Nebraska, © Alexander Payne, 2013
You know the drill by now. Dan Mader's Unemployed Imagination, his weekly flash fiction feature and yeah, here we go. I got tangled up in some real life webstrosity this weekend, so I couldn't participate on Friday, but still, I try every week to come up with a collection of words worthy enough to add to this increasingly literate collection, and I found some time tonight instead, a couple days late, and added them anyway, worthy or not.
I hope I don't offend anyone with the title, but it's the exact right title for this piece, and you can't fight right, you just can't.
As with many of my recent short pieces, they seem to be haunted by that atmospheric, moody tenor I've been so steeped in lately, especially in films like the recent Joe, films full of ambience, love, and violence. Honestly, there are some compelling movies coming out of America these days. Ain't Them Bodies Saints, Shotgun Stories, Prince Avalanche, Nebraska, Take Shelter, Mud, Blue Ruin and now Joe. All so steeped in that rural blue-collar loneliness that stretches from Montana to Minnesota on down to Louisiana, a swathe of bleak, moody, riverbank angst, gravid with a gauche type of need. But now I'll shut the hell up and here's my latest story.
Christ Fuck
Road weary and trembling with pent hysteria, we make it at last into this Nebraska town, this South Dakota town, this Iowa town, bleeding from our raw stigmata.
These are settlements filled to the gills with dust. Boxy, squat. Wide main streets with angled parking, like nobody ever had to worry 'bout space. Tire companies. Two-pump gas stations, rusted and flake-leaded with ancient paint. Corner bars risking fever-glimpse neon signs, two or three patrons at any one time, no matter when. Hardware stores. Pawn shops. Silent chapels. The scent of oil. Weeds erupting from sidewalk cracks. But mainly a shitload of space and even more dust.
"Holler if ya need something." That's Marcie, runs the only good diner in town, fine American cuisine, and I surely ain't bein' facetious, no sir.
We spend our entire lives goin' in and out of buildings. See if that ain't true. Argue with me, if you like.
Watch times change, watch.
"What does a smile smell of?"
I ain't answering that. I ain't crazy.
Dead lots waiting years for something different, something better or at least newer, hunched SUVs scurrying scarab trails, chain link and rail cars under a dull lead sky over straight horizons. We're choking here. Choking on decent air, neglect, and pure sexless melancholy.
"My head is a cage." Your pretty brown eyes look panicky to me.
"Yeah. We oughta leave." Keep heading west. Makes damn sense. Go until the ocean stops us. Go until the end, until we can spring the cages.
But all of this—all of this—pales in the firefly glow of brand new love and the Christ-fuck flash of lightning over the endless traveling midway.
Nebraska © Alexander Payne 2013