Posts Tagged ‘pacific’


Clinic Lady

Strips of rail peeled.  Certain spots, the current curry yellow nearly provided enough cover over the salt-sprayed rust bubbles.  Rust bubbles were not something any of the drivers would notice as they fought to gain a foothold against other car-bound crossers.  She never had.

The trestles shook as her feet set upon the middle of the bridge.  Running gave one a different perspective.  The shaking, so pronounced she quaked, could make the sanest person sprint for fear of a collapse. She certainly thought about it, running to fight the world, but the papers she absentmindedly took from the car out of caring habit, would not do well in more wind. If she were to grab the yellow rail and run, she’d surely slice up her right hand, requiring a tetanus shot.  Shots were something she did not receive well, unless they were defensive.

His kitchen pine floor, denuded of dirt and salt, thrust its chest out. Shiny, newly polished, so clean Mr. Clean’s bald pate blushed.

photo by Daniel Agee.  All rights reserved.

photo by Daniel Agee. All rights reserved.

My clinic go okay?

Okay.

I go straight into toilet.

Blake nodded affirmatively.  She was more than he bargained this time. Burning bright green eyes, two Ponderosa Pine needles as they burst into flames, strode through bleach blonde hair.  A different color shirt every Wednesday, today’s a canary yellow button-down top along with the ever-present translucent white capris.  Color meant everything to him, yet nothing, as any color bounced off her fresh-scrubbed pine table tone.  She excelled at scrubbing the unseen.  She scrubbed the mantle. She scrubbed the first curious day of her arrival.

One day after he fired the last cleaning lady, his seventh in two years, he found the note

Hallo!
My name is Dorota.
I am Polish professionall cliniclady.
With exellent experience in USA.
Who already have a house to clin.
In your neighbours hood.
It would be nice as well to clin.
Beautyfull your home too.
Please – take a contact with me under:
555-555-5500 every day from: 7:00pm.

rubber-banded to the flag on his weathered oak mailbox for which he bargained with an artist in New Mexico nearly five years earlier during a mixed media show.  He wished he had taken better care of the brown Pelican, its beak the opening to its throat pouch where the mail rested every mid-afternoon.  Alexis, his daughter, picked it out and, although reluctant to give up the knotty oak bough bench he wanted with Cochise carved in the upper right, it had made her happy.

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April

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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