young broke and republican by r.e.knowltoniii

The windows above each and every door smothered themselves with the heat that smoldered the souls of those that walked beneath them in the deep southern inferno. They breathed in and out in laboured effort, as a dog does when it runs hard against the points in order to catch the rabbit, regardless of it’s cardboard meaning. In the day it was oppressive; in the night it was just hot enough to muster up a comment about how hot it was.

She hiked her dress up high on the front porch swing while the paint chips flecked and flicked themselves down upon the buckled boards of nail rebellion. She waved a hand to veer the heat away as she looked so full of sensual submission; the sweat gathered between her breasts as if to mean something. He crossed the mossy grass over stone and earth and songs that echoed in souls made him move on as the reverb pushed each foot forward - one after another. His sandals wished they were beach shoes as they pressed on but they did so as penny loafers would as well - deck shoes even, saddle shoes.

Her facial fan was nothing more than crimped paper paradise spreading cooling joy about to and fro and making her so blissful that past lovers were jealous and the current ones could feel it. The sounds that emanated from a guitar far away made her smile because the shade under the tree (as her feet rubbed tightly against each other in the air bereft of sunshine) made her think that all the guitars in the world played for her. Four doors down in a back yard with deviled eggs and children drinking kool-aid while pink skirted women paying attention embraced the lonely man strumming out the humidity on an instrument that she momentarily forgot about as she drifted away in the moistness of her panties and the day collided like lust-lorn meteors kissing in destruction.

He drove through the forgotten, the nights where only foreboding AM convulsions of conspiracy shown through. The nights would rise high above and make the rain forget it was damp and make it fall all at the same time. The loneliness would caress the dashboard as the moon would laugh and the lines written by men upon the roads would blur and stagger about as they were the paths weaved by drunken men walking home in the shadows of dawn’s smiles before they turned to frowns of disapproval in the glow of flaming, carnal sienna.

As she sat there with beaded brow, he would stand in front of the mirror so far away and turn the light off so he could not see himself as he spoke to no one in the reflection while listening to Leonard Cohen songs and smoking too many cigarettes. The passion of something north made him think of places east and memories south as he dreamt deep down in his soul of something west. The guitar strings strumming so fast his heart could not keep up unless he would seize, die.

He thought of the coffee pot; She thought of a lover gently kissing the nape of her neck as a tongue flicked upon torrid flesh in a salty night of desire deep inside both their souls.

Five in the morning comes quick when the days are turned upside down needing the hours to spin up right and make themselves known.

The Widow next door made herself work through the tall grass in the humidity and the day and the sun and all the rest that the day presented. She found herself against the porch wheezing and turning about in the throes of turmoil and disgust but driven by the determination to tell the sultry girl laying lackadaisically in the swing what exactly was in the future for future’s sake. A genteel strumming came from some where beyond the moss in the willows and neither one of them or the old woman had any idea where it came from yet all three of them smiled.

Four doors down there was an expression in oblivion (birthed from expression and oblivion) curled up in a knit cap of denial and reclusion for the sake of not knowing as that tends to be the hardest bet on the table - it takes all the bets in the alley as dice roll hard against brick walls while men get mad at the burden of others with rusted need in the daylight simmer.

A woman’s voice came down through the willow as her skirt was pulled down a little bit tighter. A man’s footsteps ceased in the moonlight. A widow bit her tongue as to not ruin a moment. The frogs sang in symphonic order as if a crane had held a baton in it’s beak and conducted something romantic beneath the stars. It was truly a moment, the kind of moment that words are meant to describe yet none of them interacted in it but they all felt it just the same. The porch swing held in the air like suspense, the widow paused as if she died herself and the boy moved forward out of the need to know, as most young boys do.

Along a body of water not so far away there were pussy willows, cat ‘o’ nine tails, and tall razor grasses that eavesdropped on the whole night and the events that were so patiently unfolding in front of them even though nothing was happening beyond the movement of the height of the skirt hem. They weaved this way and that and grew older in a second as they were dreamt about by a boy that wished he were the man desiring the singing woman on the porch in the darkness. Alas, he was - is.

Stuttering and stammering through the darkness that was too lit to be called night as the bayou yellow bit the lip of the purple dusk enveloping the day in a blanketed turn of events was the boy edging ever so close to the porch stairs as his thoughts of her became a reality. The Widow cursed the earth and spread the dirt around as if to cause some sort of voodoo curse or canto that could only be interpreted by those who spoke to gators and wore big medallions as some sort of pharmaceutical replacement to modern societal acceptance. She began to hike her skirt back up and it danced across her shaven legs and her lips pursed with the fury of passion and lust and love and desire as the phonograph skipped gently like a momentary loss of a lover’s direction in the darkness.

You could still hear the guitar playing even though no one had been playing it for more than moments but only if you were in their minds, their souls, their hearts.

There was a dragging sandy sound that cricked and creaked it’s way through the stick dragging fauna of back woods prevention the Widow had put forth. She struggled with their power while they had no struggle in their naïve nativity.

She had a wooden cross on a black shoelace around her neck. It hung just so and she found the right moment to touch it as she touched her thigh. He looked on and began to cry through the air thick with tears. He whispered, “ I Love You”. The record playing inside the house skipped and scratched again and continued on as if both of them fell into a comfortable spot that made them both cum out of a mistake.

The moss whipped around like afro fury at a funk show and the sounds of Dixie could be heard by ghosts that had collected to feel the passion in the air, taste the desire that spilled over, and devour the lust that knew not what to do with itself. His eyes grew deep and wide as he could feel it all around him and he imagined himself as the cross around her neck as she gently touched it with her fingertips and her fingernails clicked across the corners as she smiled. She smiled so wide that the corners of her mouth were going to break; her skirt went up higher. Gingham glory on a hot southern night.

Dirt flew in a fury and fervor unlike any other as the widow belched a venomous verve towards their beings. A crotchety finger wagged and wiggled at them like a seizure dance of palsy at a middle school dance in the suburbs. One was left to wonder what was up the sleeves that were not there. If she had carried a cane she would have gyrated it in a general direction that would have inflicted and infected the futures of two innocents that stumbled through the serendipity of nights onset.

The porch light blew out and her cross found solace in the palm of her hand; his heart leapt up through his chest and out of his throat only to find refuge in his chest again while remaining still. The widow even paused for a moment to collect her position in the greater scheme of things and then paused again in order to observe.

The vinyl’s visceral vitality was more verbose than ever as it echoed between the willows and made the porch swing shake, it made the boy stall, it made the widow question her actions; Gram Parsons has a way of doing that in the darkness (even if you don’t think about his body being lit on fire at Joshua Tree). The night smiled and moved on into it’s motion of growing bigger and darker and more consuming. The cross around her neck began to feel violated. Her dress felt less significant by the moment.

He spoke in a raspy baritone and softly said, “I Love You”. She still could not hear him; to her, he was not there.

Her hair was wisped around in a messy nest of a bun and she fiddled, momentarily, with the idea of letting it down - which she hardly ever did and it made her wonder why she would think that in the sudden darkness of the set in night. She thought of M. Ward; she closed her eyes and sang Yo La Tango lyrics to herself. He said, “I Love you” again but this time it was in his mind.

The Widow had all but almost given up when she could sense his doubt, his insecurity overwhelmed him. She danced in a Pentecostal manner as her fingertips wiggled towards the sky. The willow moss whispered how much it was a southern staple like BBQ and then it quieted down in dreams of being a beard replacement for Santa Claus if he had ‘gone green’ for a year and forgot his white facial locks up in the snow far, far away.

“I Love You”, it got louder this time and for the first time - it was almost audible.

She grabbed at the black cross and her skirt seem to run down her legs to cover her knees almost has if she was experiencing anaphylactic shock from the words. Stung by the bee, bit by the bug - more like an arrow in the ass. Cupid the insect. Complete with dirty, dusty records and momentary thoughts of delusional futures wrapped in ribbons and caressed by emotions never sought out but found none the less.

He moved one step forward and again making it two. It was a sadistic game of ‘Mother May I’ where his heart and soul dictated how far he could go whether he wanted to or not - a marionette clumsily clodding forward for the sake of a beating muscle and a cloudy soul all needing to jive in the moment - the affinity of forlorned destiny and fate and all those other things that a man in control would shun.

The Widow cringed and began to mumble so incoherently that she could not even understand herself. It was as if a Gypsy and an Aztec decided to try to buy a beer in Iceland and the ensuing nonsense merged into one conversation that occurred between one and only one person - gibberish in a southern accent. For a split second between the self propelled cacophony she wished her husband was still alive and then she spat hard down onto the grown and shuffled back through the thicket and the snakes and spiders towards the women in the pink skirts. The Widow was miserable there but much happier than where she had found herself on this night of nights.

She wanted to stand up from the swing but couldn’t; an ice sculpture waiting to melt and flow away under a door and down a drain before the towel could wipe it up. He moved forward but still was only silhouetted in the yellow moon and it’s vicious glow shining about like a sadistic front porch light. He wished it would all come about, all work out and all make sense but he knew it couldn’t.

She leaned forward with her skirt wrapped tightly around her knees as if it were a priest’s collar. She wanted to say hello but could not find the words in her throat. They were in her mind, her soul, her heart, but getting them out to her throat and to be verbalized was a whole other circus trick in it’s own right. ‘Hello’ became the last cripple midget clown in the very back of the car that got suffocated while all the other clowns joked around and jumped out of the car one by one. Fear and Anxiety were OBVIOUSLY the leaders of this clown pack and the Big Top was not any better off for it. Somewhere Hope the Clown was sucking on a cigarette and making love to a flask of bourbon.

His moonlit being was werewolf like and his hair flared out in so many directions that it made Dylan lyrics make sense. His gut corkscrewed about and he lyrically lurched forward with an “I love you” that never seemed to dig deep enough into the walls of Alcatraz. He thought of Tennessee Williams and Elizabeth Taylor’s mascara and mint juleps and menageries of emotion that never could be touched. Some where in the back of his mind he heard the widow flee.

She said, “I love you” but the words never actually formed as her lips moved. Distant lightening made the plantation seem like Time’s Square for a split second; the moss swaying in the wind like a hundred MTV groupies gyrating to the new star of the day arriving in a limo in the daylight with no underwear or make up to speak of. Paralyzed, she wondered why and she almost fell forward as she tightened her skirt around her knees as she stood and leaned forward. “I love you”, it creeped out as a whisper on her second try.

He had already begun to walk away not knowing of her strained attempt to make it happen; her valiant effort. He picked up his guitar that had been leaning against a rose trellis of pie like lattice work. He began to strum in the darkness. She knew. The Widow heard it and smiled. A simple collaboration of Em and A. It was almost flamenco in it’s rhythm. Somewhere in Spain a bull hung his horns low and refused to see red.

He whispered, “I love you” and shared his tears with the moon for soon the widow would see his worn, ruddy cheeks and he knew that only the honey milk sympathy of the lunar globe could comfort him, if only for a minute.