Crazy Plain

based on prompt: Man is widowed with 18 month old and starts to date again.

I plan to replace the old green linoleum. It’s cracked and peeling up where the old fridge leaked. The new fridge (five years old now) sits in the old one’s place. The mop and broom and a broken piece of trim I always meant to fix are stuffed into the space between the fridge and the painted paneled wall. The kitchen curtains are stiff with age and used to be pale yellow with darker yellow flowers when I was but a boy running around here with a runny nose and too-short pants, but have faded with their time shading the sun. In this old clapboard house, there is an eternal supply of tea. Sweet and rich, almost syrupy. Warm to the hand if one doesn’t add the pounds of ice. This is home.

My mother is home too. Her back curves over now; her body shaped into a perpetual question mark to match her words. Where are you going? and When will you be back?

I don’t know, I tell her. She sighs heavily, and turns back to the stove where she’s boiling up collard greens.

She repeats the same questions she’s asked my whole life. Asking where and when in effort to avoid the hardest one of all, Why? Some days I get so tired of it, it makes me tense up like a bullfrog. I begin to see the blue river of veins crawl up my arms under my tattoos and disappear under my t-shirt. I hear a buzzing in my ear, and it takes every particle of breath in me just to hold still.


I grab a beer out of the fridge, though it’s only 10:00AM on a Saturday.

I’m gonna work on the transmission in the Chevy, I tell Ma. It’s getting a gratin’ noise I don’t like the sound of.

She sighs heavily once more. I know she doesn’t like me, she’s ashamed of me, has been since those last few days of high school and the crazy couple of years after. I know why, I’ve answered that question in myself. But we don’t talk of it. Some things are better left unsaid.

On my way out the back door, I stop and give my girl a kiss. She’s in her high chair banging her spoon and her oatmeal is flying up everywhere. Some has scabbed on her cheek and she looks like Chernobyl survivor.

You quit that! my ma admonishes her.

I lean close and whisper in the strawberry curls around her ear, you give ‘em hell. Then I walk out the back door and let the screen bang behind me.


It’s later in the day and the shadows are a growing. Spreading back under the trees taking back over the world one foot of land at a time. I’m wiping my forehead with a red bandanna and deciding my back has enough of this work. My hands are resting for a solid minute on the frame of the powder blue truck, when I hear a voice behind me.

I’ve been sent here to help you find Jesus, the voice says.

I turn and there’s a girl there no bigger than a minute, and she is looking at me with a gaze as steady as you please, just as saucy as a hooker on nickel night. I don’t know what say. So I don’t say anything.

The lord’s been telling me I needed to come talk to you ever since your ma told us about your troubles in church.

Is that right?

Jesus loves you; God wants to protect you. He just needs you to repent and he can make your soul whole again.


This last part was told to the swinging screen door as it banged shut behind me. I stride through the kitchen and pick up my baby girl from the carpet in the living room where’s she’s pushing around a toy truck. The buzzing is back and I know this: My wife who’s dead from a car wreck was half my heart and this little girl is the other half, and although I’m the one walking around, I am dead.

I pick up my half a heart with strawberry curls and hold her against my chest where a heart should be. I pretend for a minute that I am whole.

Not too long ago the judge told me I had to go to a head shrinker for a while to work on my anger. I didn’t know I had an anger problem, but why he thought so was this:

I was sitting in the bar after work having a few beers. Kevin, my buddy since grade school was sitting on the stool next to me. We was smoking Marlboro reds outa the same box, filling up the air with smoke and making the lights stretch themselves out into daggers to see them through the gray air, when he turned to look at the girl playing pool behind us.

She was a thin little lady with stringy blond hair, and the way her shoulders sloped over the pool cue put me in mind of Amanda, my wife. All of a sudden I felt all hollow inside, like there was nothing in me but smoke that was making my insides burn. When Kevin said, Look at the tits on that one, I still couldn’t help but to grab the cool glass of the beer bottle on the bar, hoping the chill would cool my skin. It didn’t stop the burning in my skin from making it’s way to my head, and the next thing I know I was using the bottle to slam into Kevin’s head.

The bartender later said I was as calm as Methodist at a funeral as I hit Kevin up side the head, except I kept whispering the words, “Mother Fucker” as blood and beer made it’s way down his the side of his face and onto the bottle and kept running right between my fingers until they throbbed. It put me in mind of when we was just little kids and we promised to be blood brothers for as long as we was still under God’s sun. We cut our palms with a rusty old pocket knife Kevin had found and made our oath like a million little boys do. So I can’t think of why I’m hurting Kevin. By the look in Kevin’s eyes that night, I don’t think he knows either.

I’m guessing God’s sun don’t shine on me much anymore.
______________________________________________


The shrink wants me to keep a journal. I think the shrink’s a little off, but he keeps the judge off’a me, and keeps me out of jail, so I’ll be writing in this damn thing, like it or not.

Last night I was jacking up the old truck to work on the brakes a little bit and trying to avoid my ma, who is on a rampage about me staying out too late the night before. I told her I was with Kevin, even though it was a lie. Kevin won’t have much to do with me since I hit him, so now when I go to the bar I sit in the corner and watch the dust settle on one bottle of beer after another.

I had set the wrench a little to far to easily reach, and was stretching out my fingers for it while I was laying on my back underneath the truck, when that girl with the crazy talk reached down and grabbed it. She was back.

“God know anything about fixin’ brakes? I ask her, hoping she’ll go away.

She don’t say nothing. Instead she tucks her long skirt around her legs as she sits on the ground, and I see her pale arms cross over her knees like she’s being trussed up like one of those calves at a rodeo.

How are you today? She starts off neutral, determined not to let me make her mad, I guess.

Hotter than hell, ain’t it? I ask her.

She says, Just about. Then she says, You think about what I said the other day?

No.

You and your girl, she’s about a year and half, right? You two should come to the church picnic this Sunday.

I don’t say nothing at all except, You mind if I use that wrench you got there, since I bought it and all?

Her pale hand grasps up the wrench from the grass beside her and places it next to me. See you around, she says. She pulls herself off the ground and saunters away, somewhere up the road where she lives.

I stare at the greasy axle inches from my face and realize that I’ve just had a conversation with girl without ever seeing her face. Maybe that’s why the buzzing stayed out of my ears and my skin stayed cool.

But I ain’t going to no freaking picnic.

_______________________________________________________________________