Thursday Night

"Yep, she's stuck alright."

Nimbus, wet and heavy, we're staring at the chevy, stuck one foot too deep in a mud that's only going to get worse. Some snark comment gets passed between us, commenting on the soggy state of the soil and detritus staring back at us, almost with derision-- it's out of boredom and indecision that we try the manual way out.

He pops a stick of gum in his mouth. Lights a cigarillo after twenty minutes of attempts in vanity:
"... would be the definition of insanity. To keep trying--" parched lips quenched by rolling bottled tap water, high in iron, and he swallows the gum.

What a creature.
Borne of affluenza, Tennessee, swam along the nearest river to come meet me--to come meet us, out here by the sandy sea. He has a habit of swallowing gum and getting lost, wearing thick-rimmed spectacles, taped up and broken not so much out of poverty as habit. In another life, they would have called him Rabbit. Quick to itch but not to bitch, a terrible poker player.

It's five o'clock and he scratches at his shadow, he looks back at our mess:
"We're under duress."

I'm not sure if he knows the right context of that word, and neither is he, so he laughs instead. We won't argue about it tonight, but we will pillow-talk about the sand between our toes.
By day we roar and boast and sing, but here's the thing: we're just sheep in lions' clothes.

"Fifteen years and we get caught--" as we ought. I think of our plan of days prior, our bodies in a knot. How we've been waiting for a safe job to take it all and run, not just for money,
"...we've had our fun. Think it's too late to turn back now?"
Looking into the cab, our overturned lock box smirks back at me. Well, it's not really ours.
"Yeah."
"I'm sure they'll send someone by soon--" sweat on his crusty, decisive brow, wrinkled and pressed like a uniform held under the weight of his years, hair cropped close to be kept off of whose big, cauliflower'd ears. Someone would be by soon, we left at precisely noon with a two hour window.
We got a lot further than we even meant to before we'd been stuck for two hours.

Another twenty minutes of dreadful silence, with nothing good to do. Sisyphus is on a break so, I may as well tell him now;
"I love you."
"What?"
Shit. I swallow hard, but the ball in my throat isn't gum, it's iron.
"I do, it's true."
"You're talking like your own paul-bearer."
What else am I supposed to do? A ballad of a bard heard near and far have struggled for millenia to make sense of something so gloriously plain -- so therein I thrust again: "I love you."
I travel for the pain, inscrutable in my quest, fixing to plunge into his chest, I wield that rapier of vulnerability higher than my nation's best
"I love you."
He's stunned, awestruck, wondering how long I've waited to flood this feeling, gated by the dyke of the novelty that was my face and body, to him and to me; I've waited so long to be this free.

I don't care what the cost is, stepping towards him and tears running down my face, softening these dried desert grounds, as Thor's chorus blots me, a dark noir silent film, reigning down.
I am dramatose, dragged across the feet of a thousand men come lesser steps than I,
as shapely shadows grin to reveal my shape, pulled back like a veil
beneath my shirt, I know now, my breast beats for it
like the drums of the tribes of jupiter, worshipping their moons, so pale
as the mace of Uthr, I ring again, swinging wrecklessly and wracked with sudden fluid desperation
loose change in my pockets for the man at Styx, rattling cold against my hot skin
dumbstruck there was this honest man I've kept myself from for so long
and thus his dumbness struck him down. down into the sand (he forgot his wretched pills in the glove box)
He clutches at his chest, clawing at the tired fuel, congealed, no doubt trying to make sense of the fire inside of me, my shape revealed. A sick foam is his last reply, but how can dying men lie? Before he was buried six I swear I saw the shape his lips could bear the feeble desperate clutching of an unhappily married man -- 'I love you, too.'

Silence is to a troublemaker what madness does to good men.
With no mirror to reflect my deed how do I know I breathe?
A .38 special made for saturday nights works just fine every night of the weak.
Double-action, I leave none in life bereaved.