literature

Rufus said 'Good Morning'

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“The girl’s a cigarette lit at the wrong end.”

Duke Ellington with strings and the back of my throat burnt by the winter wind, I made the long walk home from her apartment. It was a small room-to-let atop a two car garage on East James Avenue. There were no views or windows to have them through, only a twin sized bed thrown in the corner and columns of books lining the walls—books she never read but quoted constantly.

The place smelled like neighborhood cats had crawled in an open window one rainy night and made their home. The placed smelled like her in all the worst ways. I pulled the sleeve of my jacket close enough to taste it all again. Potpourri past it’s prime. Cigarettes. Cumin with a Southern Comfort chaser. Tahini. The smell of the chlorine from her hair as she dried it on my ever-waiting shoulder. Smells that’ll take ya back as sure as a song if you let ‘em. I stood over the black garbage bag of lawn clippings brought to the road and thought of throwing it all in- of a man in steel-toe-boots hauling it away by the first light of dawn, and freeing me of the smell of her, that last bit I’d miss when morning came. I thought a lot of things and I kept walking.

A dog barked as I passed the ivy cloaked wooden fence parting us. It followed me to the end of the block, sharing eye contact through a knot hole for a split second in passing. The dog has a name, but I don’t know it, or care to find it out. To me it’ll always be just a noun with teeth who smells her on me.

“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like, I’m doing?”
“Those are mine. Hey, I said those are mine.”
“I know.”

I walked past a church and felt a pull to enter. I’m guided to wet my face with a bout of holy water and say a prayer or two for forgiveness, but when I reached out for the brass handle and pulled I didn’t hear the click. I wiped a small port into a frosted window and looked past the darkness within to upturned pews and downed candelabrums. god’s closed for business tonight. he’s out of town, gone fishing, and dreaming of warmer days, but he’s left this molted shell for me to play with like the deep brown husk of a cicada thrown from the upper boughs by a cold wind. god was dead or sleeping and if I were to ever know which the time had arrived.

I followed the faded flyers of now-defunct rock trios round back to the rear of god’s house, to the chipping paint of a green door and the strong scent of mildew that passed through the breaks in its frame. Someone had broken in before tonight. Someone sought shelter or absolution, and by their splintered handiwork it was obvious they needed it more than I did. Maybe they were still inside. Maybe they were many. Maybe a new congregation met on the ruins of those that once condemned them. My mind raced with the romantic ideas of the impoverished shitting in the coffer they had been denied. Vagabond rituals, wedding and funeral, performed side by side before the exhausted baptismal tank.

The door was jammed on the other side and my thoughts raced with largely sacrilegious guesses as to what barred my entry. I pulled and pushed and pulled again, but to no prevail. This coven were nothing if not protective of their secret order. I wrapped an oil stained rag around my fist, three times tights, and threw it through the little window above the food-drive drop box. Poking my head in for a better view of the obstruction I found only steel chains aglint in the crowning waves of moon light. I wondered what logic chains make on the inside of a church house in any moment other than there and then. I leaned against the rattle of the chains and took a moment to wonder.

“Do you have to leave just now? Can’t we just sit and—just sit and talk this out for one second?”
“No point.”
“No point? How ‘final’ of you”
“This is a supremely final moment.”
“You get to decide that all on your own?”
“Someone has to.”

I wondered what a man would have had to have been guilty of for his clemency to tear this door loose its hinges. Were there chains then as well? Or maybe it’s nothing quite as picturesque as all that. Maybe he was just a man in the cold or a man after a small clutch of tythings. They break and enter just as well as anyone else, and far more often than I’d care to admit. I wondered if his hand bled too. I wondered when I lost my watch.

Quick steps to the road again and back into the belly of the beast I aimed; I passed an old man beneath the corner street light. He smelled like he should be in church, but for many understandable reasons, refused to return my wink as I passed him.  He looked to be the bishop and held himself thusly.

Garbage men are out again and I am reminded of the time I do not have. Six, perhaps a quarter past, the long night disorientates me and it’s hard to tell under so few stars. I passed their truck and waved to the man hanging off the back, grass clippings on his boots.  The smell of blue bonnets in a mason jar vase, unassuming and carried deep into my lungs as I ran with the sleeve of my jacket held firmly over my mouth. Blood held the jacket sleeve to the side of my hand, and refused to release itself as I shook in the cold.

I ran past the clogged storm drain and stopped cold in the middle of the street. Something was missing. Someone was missing. I turned my head towards a small hole in a wooden plank and locked eyes with a voiceless noun. Time passed.

“Would it even matter if I said ‘I’m sorry’?”

The dog remained silent as I neared the fence. Its eyes, small, black, and wet followed mine. It whined a soothing pitch as I placed an open palm amongst the cascading ivy.

Rufus said ‘good morning.’
I haven't written in a quite a while, and never in a form a direct as prose, but here you have it.

~glim
© 2007 - 2024 glimmerfish
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