Mrs. Martin Part 1

I'll call her Mrs. Martin because I’m making up parts anyway. Because it’s memory and I’m always making that up. Mrs. Martin lived in a wheelchair and never left it as far as we knew. In fact, she never moved at all. In all the times we’d ninja into her yard close enough to get a look, we never saw her stir. The room’s only life was the constant flicker of television lighting up the windows and walls. She lived where Della Street U-ed into an industrial road that made the property value of our street just crap enough we could all afford to live there. We being Emily, Melissa, and me.

Our street only had three kids near my age. Em, a tom-boy with her own tree fort who believed in black magic, curses, and hexes. Melissa, a fifth grader who deigned to hang out with us, and would cock her head sideways, stick out her new chest, and tell me I’m cute when I laugh. Which would color me instantly. The third kid was Jason, who I hung out with for a week until we were in the forest playing commandos and he pulled down his pants and threw his own turd at my head.

It’s hard to be a boy with two girls as best friends. What I couldn’t see then is our first sonars of puberty, these first soundings. Sometimes Melissa would reach for my hand during cartoons. Em would wrestle me in her fort and just lay breathless on top of me. Em bought a training bra before she needed it because of Melissa. Melissa was jealous of the tree fort and found a secret place for us between our hedgerows. Once I asked Melissa if we could touch tongues after our daily batch of Kool-Aid. In the middle of her room, our tropical red tongues tipped together. She said later our first kiss was French. Em brained me with a rock when she found out.

We passed Mrs. Martin’s on our way to the forest. It looked all grown-back I told my Mom. I know the word now is reclamation. The twin maples jutted in, scraped against and into the attic window. The yard hadn’t been cut in years and the grass was head deep and pocked with litter. Probably not having noticed, Mrs. Martin had not followed the suburban trend of residing and her house looked bedraggled compared to the plastic sheens of her neighbors. Her house of cards was a fault line of expectations, a paint peeling question mark, a great breath of hesitation before something.

Someone take the lead here...

and figger this sucker out fer me.

I don't think my invitee is 'down' for this. Someone we might look at is Eiryn Jakob, who could provide an interesting vantage. I think she is a phenomenal writer. Czech her here: http://wajok.blogspot.com/

Someone take over on this or it will die on the vine. Someone write something. Do something, dammit. Live.

I was trapped...

...behind a long line of traffic that extended down the single lane behind me, disappearing over the false horizon in my mirrors. In front of me was a shitty white Datsun. The Datsun sounded like a children’s brass band. The side mirrors were cracked. The exhaust spat at me. The taillights were illegible. Strapped to a warped ski rack on top of the Datsun was a slab of inch-thick plywood. On top of the plywood was the severed head of the biggest bull elk I had ever seen. The ragged edges of the bull’s neck were flayed out around the head. The board had blackened from the blood, as though the veins had once pumped old motor oil. The glassed eyes were looking straight up to the sky. The tongue flagged out of the mouth to the side. I imagined that it would have been flapping, but it had stiffened beyond motion. From behind, it looked like the carcass of a primeval spider—the legish antlers extended skyward. The wapiti was strapped onto the roof of the Datsun with nylon cording strung from the uppermost antler point to the lowest and then hitched onto the rack. There it was, the Datsun’s aegis to the cold sun, a blood trophy and mascot, the wagon load of spoils, a hirsute and huge John the Baptist. Without the wind, a host of blue black gunmetal flies would congregate inside it to lay their eggs for the other heads of other creatures one step beyond. All the years eating water cress from the bottom of Beaver Creek, and the battles of antlers and frost, and the thin years and winter months when no Chinook found his harem. The rut and the gravity in the groin—the slicing bugle that could cut ice like a blowtorch. He had survived. So many years of knowing the Targhee better than God himself, and the final ride down a 2 lane state highway atop a sputtering, shitty Japanese compact driven by a man dressed like leaves.