There are few straight lines; even the stop signs sit on bent posts, the result of DUIs, snow plows, eroded berms, and reckless youths. The mountains are rounded, the rivers wind, roads and town streets meander for reasons lost with old property records. The siding on houses, which one would expect to be bastions of straightness, sags and wobbles more than not, the colors faded to that of sidewalk chalk. Where the siding is gone you’ll find aspenite soaked by rain and sun and dulled to Soviet gray, individual wood flakes curling up like potato chips. There is no dry rot because things simply are too often wet. The flagpoles at schools are the exception to all this and stand perfectly straight, as the buildings they loom over feature Reagan-era desks etched with faggot and ancient sharpie blotches. The flags themselves wave in the breeze or dangle limp and so never form a hard edge of their own.
The omni-present camo intentionally mirrors the above.
He doesn’t really follow politics but he knows this for sure, he’ll tell you what.
Rust is acceptable until a child can dangle a limb through a vehicle’s floor panel. Rust is everywhere and affects everything, staining concrete, plastic, paint, rock, brick, and chrome. Memory of the most recent tetanus shot is clear.
The neighbor cuts the grass once a month at 7:00am Sunday morning and does it with an undefinable limp.
The cheap plastic weekly pill organizers that adorn so many counter tops have uneven edges, the SMTWTFS is in chipped or peeled paint, and even their muted rattle fails to make a defined sound. The counters are cheap and utilitarian, dull Formica with end caps bubbling off from spills and humidity. Toasters and toaster ovens have their comforting rust, as do sink fixtures that wobble too loose. Sunlight cuts sapphire through economy dishwashing soap bottles standing tall in a constant pool of water or gummy spillage. Too many pots and pans are aluminum. Nothing that was originally nonstick is anymore.
Summer nights are a cacophony of life and the far-off whoosh of someone headed somewhere in a lone vehicle, tires thwock-thwocking potholes and shaking apart on rumble stripes, all cut through by the occasional train. In winter you can pick out the size of the lone vehicle and hear the train like it’s just over the hill. You can hear animals falling prey year-round and somehow those shrieks are comforting because there really is life out there.
Any random series of gunshots is cause for a shrug.
Highways sell water softening and faith. Everyone’s problem is their own fault except when it’s their own problem.
The good stuff is never in the weekly pill organizers and is never left out on the counter.
The neighbor with the undefinable limp has had a prescription for seven years and sold some for the first six months. After he mows his lawn, it looks like the fields further out of town before someone bails them, and the dead streaks last until he mows the following month. When asked why he only mows once a month, the neighbor of course just shrugs and says, “It’s just going to grow back. What’s the point?” but never brings up the environmental sustainability of fallow lawns. Besides, mowing hurts his leg, he says.
Heroin is cheaper than pills sometimes and it’s often cut with fentanyl or carfentanyl and everyone knows that and they do it anyway and they die, and when the neighbor goes the yard is fallow, the siding falls all to hell, and people shake their heads before putting them back in the sand.