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El Jardinero

  My foot tapped to the rhythmic creaks of the ceiling fans as though to some strange, transic song. Like the tick of a grandfather’s clock, the “click, click, squeak... click, click, squeak” of the fans begged attention during the mid-day doldrums, loud it was, as the pulsing blood echos loud in my head at night when insulated by a down pillow. We natives know that the Mississippi heat exposes the drawl of time, tuning it to the ear, just as the drawl of Mississippi’s dialect is tuned to the ear, they being essentially the same, the measures of each played to the sleepy beats of a Delta Summer. The fans themselves were beautiful, antique, ornate with silver and brass pipings. Their Irish Green canopies sported elegant, golden script too small to make out from below. A single motor hung between them, it’s red, serpentine belt tying them all together. Their spade shaped paddles of rattan were woven like the saw-grass baskets of the black women along the South Biloxi beaches. The pad...
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Daddy’s Girl

  A two-toned, red and white Chevy pickup truck was parked in the sparsely grassed spot underneath the shaded limbs of one of the two magnificent pecan trees which dominated either side of the old farm house’s front walk. From the covered front porch clear out to the road could be heard the excited voice of Eli Gold describing live action from The Charlotte Motor Speedway, even though it was only a hand-sized transistor radio. Beside the truck, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a dripping sponge in hand, stood a man caught in a curious pause from his truck washing, having stopped to watch his four year old at play. The child was behaving in an unusual, if enticing manner, having climbed down inside her pink, pedal-powered plastic Barbie car to remove the bicycle-chain linkage which acted as the little car’s transmission. The man’s ’Lil Miss had managed to identify the master link, then had used some unknown tool to pry it apart, and was currently attempting to shorten, or tig...
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The Shame of it All

  So this is where the years wind up? This is where it ends? The man crouched on the stool atop the stage touches the strings with delicate if resilient fingers, but the tattered Marshall amp on which his boot rests doesn't care. The Marshall likes it loud, just as the Gibson connected to the amp does, and just as the old rocker who cradles the classic guitar to his breast does. And like the other two the aged amp still works fine, which it proves by ejecting the single chord through the “business end” of it’s speaker like a well-tuned cannon’s blast. The lonely chord reverberates through the practically empty room, an amplified clarion call of Axeman, Gibson and Marshall, but the few paired-up people in the bar are inattentive, all but one. In the harsh glow of the footlights his fingerprints and sweat streaks besmudge the guitar’s fire-burst design, soiling it, the same as the man’s blue jeans are soiled, and the boots beneath them. His hair is long and unwashed, and his beard, a...
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The Devil’s Last Chance

  Lainey found it to be true, the fact that wild, feral eyes are drawn to the movements of other wild, feral things, as her own eyes were currently attracted to the prowling's of one such thing, her ears tuned toward it’s guttural reverberations, her senses recognizing something of herself in the way the souped-up roadster crept jerkily towards her, it’s muscle flexing against it’s brakes as though anxious to pounce, the familiarity of it tickling at a salacious memory deep within her.   The car stirred some untamed thing inside Lainey which slowed her steps, allowing the danger to creep ever closer in spite of her natural predilection to flee… even wild things have a breaking point… but then a resigned willingness to either consume or be consumed halted her steps altogether until she waited, allowing the distance between she and it to close. Lainey couldn’t forget. How did one unlearn the exhilaration of lust, or the intoxication of being it’s object. God knows she had tried,...
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