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eternity overdrive

by Gabriel Ricard

It might have been Out of the Past,
but it was impossible to tell,
in the time it took the two of them to rush
from the front door to her bedroom.

The old man was halfway across the ocean.
He was snoring over the ninth-best TV
1968 could afford.

Yeah,
pretty much could have left on
any kind of movie about the games
desperate people play
when the girl doesn’t make it out of Los Angeles,
and every other light bulb in every single flophouse
is defective.

They made it upstairs,
as though anything less than the old man’s wife
coming back from Toronto was going to wake his sad ass up.

House was otherwise empty.
Perfect for a haunting that plays out
the last 30 seconds of the calamity that swept them away
like a thief in the middle of breakfast.

Except she knows that there are houses
all up and down the block that are even worse
than hers.

She’s grateful that her dad isn’t a minister.
She’s grateful the minister isn’t their garbage man anymore.
She’s grateful fall always precedes winter.
She’s glad the boy is even more terrified than she is.

And he’s going to get into a lot of bad stuff
when he turns 19, goes down to the lawyer’s office
to pick up the cheque, and bleed pennies for three years.
Until the chemical minefield in his brain snaps its fingers,
signals the real McCoy hiding out down south as a cover band
to come in with the guitars, the defiant march of a progressing world,
and turns his lights out to put summer into eternity overdrive.

For the rest of his life,
a good one while it hung from the chains
left on the 8th floor windowsill to dry,
he would compare all those other girls
to that first time in that bedroom
that lived through the worst blackout
of the year just fine.

Everyone got to hear that story.
A lot of people dreaded yet another telling.

And she lived a long life of three different men
and one woman who told her
from start to almost-the-finish
that she was the most extraordinary creature
for a thousand miles.

She didn’t think about him very much,
but whenever she did,
it was the weird feeling
that he might come back into her life
out of nowhere.

06/26/2013

Author's Note: Hot damn, am I pleased with how this came out.

Posted on 06/27/2013
Copyright © 2024 Gabriel Ricard

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