgrown lawn.The slimy blades of grass dampened the shins of his jeans with dew like a thousand slobbering tongues lashing out, frog-like.
"Ingram!" came a shout.
He turned slowly and gazed upon his stark-naked wife, Georgene. Her pale thick legs and ass bounced due to the sudden stop she'd made. Ah, the shudder of flaccid skin. A knot of golden curls were piled above her round and vacant face like a nest swirled together by a momma bluejay. She leaned against the doorway, arms crossed below her youthful breasts covering her protruding belly, and waited.
"What woman!"
"Where you goin?' she whined.
"Fishin. I'll be back shortly. Put some clothes on. Your excitin' Joe."
The scrawny dog below the steps jumped up at the sound of his name. Ingram waved and turned. A violet foreground of mountains pierced the wispy clouds and held the giant auburn star between it's peaks. Everyone's on a righteous path, he thought. "As long as it's forwards and not backwards your headin'." he spat, to himself.

Alex Taylor: Rosine, Kentucky, Good Writing, yes.

The Name of the Nearest River, stories by Alex Taylor from Sarabande Books on Vimeo.

Barry Hannah interview 1984, part 1

The Oxford American(Conway Arkansan)

Wonderful magazine.

Geniuses

Just some disturbed geniuses I admire, disturbingly.

Barry Hannah

Barry Hannah-----Crafstman of sentences. Artist of syntactic notations. A writer. Damn.

Field Dressed & Undressed

A quirky East Texan with white and black striped knee socks wrapped around my waist, helped me become this adulterer, in her bed, which was a mattress thrown on the floor. I think she was a hippy, very hairy pussy. Offered me warm beer and a back rub, George Harrison plucking in the background. I couldnt resist her Eastern vibe. She was an amateur photographer with a vintage Pentax camera. I took photos of large, brown-nippled, titties and a pale fleshy stomach stretched out into raunchy poses she had created. Absolute hairiness making me disquited. I instantly regretted this and ran out into the bitter rain and drove home bawling, to my warm bed, where wife was breathing gently, asleep. She was my third and desperate wife. Exhaustively trusting and utterly ignorant. Dear, woman. I woke up early to a black Arkansas morning to hunt with a cousin of mine in the tall piney woods we cherish here. Frosted grass and breath you could see floating in front of your nose. We parted when we entered the trees to sit in our stands and await the deer we yearned for all seasons long. Slow in coming. A tangerine sun bursted through the bare limbs and thawed my mustache, at last. I smoked my Pall Malls shakily and dozed. An explosion erupted the stillness and echoed through this fiery forest of darting squirrels and swift bluejays, stirring all the living. I climbed down. Dried leaves crunched under my boots as I walked towards the West, where Cecil, my cousin, should be. The metallic smell of blood was filling the air and my empty stomach was churning brutally, mouth watering, near vomiting. Cecil's dark figure sat squatted and arched over the grey lifeless deer. Blood stains from fingertips to elbows, drying in clots and clumps on the hairs of his arms. He pulled a lustrous knife through the ribs and up to the neck. Skin, bones, and tendons popping like a taut rope exploding in an empty room. From behind he seemed to be a creature feasting on a corpse. He pushed the deer onto its side and slippery organs slid out on the frozen grass, steam hissing and fizzing. Carefully, he cut the bladder out and tossed it away. He turned to me with indifferent eyes and cut me callously. I threw up on my boots.
"Sissy." he laughed.
"Fuck you. Redneck!"
We toted the field dressed eight point back to our cabin and embarked on a drunken stupor that led to us driving back to Little Rock to rouse up some kind of worried affliction. We found our poison in a ramshackled little dive that didnt shy away from large camoflauged adults with facial overgrowth and orange hats aglow. With our bloody fingernails we handed wadded cash to the tender for the stinging whiskey that awakened the soul and opened our eyes to the brawny brunettes peaking at us from across the abandoned dance floor. They both wore too tight halter tops and short, cut- off blue jeans that rode up high into fat camel toes. Tan muscular legs like gymnasts and freshly painted pink toes, both. We mozied over to where they sat, hands pocketed, and slid next to each over the torn vinyl seat covers. Come to find out, they were a mother and daughter tandem. Mom being thirty seven and daughter nineteen. I sat next to the ripe daughter, with intentions. She whispered in my ear.
'You wanna suck my pussy?"
"And your toes!" I shouted.
Her tongue melted in my mouth and she gripped me quick as we stumbled out the door tangled and intense. She smelled like syrup and her skin burned with rapture. Cobalt eyes fearless and ardent. Cecil and Mom staggered out behind us and we four squeezed into the old Ford and followed directions given from Mom. The house was small and dogs lay scattered in the blotchy yard like heathen children.. Paint silently flecked off the wood siding. Cans of Budwieser were stuffed in the ancient refrigerator and a porn was mutely displayed on the giant flat screen TV in their tiny living room, flashing on the opaque walls. Daughter peeled off her shorts, pushed me onto the depressing couch, and jumped on my face, legs wrapping around my head, and I sucked, and sucked. Finished sucking, it hung down two inches and was ruby colored and raw. I passed out and dreamed I was sleeping. A rumbling snore from daughter woke me and she lay naked by my side, with mouth agape, and I noticed in the light she may be younger than she told. Fretfully, I dressed and searched the disheveled house for cousin Cecil. Down a dark hallway I found a door locked, a retched smell escaping from underneath. I knocked, Cecil appeared, eyes frantic, through a slight crack where an odor attacked my senses. I vomited on the door.
"Sissy." he chuckled.
I pushed into the room and saw Mom field dressed and splayed out on the blood-soaked sheets. Intestines unraveled and strewn. Walls smeared and hand printed. Cecil muttered to himself and licked his knife clean. Outside, flies landed on the glacial meat of the deer, buzzing in the hushed doldrums of daylight erecting from the far away skyline.
With dusk now an afterthought and a funereal dawn fixed straight ahead, we drove into the auroral sun with haggard faces, hopeless. Helpless, even. Cecil smoked and ignored his stained fingers smudging the crumpled cigarette he fondled with a facile and sanguine comfort; unlike an amateur murderer. Somewhat like a psychotic assassin. The kudzu scaled the trees that lined the black asphalt. I navigated with trembling hands.
"Dont worry bout it Cousin." Cecil announced.
The stillness in the cab of the truck shattered when he spoke and and reality squeezed back into the moment with haste. Arkansas was dreary with its raw sleeted fields and stripped trees. A setting to match the situation, I guess.
"Oughta head down to Mobile." he added.
The defiant Cecil emblazoned with ideas and sudden sobriety. Gaunt body caved into the ripped vinyl seat with a Winston bobbing up and down between his chapped lips as he spoke, mumbled rather, with callow simplicity. Owner of a dull mind. Ashes flailing to rest onto his scraggly beard. Electric orange hat covering his oily mop of stringy brown. An ungodly sight huddled in the corner of the truck, laid against the door with absent eyes looking out the window, unblinking. Rimmed with vessels etched in the whites of both arctic gray eyes. Empty. A modern cavalier of evil armored in his camoflauge and crowned with a fluorescent cover, militarily speaking. "Vietnam Vet" , was written clearly on his pallid face in a shiny gold cursive scrawl. Jungle sweat still leaked from his pores. Other leaks still oozing too. Rice paddie prostitutes will bring you down my brother. With their skinny almond eyes and black hair thick like a horses mane. With fat lips and a foreign tongue that lolled you into a a vivid and aware coma where nothing mattered. A floating fantasy that stung your veins with a lustful and ravenous longing for more. The sex and heroine coalesced. The damp and heated air stifled. The smell of urine and blood and feces nauseated. The mind far gone, scorched. It was all written on his face. A golden scrawl. Veiled but obvious. Metaphorically speaking. Cecil ,the deer hunter and veteran of a useless war, still wages death upon the languid. This violent man does not bear it away. He pours into a room and seeks the needy with his elite vision for a numb and dumb heart to falter at his feet. Scanning for a subject to maul. To wash over it with a blanket of red hate.. To break it down and destroy it. Layer by layer. Literally speaking.
The morning highway was empty save for a few early rising workers headed to the mills and plants to put in their 8 and 12 hour shifts of misery. Like zombies on autopilot. The sky was ashy gray with the sun still ascending. We seemed to be two hunters departing the woods with our deer in the truck bed stiffening up. Near froze. Dew crystallized on its glistening black nose. A pink strip of ice fell out of its mouth and stuck to the scarred bed. A good size 8 point. The trucks heater blasted and the gun rack shook as we headed home. We pulled onto the mushy dirt road where Cecil lived bouncing through all the dips and holes scattered intermittently. Jolting us awake, or at least more aware. An old bluetick hound emerged like an ethereal phantom from underneath the porch with misty breath puffing like steam as its paws crunched the frosted grass and mud. A corporeal sentry for the dilapidated trailer. Neighboring trailers full of sleeping bodies and innocent hearts under warm quilts. Little babies in cribs with wet diapers; night-lights glowing orange on chunky cheeks as they squirm sleepily. The insomniac elderly shuffling in tattered house-shoes on knobby knees and arthritic ankles with a glass full of buttermilk and cornbread; spooning it into their toothless mouths, gumming it down their throats. Thick wrinkles carved their splotchy faces. Just waiting on death to arrive, to wipe its feet on the mat and come in. Just patiently withering away watching Soap Operas and late night boxing in lamplit rooms. Pill bottles aligned like armies on nightstands; an infinite amount of refills to be phoned in by gnarled and bony fingers punching the numbers in. The porchlights hummed simultaneously in the bitter solitude.
Cecil fell out of the truck and pulled the dog into his arms rubbing its floppy ears spiritedly. The dog licked his bloody fingers in return. The yard was littered with ancient lawnmowers and parts to cars no one needed,or wanted. A couple folding lawn chairs sat around a rusted trash barrel where smashed Budweiser cans lay thrown in a pile.
"Damn, Cecil. Looks like a bomb went off in your yard."
"Aint had the time to fool with it Cousin."
Words wouldnt come as silence ebbed between us a like a wall. Cecil walked up his porch steps and threw a hand in the air, a farewell gesture.
"We'll just see how it plays out Cousin! Don't ye worry bout it!"

Sweet Lucinda

Lucinda, long-legged and golden haired, waltzing down the sidewalk. Headed to the park, she says. A party's happening, of sorts. High heels flexed her skinny calves. Big, chocolate doe eyes reel me in. She pauses, hand on hip, and waits while I don my tweed jacket and fill my flask with sweet, sweet bourbon. Arms interlocked, we commenced. The orange sun is falling slowly and an October crispness is verging. Lucinda's an inch or two taller than me, lean and sleek, but I wear her boastfully like a medal. Trumpets spurt and guitars ring and drums attack the night with sound. Electric voices moan and bodies sway as one, dancing on the St Augustine. We pass the flask back and forth, warming the insides. Blending into the mix of people, Lucinda's hips shaking and her pulling me closer. She grinds against my leg and slips her tongue into my mouth. She's warm and sweet, like her Alabama drawl. My Tuscaloosan Princess. The band is grooving and the stars fell on us. Hiked skirt, she leaves a wet spot on my thigh. "Tonight, we feast!" I shout, oddly. She looks at me and rolls her browns and I hope I didn't ruin our rendezvous I have plotted, solely. A sensationalist by nature, she placed my hand under her skirt to a sopping cavern and then suddenly bolts, seeking cover in the herd. Shocked, I don't chase, figuring her to be embarrassed by the gaping wet orifice. I danced drunkenly alone achieving stares from all eyes. Later, worried, I began searching for my debutante asking strangers if they have by chance seen my blonde friend. Finally, I was informed I might be able to find her by the giant oak tree behind the stage. This person smirking as they spoke. I rushed to the tree, behind the stage. I stumbled upon a great orgy, my Lucinda in the midst, taken by two homely looking gent's high fiving each other, penetrating hairy organs into her. Beauty begets disgust. I violently snatched her from the beastly entanglement and caressed her sweaty cheeks. "Sweet Lucinda. Forgive me. This is my fault!" Laughing and crying she slaps me and agrees. Said she saw my stunned face as I felt her and it horrified her, abashedly. Said she received drinks from strange hands while caught in the crowd and accepted with hopes of forgetting what had happened but she got drunk, and horny. "I will kill those hillbilly's!" says I. "Please do." she cried. I ran home feverishly and grabbed my 20 gauge Remington and my cigarettes. I filled my jacket with shells and cursed the moon as I hurried back. Lucinda was balled up, naked still, arms wrapped around bony knees, just as I left her. The two hillbilly's were drinking Old Milwaukee and dancing, shirtless, with two fat women, giant breasts falling out of their tank tops. They saw my crazed face and the shotgun and raised their hands as if I were a cop. I chuckled. "Don't shoot!" they yelled. I caught one in the neck and the other in the face, exploding flesh. They fell in a pile of blood and bones. The two fat women hovered over them wailing. Acting like wives. Smoke and gun oil seeped into my nose and I was manly. A savior. I scooped up Lucinda and we smoked Camels on the sidewalk to my house. Sirens rang as I fell into her, deep, and we rolled in sheets as blue lights came through the windows. She begged for me to take her rear, so I did. She took it all and wanted more, more. I had no more. She accepted that. Months passed by like speeding cars. Me and Lucinda got married in Biloxi where a few of my people still ambled. She had never seen any ocean before and she fell in love with the rolling brown waves and the dirty sand of Harrison County, where I built my castles in the 80s. Afternoons, she baked under the sun in her bantam bikini and I caught fish from the pier. We stayed in a tiny motel and I watched free HBO as she loved me down there, sloppily. Four days straight, loaded on strawberry wine, Lucinda's tanned body lived naked in our room and we embraced hard, to the bone, like a storm thrashing about. Bodies weary and ravaged. Loose in the streets at night under the flashing marquees we were a couple of birds with eyes full of youth. In Harrah's, I won $500 playing blackjack and Lucinda hung on to every sweet word and sentence I offered her, like a child to a mother's hand. We were a lovely couple, her with her legs and heighth, and me with my mysterious European looks. We drank scotch and listened to a colored jazz band bop with sweaty energy and jerk with real feeling, their caramel glazed skin glistening under the dim lights in the casino bar, until the rising sun pulled us out into its unforgiving shine, us being barbarians of gloom. Hung-over, we drove home defeated and red-eyed. But married. The Toyota trembled on the highway and Lucinda slept with barefeet on the dashboard, as we sped. Biloxi cried when I took my fresh-faced Alabama bride from its sandy grasp. A pink sky bleeding in my rear view, just another memory.      I bought a trumpet upon our arrival home and practiced nearly every day. My lips bled and cracked and looked sad. Lucinda became a neat housewife and gave me her rear most anytime. Trim and tan legs all summer in her shorts, and brown toes too. Perfect and symmetrical. She planted flowers and owned the yard and her skin was salty. Rocking in our chairs we guzzled iced sweet tea as birds perched in our pecan trees. I played my trumpet for her and she sat at my feet, longingly, with misty eyes as the stars speckled down on this young affair we brandished bravely. I didn't deserve her. She deserved everything. The powdery Georgia moon was full blown and Lucinda led me to our rumpled sheets and straddled me with tension until we came together, and cried humorously.   Our landlord is a retired Greek physicist who wears polarized sunglasses with his bushy tufts poking out his polo shirts. He stares at my wife behind his sunglasses and I want to strangle him. Needs the rent, he says. I write him his check and he's gone. His Mercedes leaving in a rush of exhaust with its high grade fuel exploding blurry fumes. An easy wind blows through my wife's yellow waves and she's shocking. No wonder the gawking from the Greek. A cheerleader in high school who read difficult novels and experienced with boys before any of her friends had thought too. Still limber, she does the splits for me in our bedroom and chants a hoarse cheer repeatedly. We ate our eggs together and drank black coffee with a newspaper between us. My Hogs lost to her Dawgs and she's glowing with augustness for her dear Alma Mater. I'm not even a blemish on the campus of the jagged Ozarks where I root for my Razorbacks. Dropping out after only a few courses, realizing my genius over the tweed-coated, pipe-smoking professors who taught, because they couldn't do, who peered from podiums with their borrowed ideas and practiced poetry that allured teenage queens with supple lips and dumb eyes back to their stale apartments strewn with beloved books they haven't opened, but own, achieving the literary status needed to seduce said teenage queens. Spite tastes like rotten lemons. "You'll be late for work, honey." Lucinda piped. "Aw, babe. Don't be pushy." I kissed her forehead hard and rose from the table grunting in my pajamas angrily. "Dear wife. Do you not remember my saving you that October evening by the old oak tree from the two rapist brothers with the enormous wives who enjoyed watching their husbands with something pretty and delicate as you? Do you not remember the sirens wailing but me keeping you safe, and warm even, from the chilled night? Do you not remember?"   Tears dribbled down her cheeks and I knew I was ridiculous. I destroyed her beauty and Lucinda was plain and expended now. I stole her brilliance. I detest drama but I am drama. "I'm sorry, love. Forgive me. My words are cowards, as am I. Please cause me pain. Show me you care!" I shouted.     She spoke not a word and smiled at me with lusty eyes and a wet mouth. With strong hands she yanked my shorts down and assaulted my swollen member with vigor and purpose. Pulling and twisting with both hands until I bursted on her ample breasts. She rubbed it in like lotion and lay on the floor and slept in a mess. I have deflated my young wife. My abused lover in a pile at my feet, snoring. All because my own memory is perfect and remembers too much. All because the Old Milwaukee brothers were violent and hungry for my sweet Lucinda. All because a past is forever and never fades. The past feels like a guilty verdict and in return needs punishment. Only by association she is. A smoking gun and a bloody linoleum floor relieves her of my misery. Goodbye, lover.     Later. With shaky hands I grasped her thin ankles and drug her through the desolate house, her nakedness very befitting for the occasion.  A brush-stroked line of crimson chased her tangled mess of bloody hair across the floor like a reddened mop. Her sloe-hued eyes no longer vibrant and curious; now just bereft of life, glazed and cold as the winter wind stinging the window which framed the lambent moon outside in the black. Down the steps we thud, death among us already. The season's blanket of rust-colored sumac leaves flickered with gusts that swirled around us like a fleeting tornado, scant and undeveloped. Windy laments were sung for us. Shouted, almost. The shovel sat against the shed boasting with a purposeful look about it. Maybe a tunnel of light descended down to reveal this sacred instrument needed to finalize this selfish act of evil. It's really unclear to me. Laboriously, I unearthed the strong scent of dirt and rocks and made a neat pile of it. Icy sweat raced down the inside of my shirt, from the armpit; tickling my ribs. My muscles corded and strained for my faded bride. Only for her, I told myself innocently as I peered down at her with a strange necrophilia urge crawling under my clammy skin. She seemed so beautiful, and glowing too. Her legs longer. Her skin smoother, and so on. I decided against the urge and gathered her up into my burning arms. Her body heavier as gravity pulled. I placed her in the minor rectangle and threw the loose dirt and rocks upon her graying nude body. I am a sick soldier of love, grieving self-inflicted loss and horror. Stricken with a lapsing judgment of myself. No mirror reveals the truth in my face, quarter-aged and semi-handsome. A mound of bruise-colored dirt now represents my fallen lady; a sunken Alabaman with treasures clasped to her chest, a last breath exhausted by the dust that fell loosely on her lips. Something like remorse perched upon my shoulders as I unsteadily tramped up the steps into the bleak house, but I wouldn't turn around to face it. Never. It would lurk there forever.  A reminder of her slender, lengthy legs that tied knots around my waist and her flawless toes all lining up in order and depressing slightly like steps going down. Tender breasts and a perky ass buried beneath my ignorant anger. Such a devastating loss, such a loss. My tears are dry like a bone. Grass will grow over that earthly mound concealing, cosmetically at least, the death at thine hands. But the presence of Lucinda dances through the yard swinging on limbs with her dipping arches like a Russian ballerina. Face powdered and painted. The rushing dramatics of an ill-begotten symphony bursting through the shadows of the bent and distorted trees with haunting melodies and staccatos. A loud silence. The loudest, I say. I sat at the dining room table sipping old bourbon from a coffee cup and smoking cigarettes watching fixedly the dried streak of blood that curved into the kitchen, as if it might slither away like a snake, abruptly. The acrid smell of a taken life rose to the ceiling fan and was distributed throughout, settling onto the furniture like a fine film of impalpable dust. The swirling natural characteristics of the cherry stained oak table spinned me out of my mind; into a fitful maze of feelings like perfectly trimmed hedges with the little red berries floating amongst the piercing bushes. I, drunk and dripping with language, held the attention of the lonesome air where there were no ears to reach with the verbal epitaph that hung on the end of my tongue. Dearest, Lucinda. I am terror, embalmed for thee. Imperishable from the weight of love you left me with. A bedraggled specter of my own self. So, who really got death?