Posts Tagged ‘Atlantic’


April

January 18th, 2010 by rick copper

Jimmy crack corn. Yep. Jimmy crack corn and I… don’t… care.

Brunette curls shook as she leaned back – elbows on a Caribbean blue beach towel bought last summer on Bermuda’s north shoreline – and laughed.

You remember that?  Remember?

Not hard to forget.  Four? Five?

I think it was five.  Think.

Toes, pedi’d to a French cut less glossy clear coat, wriggled free of their temporary prison, shooting maroon nails out of sand like a time-lapse garden of croci in April.  Bridgette brought her feet up to the towel, lightly shook off what dark Georgian sand she could, and set them on the towel.

The absolute deadpan delivery. It would have shocked me no less if she had spilled “Jimmy cracked corn and I personally could give a rat’s ass less.”

Crack his fucking corn all over town for all I care.

The laugh warmed over bounced across loudly enough she must have heard.  Had to have heard.  Hermit crabs scurried for cover, leaving their sidled prints along freshly dampened sand.

photo by Daniel Agee.  all rights reserved.

photo by Daniel Agee. all rights reserved.

I know.  It was amazing.

And a foretelling.

No damn kidding.

Sodas only today.  Sunday.  They weren’t religious by any means.  A passerby on the road of their own life, if given a slice of their time to observe, would declare them as laissez faire naturalists.  Not naturists.  Not that strolling about naked would have necessarily bothered them, they just preferred not.

They ate raw.  Feeling a need to void themselves of as much processed sugar and corn syrup as humanly possible in the United Sates of America, they consumed organic raw vegetables and fruits.  Generally they preferred to grow their own, but every climate had specific foods it grew well and those it did not.  Georgia did well for a lot of sustenance (read peaches and onions) but almonds, a family staple, were not one of them.  Neither were fair trade grapes or coffee for that matter.

Whenever neighbors would invite them over to a barbecue bash, they wouldn’t turn their noses up at any meat offered.  The occasional slaughterhouse cow or pig was tolerable (although when they got home their stomachs, not used to grease and fat, would often purge).  They would delicately express their desire for a non-sauced slice of domestic meat to avoid, again, processed sugar and corn syrup.

Bridgette shifted, swinging her left leg over her right to face Dan.  Her eyes sparkled him.

Can you see?

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Shadows

November 27th, 2009 by rick copper

Yellow lines crawled away.  Gaining momentum, stripes crisply zipped until running together, turning to a ribbon splitting asphalt in half.

If one had superhuman abilities, such as freeze framing within optical organs, you could hold onto District 147, a faded muted black stencil halfway up golden canary yellow sheet metal.  Once the part-time driver got the beast over 45, freeze frame became mere memory bored into reality.

Bored out of their gourds, idle chatter rapidly succumbed to nodding.  Field trips, no matter how intoxicating intellectual stimulus created, always drained.  Kindergartners could fall asleep in line waiting to get back on the bus.  Budding teenagers would brave it out, holding up until they turned onto the highway.  High school juniors were beyond putting up a front, getting comfortable before the bus pulled out of the sand-covered, eroded asphalt lot.

photo by Daniel Agee.  All rights reserved.

photo by Daniel Agee. All rights reserved.

Three teachers, all science, one cut from the crust of geology.  Aside from teachers, two other adults were present, mothers posing as teachers on the ride-along as chaperones in case the field trip turned to a dance. 57 hormonally-challenged, synapse-snoozing teenagers trying to keep collective hearts aflutter despite continual monotone detailed explanations of tectonic plates within the Eastern United States, their massive collisions, upheavals, forming Adirondacks, Appalachians and the eastern coastline. One part-time bus driver, a senior and former truck driver who once took a snooze on a 17-hour haul across I-10, dumping a load of avocados and peppers two miles outside Mobile.  No harm done except for a few cars slipping on a delightful guacamole spread across four eastbound lanes.

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