Snow on the Strip Mall Tomorrow

anonymous

This winter, I’m cranking out community service at the thrift store. Mostly I stand outside the doors and wait because the dust in there makes me nauseous, and ‘cause I’m sick of those fuckboys, what talk out the sides of their mouths. So I smoke or else sit in my truck and watch my knuckles on the wheel.

But it’s a easy job, and sometimes you find things in the boxes. Like today, a pack of cigs, but inside there was just little plastic spiders. And last night, I found a pet. Stuffed, no shit, some kind of rind around his eye, and the legs bent all to hell and I’m holding him away from me and I start for some reason, to think about Max, who used to lay up in my arms, at night.

It’s real easy work, but something inside me is stubborn. Boys in there huddle like a cyst, talk about the weather, while I sit out back, my mind knitted into tissues of someone real old, still living like a slob at home. Some other face, my tongue sunk into it, sprained into a character not my own. Someone else’s anaemic heart trembles inside of my swollen, falling chest.