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What can YOU say in six sentences?
Undertow
The apartment houses that crowded the cliff up on Belmont, abandoned and eyeless pueblos, their doors hanging open or knocked off their hinges, once were the warrens where Joey'd found girls with knives and tattoos whose asses he'd nuzzle in bed as they whispered sweet slurs and then drank him.
Who knew now what squatters he'd find here, or how the rats might regard his intrusion, but he had to know what had happened, so he hoofed up the stairs to the first house and ducked in the entry that once held a door, and climbed to the attic where Allie had lived like a gypsy and loved all the dead boys who'd come for a piece of her wisdom.
The old wooden floors and yellow walls echoed, and all that was left in the place were the dust and some beads, and a picture of Allie and Joey in flagrante delicto, the night before All Hallow's Eve, 1990. He remembered the moon as it washed through the skylight, as well as the punk who'd popped through the door and knocked off a roll of triple-X stills so he could go back and sell them around for some bennies.
Allie had smiled and invited him into the bed for a taste then and there, and the fool put that polaroid down and she knifed him, and licked the blade clean with a rage in her eyes that slowly gave way to a desolate hunger, and she stared and stared, and sucked Joey into her eyes, bled his tears, made him weak--and he knew in that moment his love was an undertow dragging him far out to sea.
They waited till morning, then rolled the fool up in a rug and stacked him down there in the basement with all the blue dopefiends, and Joey grew cold, and then the next night, he held her and loved her and watched as the tide took him under...
Comment
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Comment by Angela on October 20, 2012 at 1:58pm -
You use a particular phrase from time to time, i.e. "sweet slurs" that I would love to steal. In the third "stanza", the leftovers are so particular that they make the scene very vivid to this reader. Some love is a deadly undertow I think. You have found an interesting character in Joey, indeed.
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Comment by Mike Handley on October 20, 2012 at 10:15am -
Never thought about undertow in this context, but it's goddamn perfect. Bravo.
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Comment by David Brown on October 19, 2012 at 9:27pm -
nice one
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Comment by Paul de Denus on October 19, 2012 at 1:45pm -
Got towed away with this piece- especially the 5th line- nice telling Robert
© 2013 Created by Robert McEvily.
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