Category Archives: Roadside Attractions

prelude

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image by Tina Phillips

For thirteen years the Lacy sisters, thought to have died at birth, perched, twined and vined, under a wire mesh cage. It was Ruby’s small, off-set eyes and Polly’s sharp, beak-y nose that turned their mother’s stomach so instantly she had them sent from the room and down to the cellar to be discarded with the next day’s rubbish. The caretaker could not bring himself to cast off human life as neatly. Instead he wrapped them each in flour sack cloth and tucked them away in an empty kennel, smelling of ammonia and gasoline.

As they grew, fed from table scraps and rat-traps, the girls’ elongated, brittle bones scraped edges from undeveloped muscle, tearing slips of themselves free with the motion of each creaking joint. They soon filled the cage, one body wrapping around the other in turns, so they resembled a pair of knotted mandrake roots, pitch dark with soot.

On the blessed night of the seventh harvest moon, a whole and perfect boy was born to the Lacy estate. His hair and features rang clear of a well-defined and happily-chosen parentage. So grateful was the mother for this healthy birth she sent word of a baptism to be held the following Sunday over the font of St. Peter’s Basilica.

It was then, through the vibrating cheer rattling from the rafters and down through water spouts into the hungry mouths of the sisters, that they too knew of the happy news. Their mandrake limbs and dry, blind eyes throbbed with a contemptible ache only the desperate and discarded can know. The small cage rattled. Their lips parted and mewled as the fiery parchment of their skin fell in sheets, crumbling bloody through the wire bonds.


Radio Silence

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Sometimes I fall in love with time, when I can see its minutes slow, a space like water fill. I walk through junk shops hooked on dust, dribbling, slow dragging feet past cabinets layered in so many rusted lives. Lives like mine or yours when we forget the value of our haves and look too far out to where the buoys have stopped bopping orange against the dotted sea.

Out there our wants are tattooed in dragons and pearls. Our tomorrows stretch endless to horizons we ache to reach, but in reaching touch our backs, tender in sleep, sweating under ripped sheets we swear we will replace. With every pile of junk we move, room by room, box by splintered box, we replace our selves, our shelves, heaving, blistered. Seven more years into someone new.

 

It Was the Winter of Her Malcontent

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There were faces in the snow scratching at the windows. Wind-shapened men in tipped fedoras and blue-heeled women threatened the integrity of the ice strewn dance floor. Susana wanted out into it, but each time she belted her dress and wrapped her fur, the door banged against her hand, bruising her palms, leaving her pulp.

It would have been Susana counting the beat at the heart of the party. Circling men dragged to center all because of her legs. Hollywood, 1929.

Susana was more Jean Harlow, less Greta Garbo, with the martini laced bite of Dorothy Parker. On a good night in a hot place, she caught stares like fireflies in mason jars. Kept notes in pocket books. Wrote sonnets on the backs of neckties.

Thirty-six years and one drink too many slipped her from the wagon, landing her the role of a lifetime—crimes of passion, twenty-five to life, and the slick, oil taste of a pretty pink gun.

 

 

 

 

I Was Here

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Black Cross New Mexico 1929, Georgia O'Keeffe

She places a stone near the Penitente cross where fifty stones already lay. We’re all trying to feel sacred, she thinks, but it doesn’t come until the first sun scorches the adobe wall and breaks through the eyelet curtain. It’s alien light. The red of strawberry jam oozing down the wall.

A woman sleeps in the next bed, a white-blond artist from not so far. These beds are always taken up with artists and expectation.

Behind the adobe is Pueblo land protected by a common truce. Our heroine breaks in with two steps, a full bladder, and a heavy camera she does not know how to use. Fabric hangs in strips from piñon trees, orange and red, faded in the jam light. Taos mountain, dark and heavy, another sleeping woman, another bed.

The wild dog does not see her, its sharp nose pointed hard to the south where it runs, smearing shadow across the sage field. She heard coyotes in the night and hoped for useful dreams.

She’ll spend her week trying to get back here, to this sunrise, these prayer ties, the wild dog running. She will eat her weight in tempe and dolmas. Walk the Plaza looking for gifts with little money, where she finds instead a boy on a banana seat bike riding circles around her, an unlit cigar hanging from his lips.

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Searching online this morning for the answers to the cross I remember walking to in Taos, NM, I found this photo by Kevin S. Moul. I’d like to walk into that photograph with a notebook and pen.