after all the cars stopped running, the sky was full of weird lines and curves and glowing, smoky corkscrews from our outbound missiles. That was the last time I saw blue sky. Now it’s just the bombers up there, finishing up. I guess it makes sense, in a hard, no-bullshit kind of way, that the government decided to wipe out our enemies before it started to help us. I mean, what good would it do to start rebuilding if the bad guys could still nuke us whenever they wanted?
The only stoplight for miles around is dead, but the yellow blinker of a construction barrier is winking away on the last of its battery power. Some things are tougher than others. Some things are just in better places or somehow lucky when the shit hits the fan. That’s the kind of luck I want for us, too. The wind is puffing my hair and trying to push me around. Broken things are banging against rotting things. My boots thump on old asphalt that’s seen better days. The thought of an ambush keeps me sharp.
I put the rifle scope on the tire shop, but nobody’s home. We walk along an alleyway that divides the tire shop from the junkyard. I slip on frozen puddles. Dead weeds and grass stick up through cracks in the alley. The junkyard is breathing out the smells of rust and old rubber and plastic. The place is surrounded by a fence with busted slats. I can see gray puddles of engine oil. Wiring harnesses are hanging like guts in the frozen mud. Windshields bubbled out by foreheads. Airbags look like used rubbers on broken steering wheels. Cars that have been in front-end collisions look like people with their lips cut off. Jagged cuts where the jaws of life went to work. All that evidence of the time when people cleaned up their messes because there was profit in it.
We put the junkyard behind us and we don’t look back. We need food, and we aren’t going to pay for it. We might have to fight for it, because these are more honest times.
Bill Junior
I open my eyes and I have a hangover again. It’s like freakin’
Groundhog Day
. And God knows it’s a bad one. I keep my head in my sleeping bag and try to rest until the pain winds down into something I can handle, but it just gets worse. Time stops and there’s only pain crowding out my sleep, so I might as well get up off my ass and do something about it. I stick my head outside my motel room and try to wake up one of the kids. It’s barely first light and it’s cold enough to hurt. Cold air and hangovers don’t mix. I want to send someone over to Lane’s Market to get some aspirin, but we’re all wiped out. The men are still sawing logs in their rooms. The fire is out. Everyone is dead to the world, and it’s quiet as a graveyard.
I get the spins, so I fall back down into my room and let the hangover have me. I let it have the sadness about Ookie, too, and I want to say that I deserve to be hurting. I downed at least one bottle of Jim Beam last night, but I don’t want to think about it. My body hurts everywhere and it’s like I’ve been poisoned and then beat to shit by Chuck Norris. My skull feels like a busted eggshell and what’s left of my brain is swelling up inside it.
I keep seeing Ookie’s head exploding and that makes me want to puke, but then it stops and Ookie gets up and tells me that it’s okay where he is now. He says it’s like being a rich kid waking up on Christmas morning. Every day is like that. He looks right at me, and he has a deep look in his eyes, like the paintings of the saints that were hung up on the walls of the juvie chapel that we used to go to on Sunday mornings for mandatory Mass. It’s a look that has the kind of pity that doesn’t piss me off. Ookie disappears and I can just barely sit up before I puke my guts out on the carpet. It’s like I puke my soul out. It’s like a prayer, and when I’m wiping my mouth I wonder if anyone’s ever thought of puking on purpose during a church service, because puking is more real and honest than any
The only stoplight for miles around is dead, but the yellow blinker of a construction barrier is winking away on the last of its battery power. Some things are tougher than others. Some things are just in better places or somehow lucky when the shit hits the fan. That’s the kind of luck I want for us, too. The wind is puffing my hair and trying to push me around. Broken things are banging against rotting things. My boots thump on old asphalt that’s seen better days. The thought of an ambush keeps me sharp.
I put the rifle scope on the tire shop, but nobody’s home. We walk along an alleyway that divides the tire shop from the junkyard. I slip on frozen puddles. Dead weeds and grass stick up through cracks in the alley. The junkyard is breathing out the smells of rust and old rubber and plastic. The place is surrounded by a fence with busted slats. I can see gray puddles of engine oil. Wiring harnesses are hanging like guts in the frozen mud. Windshields bubbled out by foreheads. Airbags look like used rubbers on broken steering wheels. Cars that have been in front-end collisions look like people with their lips cut off. Jagged cuts where the jaws of life went to work. All that evidence of the time when people cleaned up their messes because there was profit in it.
We put the junkyard behind us and we don’t look back. We need food, and we aren’t going to pay for it. We might have to fight for it, because these are more honest times.
Bill Junior
I open my eyes and I have a hangover again. It’s like freakin’
Groundhog Day
. And God knows it’s a bad one. I keep my head in my sleeping bag and try to rest until the pain winds down into something I can handle, but it just gets worse. Time stops and there’s only pain crowding out my sleep, so I might as well get up off my ass and do something about it. I stick my head outside my motel room and try to wake up one of the kids. It’s barely first light and it’s cold enough to hurt. Cold air and hangovers don’t mix. I want to send someone over to Lane’s Market to get some aspirin, but we’re all wiped out. The men are still sawing logs in their rooms. The fire is out. Everyone is dead to the world, and it’s quiet as a graveyard.
I get the spins, so I fall back down into my room and let the hangover have me. I let it have the sadness about Ookie, too, and I want to say that I deserve to be hurting. I downed at least one bottle of Jim Beam last night, but I don’t want to think about it. My body hurts everywhere and it’s like I’ve been poisoned and then beat to shit by Chuck Norris. My skull feels like a busted eggshell and what’s left of my brain is swelling up inside it.
I keep seeing Ookie’s head exploding and that makes me want to puke, but then it stops and Ookie gets up and tells me that it’s okay where he is now. He says it’s like being a rich kid waking up on Christmas morning. Every day is like that. He looks right at me, and he has a deep look in his eyes, like the paintings of the saints that were hung up on the walls of the juvie chapel that we used to go to on Sunday mornings for mandatory Mass. It’s a look that has the kind of pity that doesn’t piss me off. Ookie disappears and I can just barely sit up before I puke my guts out on the carpet. It’s like I puke my soul out. It’s like a prayer, and when I’m wiping my mouth I wonder if anyone’s ever thought of puking on purpose during a church service, because puking is more real and honest than any
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