Spit it Out, Memory
I never really resented her, to be honest, until she left me in this place.
This place. This memory. A brick three-story farmhouse at the end of a few acres of wheat–a chipped-paint white porch and a leaky basement filled with rusted barbed wire and firewood.
Here, I drink old tea and bourbon and watch the pale yellow whip the air from the kitchen window; the wheat folds and frays like a wool blanket being dried on a clothes line. The leaves of a few crabapple trees blink and shutter pink. Puddles along our gravel pathway vibrate circles in the wind like drums to warbeat. Three deep steps to here leads out a straight mile; a path we made of large, ugly gravel. It goes out to Overhill Road, which leads into town.
Summer fires smolder out in the fields closer to sunset. Teenage boys and their girlfriends grab each other by dashboard light near the farms out there. Second base was all I could make it to, out there. A girl named Maryann, who I married at 18, when I moved out of my father's and into this house.
We were happy, originally. She started taking pills–prescription painkillers. This kitchen sink I'm leaning my raw hands on is where I saw her take them first.
I had been at work and came home for lunch–I was a blower some of the time, but I mainly just cleaned machines and empty firepits while the older men discussed the weather and their wives at the old glass factory in town.
After a few months of loneliness, she fucked my two part-time farmhands; both 19 and in college. I caught them fucking in our barn and nearly shot all three of them. I realized, then, that she wanted to be caught.
She left the day after and I got to drinking. After work, at The Looking Glass, I'd have a few shots or pitchers and as sure as the ashes of Sodom turned Lot's wife to a pillar of salt, I used it all to hate Maryann.
I couldn't stop and I couldn't stop her from leaving or fucking other men, so I kept on not stopping.
I took to drinking harder after a year or so, after feeling her gone. I gave up the job and took to minding the fields full time when my boss put me on probation.
It's been ten years working this land since I last saw her. Our wicker rocking-chair still squeaks when no one sits in it. Cirrus and gray cloud; like always, it gets colder like clockwork here.
I still know when to get up; I still know how to plant seeds; I still know when it's going to rain and when I can slip down to The Looking Glass for a Braves game.
My Maryann might still be out there sucking the little chalky disks out of a ziplock bag or sucking the little cocks of frat boys paying their way through school, but as my grandfather once said while we were smoking reds against his beat-up tractor: pride won't keep you alive; but hate'll sure feed you. At least, until you die.