reading – Page 27 – three good words

October 30, 2014

a simple life

The cabin was in the middle of nowhere out in the plains. It took twenty minutes to get to the main street with the grocers and the bar. The cabin had everything though, water and electricity, and enough firewood if it got cold at night. Bobby made sure there was enough.

Bobby Sachs was the mechanic in Twain. You needed your car fixed you got it to Sachs. He knew everything about cars, old, new, sold twice, three times, he knew exactly what you needed. How, nobody knew, he just did. He was a good man, tall, very broad, always tanned. He was rarely in anything else than jeans and a soiled shirt, work gloves hanging out of his back pocket, his workboats sprinkled with motor oil. He was the quiet type, didn’t talk much, but was a good for a drink and a game of pool in the bar. Bobby Sachs was liked by everyone in Twain, he was a good man, solid. And he took care of Christiana, everyone called her Christy though.

Christy was… she was a sweet girl, but not very bright. When she went shopping at the grocers, she had a list of things they needed, written out by Bobby, coz Christy couldn’t remember much. Pretty face, but brain like a sieve, everyone said. And it was good Bobby Sachs did the decent thing and married her. She’d been going out with Bobby Sachs’ cousin, Hank Royce, but Hank was no good. Beat her up bad sometimes, especially when he was drunk, but there was no getting Christy away from Hank, he was all she had save her Gran, and her Gran was ancient. Nobody really knew about Christy’s dad, and her Moma one day up and left without so much as a word or goodbye. Christy was ten then, and everybody in Twain agreed that’s when she got a bit strange. She’d loved her Moma like only a kid could, but Christy’s Moma was a bitch, everyone was happy to see her go. Nobody said that to Christy’s face though, coz Christy was an angel. Not very bright, but so sweet you didn’t want no harm to come her way. You just couldn’t get her away from that good-for-nothin’ drunk she was with.

Then Hank Royce got himself killed in a car crash down at the Old River, and it was Bobby Sachs who dragged the wreck to the yard. As the story went, he came by Christy’s to give her the money for the scraps, saw how bad she was and just took her home to get her cleaned up and fed. She never left after, and at one point they went to the preacher and Bobby put his Moma’s ring on Christy’s finger. Now Christy was taken care of and the whole of Twain was relieved. Christy wasn’t an angel for nothin’, she had a good man for a husband, a man she obviously adored, she wouldn’t let anyone talk bad about Bobby. grasses Everyone was happy for her, she was a good girl with a good man, and Bobby Sachs was the kind of man you wanted to see with a good wife. Everyone was happy to see them walking into the bar for the dance on Saturday nights, or down to the fair when it came to Crosby further down the highway, coz Bobby Sachs took care of his wife. He even took her out when she wanted to have a good time.

October 28, 2014

life in time

you are in cotton
carried in hands
of such magnitude and gentleness
all you know is…

the need to know
to live and learn
to jump and run

dance to music
savour the moment
watch a setting sun

to love
to hold
to know you and me and you
as what you are

all the you there is
tremendous

to understand the infinite
in expression

to know of time
and memories
to learn there is both
a you and an I

to be young at heart
and wise, caring, kind

…bliss

October 24, 2014May 17, 2020

saying hi

Not PG Rated

I just wanted to drop by, say Hi, see how she’s doing. Jermaine and Vaughn were waiting in a bar downtown, and her place was on the way. I walked in with the take-away guy, she looked pretty shocked to see me. She didn’t have enough money on her for her order, she’d confused the bills, so I paid. Her face got seriously red then, like, cherry. That guy she’s dating must be totally whipped by now.

She let me in though, offered a beer so I thought hell, why not, my boys can wait. We even shared her dinner, though she said it was mine coz I’d paid. I told her to stop worrying about that, and we had a good time just talking. Kind o’ got outta hand though. It’s the way she looks at you, with those huge eyes, they’re this deep blue, like she’s begging you to get her clothes off nice and fuck her real slow, y’know, real good, and that’s kind o’ what happened. She looked real bad after, guilty, so I pulled her close, y’know, tryin’ to comfort her and tell her it’s ok, happens to everyone at some point, and that kind o’ got outta hand as well. She was crying afterwards, said she was a horrible person, and how could she ever look Sean in the eye again, over and over, she just wouldn’t stop.

So, I tried to calm her down, told her this had nothing to do with him, it was her life, not his. She stared at me like I’d just shot someone, so I told her the truth, it would do her no good to start talkin’, coz her guy’d never understand. She was still crying, sayin’ how she’d cheated on him and how could anything ever work after that, so I said, she didn’t cheat on him, she just had sex with someone else. She stared at me again, that straight stare like I’d just said plain murder the guy right there. As I said, a bit innocent sometimes, but it’s part of her and it’s kind o’ cute. So I went all out and said, ‘Look, you don’t know what Sean does when you’re not around, so don’t bother him with your stuff.’ She got a bit angry there, how I could even think that Sean would ever and all that, and all I said, ‘He’s a guy Amanda, and guys are guys most of the time.’

That’s when she went all quiet and said, ‘So, this was just a fuck?’ I didn’t know what to say. I mean, sayin’ Yeah would’ve made her cry all over again, and I didn’t wanna say No neither, so I said, ‘I’m sorry,’ which made it worse, coz she started cryin’ and got angry at the same time, which is a helluva combo. She can get real loud. Took me almost an hour to calm her down, and we kind o’ ended up doin’ it again, coz I’d been tellin’ her that she’s beautiful and everything, which is true, she’s awesome, but she took it all wrong of course, but what’s a guy to do? It’s the way she looks at you and if you know how it is to feel her all hot and tight and just so good, it’s hard to say no, y’know? Real hard. So hard, Vaughn had to call me up so that I could get my ass outta there. Man, I really fucked that up. I really just wanted to drop by and see how she’s doin’, y’know, nothin’ special. Next time, I’ll just cut past that street. If it gets outta hand like that again, she’ll probably start screamin’ the house down. Fuck, I just wanted to say Hi. Now, I’ll probably have to drop the diner and their coffee’s the best this side o’ town.

October 24, 2014October 24, 2014

for once

Natural.

More of an
afterthought
than an
endeavour

more of a
f
l
o
w
than a
pu – shing – through

more of a
silent
surprise
than a planned-out event.

More of an
‘Oh… did we just…?’
rather than an
‘Ok, let’s do it.’

October 19, 2014May 16, 2020

midnight menu

Not PG rated

She didn’t talk very much, but she always said thank you with a smile. Every Tuesday and Thursday night, after the late-night shift, he would go to the diner, sit at the counter and order the Midnight Menu that was made almost entirely out of fat and cholesterol. It tasted heavenly.

Oliver, or Oil as his colleagues called him – it was that one lunch break where he listed reasons why extra virgin olive oil was healthy that did it. He couldn’t help it, it was the kind of trivia he knew. So, he would walk into the diner at sometime past 2 a.m., sit down at the red-leather stool and start off with a coffee to wake him up, then continue with some nuts or crackers in the small dish someone always set before him, and finally go for the Midnight Menu, greasy and heavy in his stomach, the perfect thing to carry him home and send him to sleep the moment he undressed and hit the pillows.

Sometimes he didn’t undress at all. It all got into a muddle once he passed his door. Somnolence thickened his fatigue halfway up the five floors, and by the time he opened the door, he was sleep-walking. Every now and then he woke up in his shirt and tie, his pants unzipped. He somehow always remembered to remove his shoes, the fruits of rigorous childhood training where one step into the house with muddy shoes was accompanied with the siren-like shriek from his mother. And he always had muddy shoes. Since then it had become almost a reflex to remove his shoes the moment he closed the door. The rest, however… Oliver couldn’t say how often he’d woken up drooling on his jacket, but only ever on Wednesday and Friday mornings, after the late-night shift and endless jokes about olive oil.

There was no reason why he went to the diner so religiously. It had nothing to do with the interior, which looked like a bad copy of a 50s’ family eatery. It wasn’t the music which was always this side of mediocre, let alone the clientele that looked just as half-dead as he usually felt. It was the food at first, greasy and delicious and so unhealthy he ate up with glee. And when she suddenly turned up, he had another reason as well. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but she had a nice face, the kind you could watch and watch and watch and not get tired, unless you were drifting off into the land of nowhere like he often was. She moved gracefully, like a dancer, never talked louder than necessary and always said thank you with a smile. He liked her, though all the conversation they had was a hello and goodbye, except his usual order and how she jotted everything down as if she’d heard it for the first time.

He at first thought she was a little slow. He never changed his order, so why all this writing? Then he saw her reading that French woman they’d had in school and changed his mind. He got a little cautious too. She was working the night shift at a slightly seedy dig, looking prim and proper like a neatly trimmed garden, without any sign of unease. The moment he realized this, Oliver got curious. Very quietly, over the space of weeks of Tuesday and Thursday late-night shifts he started wanting to know who she was, why she read that French book on the graveyard shift, and what the rest of her life looked like. She had to have something of a rest of her life. He had a rest of his life, though it didn’t amount to much. If he wasn’t sleeping he was working, if he wasn’t working he was sleeping. Weekends just drifted by, and there was Terry who insisted on drinks on Friday night, usually spent listening to Terry talk about his boring life. He’d had a girl once, ages ago. Pretty thing, bright, with plans for her life that did not entail the likes of him. Oliver didn’t mind. Thinking about her and them and us and everything else had proven to be unnecessarily complicated, he kept on messing up the one steady thing in his life, his job. So he wasn’t too shocked when she called it quits. He hadn’t seriously seen a woman in… years.

There was Stella from down the hall though. He’d found her crying on the stairs one day, crying so hard she could hardly move, so he helped her up, opened her door for her and made her some chamomile tea, why did women always have camomile tea? Then he listened to how she walked in on her boyfriend fucking another woman, got her box of Kleenex for her and hugged her awkwardly across the corner of her kitchen counter. He tucked her into bed fully dressed, except her shoes of course, slipped a tacky white teddy into the crook of her arm, a gift from the man she just fled from. Oliver made sure she was ok, Stella told him twice she was all right, so he left.

A week later, some drab Sunday night, the doorbell rang. Oliver opened it and saw Stella standing there with a bottle of wine, saying she wanted to say thank you. They drank the wine in his kitchen and fucked on his couch, and since then it was kind of an arrangement that he turned up at her place on Sunday evening with a bottle of wine. They rarely drank any of it because Stella was a riot in bed. She knew some surprising things, and liked talking about the men she met while they were fucking. Oliver got to know about a lot of people this way, it was way better than the Sunday night special on TV.

That was his life really, the late-night shift on Tuesday and Thursday, a few drinks with Terry on Friday, maybe a trip to the gym on Saturday, and sex with Stella from down the hall on Sunday evening. It was easy, there were no complications, and Oliver lived rather contentedly this way. He didn’t want anything to change really, though sometimes he did dream of faraway places where he would live a different life altogether, where he might have something close to ambition, but those were just dreams anyway.