He hadn't even noticed her walk in front of him, willowy and hushed. She was taller than most men, and stooped because of it, making her look old- too old. Her fingers clutched at the skirt of her green dress desperately. He rapped his cane on the deck, hoping to frighten her away the way one would frighten off a snake  in the woods. Cocaine Charlie doesn't appreciate company. She stayed.

 Cosima lives alone. Cosima makes lace in the room under the stairs, and at 8:48 every Tuesday night leads her mystic cult in song and sacrifice. They adjourn at 9:48 for water crackers and munster cheese. Cosima collects wind in Cambells soup cans and thinks the yellow taint around bruises is beautiful. She stands at the end of her driveway at 12:37 every Sunday and laughs at churchgoers driving home. She loves no one. And so naturally, Cocaine Charlie loved her. He loved the mean street cat when he was seven, even though it scratched his ear and he had to get six stitches. He loved Amber Mashpolluck in the eighth grade, even though she told him (in front of the lockers 5th period) that she thought he was a skinny boob. He loved his roommate in college, simply because he knew that his roommate would not love him back. He wanted to run one finger down her arms, to count the length. Cocaine Charlie self-destructs. 

Cocaine Charlie hadn't always been called that. He tried his hand at names like Shots, Chevrolet Sal, Threads Martin. None of them stuck like Cocaine Charlie. They all fit him like loose latex gloves- sweaty and uncomfortable, sticking in the wrong places and in the wrong ways.  He knew the name didn't come honest. Like, if you go to Panama for the year to look through tiny binoculars all the way to the other side of that great blue tube, you might come home and your bartender might call you Panama. Cocaine Charlie made up his name, and forced it to stick which made him walk a little stiffly, and so he took up an ivory cane. 

Who did this woman think she was? He hated her and loved the looks of her. So thin, so tall she didn't look real. Sitting in the rusty seat close to him, she had to fold herself in half, delicate and wispy. River nymph. No, a sylph. He could just see her taking flight and cutting the sky with her sharp body, free and cruel. He pulled out his pack of cigarettes and wriggled it around in his stumpy fingers, finally pulling one from the case. Cocaine Charlie smokes two whole packs a day. What the hell, he'd never see her again.

The Kings of Water Valley

I saw them all congregated and singing once

Lifting silky throats to the evening shade

One by one raising stories and songs

Obituaries, triumphs, cold bowls gifted on doorsteps.

When the meeting is done, shadows replace them

Leaving only mournful breaths and fearful rumbles.

Take to the night, empty bellies and worn feet

Caring hands replaced by the paints of war

This is your street now.

There was a time a softer kind visited

Singing to me through frosted pane

Rushing through open doors to welcoming hearths

She's gone now, replaced by the silent greys of night.

I fear for you my kings

These flowing nights are short and cold

But you are easily replaced by those behind

And there will be no taming you now.

There's just so many people. I read the statistics and I know that the song I'm listening to on the radio, probably at least one other million Americans are listening to as well. I get overwhelmed when I see them waving on the television and swamping into shopping malls like muddy water. Always more than faces, always little details lingering just beneath the skin, right out of reach.

I can't tell all of their stories but I want to.

Sometimes, there is just nothing to say.

When I remember my days spent at the old house, I remember the burnt orange reflection on everything the sun touched as it snuck away. That was when the trains still ran, one plodding right through one of our fields behind the house- it was a clinging hope for a thriving business in a world where the 18 wheeler and cargo aircraft were beginning to snuff out the very remembrance of the railroad.

My sister Sarah and I would climb on top of the hay bales, first brushing over the tops with our hands to check for dead mice, and then we would nestle into the prickly, dusty-smelling things and be shaken by the passing train. When my father was younger, he lived in a house right by railroad tracks too. He used to tell us that the train made the whole house sway back and forth, back and forth, when it hurtled past--screaming angrily in the night. There was something about them that bothered him, created a sense of dread within him. I shared his fear until we moved into the old house and I got to see a train go by. It wasn't a bad thing at all, I thought. It made the earth kind of rumble, made it purr. My sister and I would sit on that giant cat's back, all prickly with cold grass and let the train vibrate our insides. I always knew that there was a conductor, but somehow to me trains were like cars on the highway at night--the pavement amplified with headlights that only preceded empty metal shells.

When I went back, a grown up with a slimmer face and wiser eyes, the field was smaller than I remembered. Everything is smaller than you remember when you go back and look at childhood things. Things like playgrounds and murals and closets. But the field seemed extra smaller. It's been about twenty years, I told myself, and trees never stop popping out of the ground. The train was the same though, bigger even. Still a cold, robotic caterpillar, unmoving on the ground. I crept closer, feeling reverence, fear even. I had never felt close to the train. It was a childhood memory, but not a comforting one. Sarah and I always watched the train, soaking up the hay bale's warmth and the enjoying the feel of the crisp air stinging the curves of our ears--but never really loved the train. We loved the sounds, the quaking earth, the smell of the outside. But never the train itself. I was still scared of it in a way. Looking back, I understand my father's strange fear of the mindless beast, eating over the land.

Another Snippet.

Last semester I turned in a short story for a final grade. It was an expansion of the twins bit from a few posts back. Here's a bit of it.

They made no move to help him, only peered out at him from behind their dirty glasses with faces as smooth and emotionless as the goose beside them. Ghost noticed that one of them had on a sock that didn’t match the other three. Dizzy from the hot sun, and panicked from the sight of blood, he threw his head back with a howl. The goose, startled, rose from its nest like a soft fluttering moth. It hovered, just at eye-level beside Ghost, the weighted sandbags of its wings kissing tips and then spreading wide once more, close enough to brush Ghost’s cheeks. A sign from the Almighty, he thought.

First off, I got married.

After that part, we came back to the house that we live in. The great thing about living in houses is that they cover up your head in the 9,836,592,046,397 degree weather, and you can wash your clothes in them*, and there is usually furniture to sleep/sit on. The not so great thing about living in houses is you have to, you know, take care of them- and some even go to those great lengths of trying to make their homes look at least kind of presentable. Which leads me to the curtains.

The thing about curtains, is you have to have something to hang them on. The thing about curtain rods is they usually have to fit the precise measurements of your windows. The thing about windows, is that they are usually clear and let people see inside of your maybe-not-so-well-decorated home, which brings us back full circle to needing curtains for the said windows. Now, I'm no Martha Stewart. When it comes to cooking, I normally like to group foods whose colors accent one another and I'm not too concerned about them tasting well together. Needless to say, my decorating style is similar. So for things like curtains, I'm an easy girl to please, which makes it surprising that these curtains have become the bane of my existence. As it turns out, we didn't have a tape measurer to measure all of our windows with, so I went to the store and made lots of incredibly uneducated guesses about what miiiight fit our windows. I was wrong about it all.

In the end, I don't know why I'm complaining about any of this, because Daniel is the one who has done all of the work. Yesterday when we got back from the store where we exchanged all of the idiot-curtain hardware that I had purchased and got the things that would actually work, I was furious. These curtains and their persistent need to be rebellious got my goat in a big way. And so Daniel calmly gave up an hour of his Sunday afternoon hanging them all while I burnt holes in the floor from all of my fuming. I felt about how this guy looks.*

I realize now that our lesson to be learned from the anti-climactic story that I just wasted your time with is that we should have had a tape measurer all along. And honestly, what we really needed wasn't one more crystal deviled egg plate. It was this:

*Edit: Less than 24 hours after writing this our washing machine broke.

*A side note: when searching for pictures of congressman Anthony Weiner, the first results were almost all women.