November 7, 2016“Come, sit next to me,” she said softly almost singing as she placed her pinkie to rest upon her lower lip. “I drove all this way to see you, Remington, show me some affection.”
“I like how bold you are about your wants,” he replied with a cigarette in his mouth.
“No, you like that my father is the Pastor of The Unified Church of Pentecost.”
“It does help get me hard.”
“I like how old you are about your needs.”
“You’re lucky your pussy’s blonde.”
“That’s right, your predilection for blondes…lucky me.”
“And me.”
“So, are you gonna fuck this blonde pussy or what, asshole?”
“I don’t know, I’m not sure you deserve it.”
“Daddy,”she said putting on the pretty pouty face. “But you love when I tighten up around you. I even stopped shaving for you. I gotta admit, you calling it ‘pedophile pussy’ was incentive enough.”
“I told you, I’m not into bald pussy–looks unnatural. Hey, what would your father say if he knew his precious daughter was shacking up with a washed up writer at a halfway house? Lets’s kidnap him. Tie him up and make him sit on that chair over there so he can watch.”
“Where? That one chair over there…or…wait, that one chair is the only chair you got.”
“So, it’s a humble place.”
“Humble?It’s a place for ex-cons, schizophrenics, invalids and lepers. Why in the world do you stay here? Honestly, what are you trying to prove?”
“I was hoping this place would win you over.”
“Yeah, because trying to win people over is just your style.”
“You keep talking outta school, you know that?”
“Oh, christ, again with the dated language. I keep forgetting your almost my dad’s age.”
“Hey, isn’t that taking the Lord’s name in vain?”
“What–it doesn’t get you hard anymore?”
“Okay, okay, take your clothes off. But I’m only gonna make you cum a few times. I’m tired and my neck is killing me.”
“I knew you’d fold.”
A cockroach crawled out of the rusty drain and waved antennae curiously while clammy bodies moved under a seedy blanket too thick for sweaty summers. Voices ventured down the hallways and past the poignantly prurient, the volatile and the vacant, the lonely and the loons. A pressing of a contrived countenance against cracks on the other side of the wall, tuning in to her moans, squelching to a drone, shaking surreptitiously in broken and prostrated pantomime while on parole. City birds near weathered windows chirped and sharply turned, chased in zigzagging angles contrasting smog and wires once used to carry conversations for the telephone. A father took a small sip of decaf tea and bounced his penny-loafered crossed foot while uttering his truth and stealthily cameoning his daughter as an anecdote–his modicum of the maternal to his celestial paternal. “She just came back from Thailand spreading the word, brothers and sisters. Oh, what a blessing she is to our lives, isn’t she dear?”Hands clasped in what appeared to be a venus fly trap between a married couple in devoted and godly matrimony. Old jewelry passed from generations sparkled. Smiles glistened, hair carefully curled, short heels hauling, powdery perfumes and crows feet buried under cheap makeup–the great women behind their great men. The sound of tea cups shifting on their tiny dishes almost phrased a random riff in the song that is the after church party.
“Pastor, I love your home. It is so comfortable, and this living room is huge. Is that your daughter there in that picture?”
“Sure is, sister Annabelle. She was in Costa Rica there. Helping the needy. Would you look at all that blonde gorgeous hair.”
“Oh, what was she doing there? How scary.”
“She gave them the greatest gift of all: the word of our Lord. Such need in these…places.”
“She gave them all bibles, eh? Praise Jesus. Gee wiz, what an inspiration to us all.”
“Always busy that one. Keeps us on our toes. She at the park now, Marge?”
“No, darling, I believe she is taking a writing course of some kind. Some class that uses old vintage machines to get the job done. That sounds like a work out, don’t it?”
Her face smiled at the camera with the glow from heaven above as Costa Ricans gathered around her smiling dirty and tired. Paused forever and incarcerated in a black plastic frame, her gaze one of a young woman making her heavenly father and earthly father alike, proud. The moment shifting in tone while a large fly landed on her teeth.
“These sweaty summers.”
“This heat…it gets so hard.”
∞
