Chapter 2

In the fall of my sixteenth year I was all knee scrapes and hairspray. Eighty-nine cent lipstick from the drugstore counter where the boy who wore glasses stole passes and gave me chocolate bars free of charge, he wore a white lab coat and kept extra copies of nude photos gathered from the photo lab.
 ‘Can you believe they bring their film to the drugstore for these things? Disgusssting!” He laughs and hands me a picture of a chunky brunette in nude colored granny panties and reinforced cross your heart bra. He backside dribbles out of the bottom of the slick curdling fabric as she turns at the waist to face the camera. One bra strap slipping over her round shoulder, he hand splayed over herface, dishwater blond waterfall of tired hair that must smell of strawberry suave shampoo, the kind that costs 99 cents in aisle twelve. Behind her the over exposed light shone on the wood panel wall, a bouquet of wilting flowers tacked up with faded ribbons and a poster of a robust Anna Nicole Smith in Guess jeans.  A cheap princess white dresser overflowing with perfume bottles and others baubles of distractions fill the right side of the cut off room. You just know that trailer had gold green shag carpet and somewhere there were cigarette holes dotting down to the woven base to the creaking floor. It could have been a neighbor. Knowing her, it probably was.

Chapter 1

In small towns everything is wicked. The forests are the playgrounds for the lost. Everyone knows your name and makes up stories that will follow you the rest of your life unless you break away from the shadowy fingers of the overgrown trees and the unsheathed wheat in the fields that people forgot. I watch the old sheds and barn house dilapidate over seasons of neglect until they were bulldozed over for track homes and municipal parking lots. When it rained the creek beds would swell up in spring pregnancy floating it's flotsam of broken swing sets and beer bottle wishes. I rode my bike in the dark overgrown tree canopy roads, one side destitute, the other disgusting with over indulgence. I sang into those nights trying to call for a companion and sometime one would join me galloping with paws and whiskers joining my caterwaul melodies. But still small towns are wicked, they make you pine for them when you are old, never leaving a trace behind of what they once were so you think you must have only dreamed it as so.