This’ll go into some story, somewhere…

I’ve got this forty page collection of memories that I sort of cut-up and merged with some story ideas. This is one that I thought came out kind of well; hopefully you’ll see it within some kind of relevant framework within a month but I wanted something to work on and post so have a look…

    Remember I told you about the girl I did that Christmas show with? What? You know: the one we called ‘The Blue Girl’ because her skin was so transparent that the veins colored her face? See, you remember that but not the beautiful holiday moment we shared? Shows me what people really listen to…

Well, anyway, we saw quite a bit of each other over the next year or so. Lots of drama, lots of sex. Neither of it any good. She suddenly left one week with her family and I never saw her again. Maybe I’ll talk more about her later. Right now, I want to tell you my story of Sunny. It starts with me driving out to the spacious farm communities that surrounded, at a safe distance, the Chicagoland metropolis. I know I wasn’t in my twenties yet because I went to Vegas then. We’ll get into that too because, you probably know, that’s really what we’re here to talk about. Anyway, so I drove out to the cornfields…

    I was feeling pretty good that day. It was late October and the world was dying. The skies were overcast and the air smelled of rain, burning leaves, and turkey. I had stopped at a gas station in the middle of nowhere to get a Coke and some cigarettes. For whatever reason, I had turned right instead of left and ended up out of the city. I went exploring.

    After an hour, I came to Plano. A train went through the middle of town and the fonts on the pharmacies and hardware stores told of booming business in the early sixties. It all seemed familiar and eerie. I liked it.

    I drove down the main street and decided to park. Walking in front of the shops, I saw garden tool displays that might not have been touched since I was born and a corner bar with blacked out windows. I turned that corner and went through the residences a street or two back.

    What was going on in these houses? What did people do in Small Town USA? I daydreamed as I drove about mysteries in the hardware store and romance behind the dark bar windows. About reports on the local radio station and what went on in the VFWs. What secrets were being kept here? The sky was getting darker.

    I saw her. She was out by the curb, shuffling through some recently delivered mail. One letter slipped and fluttered to the ground. When she bent to pick it up, just as I was passing, I saw a hint of cornflower-patterned panties over the limits of her jeans. I stopped. I couldn’t think for a moment. She turned and stared with her doe eyes.

    She was so country and that was exotic to me. Her hair was the color of straw, highlighted by an autumn sunset. Her eyes were the overcast sky. Lips: Ripe Strawberries. And I wanted a taste.

    I asked if she knew how to get back to the highway. I was trying to get back to Chicago, I explained. She smiled and said she could tell I was from the city. Then she said that she had a map inside and wouldn’t I like some lemonade while she looked for it? Her parents, it seemed, were not at home.

    It all happened so fast. Details aren’t complete here. I can’t fill them in and I don’t understand why; it’s so frustrating. I remember walking in the house and it smelling like cedar. I remember a collection of Gone with the Wind plates displayed along the edge of the ceiling and a painting of an abandoned merry-go-round in a field. There was lemonade but it didn’t get finished. Her bedroom was still Little Girl Style: Holly Hobby, Raggety Ann, and flower printed wallpaper. I recall looking out her window down to her backyard where an old swing set gently swayed in the increasing breeze next to the dilapidated garage. The sky told of a pretty severe storm soon.

    The radio clicked on. I turned and saw her sit on the bed. She wanted to… show me some photographs in an album? Right? I can’t remember any of them. I took another glance out the window and saw lightning on the horizon over the recently harvested corn fields.

    Photo after photo and I remember none of them. Light thunder. Here everything slows down suddenly like being underwater for just this moment. I remember everything when she looked out the window towards the sky and a look of concern crossed her face. If a tornado should be sighted, she said, then we would have to go to the cellar. Another flash of lightning. She leaned into me.

    I was wrong about the lips: Cherries, actually…

    What a sweet story, some say. Others think it’s pretty lame. It all goes back to that atmosphere that I said try to capture in my drawings. That’s what I like about it: that I can’t ever quite capture it, in my mind or on paper. You should know that within a few minutes, the radio announcer broke in to say that there was a severe thunderstorm warning and he let the emergency broadcast signal play before and after his message. I kissed her neck and smelled roses and smoke. The storm got pretty violent with lots of near lightning strikes. She unbuttoned her shirt. The tornado siren went off outside. We didn’t go to the cellar but I thought about it. Her breath in my ear sounded like a cool breeze. The lights flickered twice. You should also remember that her name, ironically enough, was Sunny.

    Now stop reading for a second and think about this story. Enjoy it. Really picture it: it’s a good image

    Now that you’ve enjoyed Sunny for that story, you should be aware of something. A year later, after I was already in Las Vegas, I read that her father had come home one evening to find Sunny sitting at the kitchen table, seemingly falling asleep as she wrote in a notebook. When her father went to wake her, he slipped on the bloody linoleum floor.

    No one knows who, no one knows why but someone had come in and taken her feet. Cut them off and took them, hid them, ate them; no one knows. If they ever did find out, I don’t know. I have never read anything other than that one story and there were so few details. But as to what goes on in those houses in Small Town USA that people talk about in their VFWs? That I know.

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