American Death Row
Many years of still air had left the phone booth across the causeway rusted and sacred.
Cutting in half local water a bridge without sides fled to the other side of functional landscape.
Bill Mule checked out of his single bed to buy an artefact to remember the place by.
White-man totem-poles and a lot of snow-globes.
Souvenirs put eras of your life on a mantle piece and kept them there.
Bill had rung his brother to ask which rumours were true; a city-slick prostitute found bathing in shallow earth and a carbon-based drug cartel.
He was sorry for his brother, a man who lived out a puzzle that had been carved by a hundred different step-fathers and community college referees.
The pieces never fit together.
Bill crashed out, sexually exotic and moonlit on the river, the Saturday evening, with nothing but a cell phone and a decade of alcoholism excreting a trail of time from the sticky cogs of his watch.
For a few seconds that ended sleepily, he saw the cyber night on a girl’s back arch and a grave of narrow thighs in the long ride suicide and upturned blankets.
His brother was still out there as Bill closed his eyes, far cornered in the cinematic square of a field light, his blood covered in ash.
It was the empathy in humanity that caused it to go on.
Bill’s brother used his one free containment call to reach Bill but couldn’t get through.
He kicked the shit out of a guy on death row and when his mother visited she seemed to bring the whole urgent universe with her.
The shiny glass couldn’t hide him from the tents of her eyes, the tent of his life, or that she owned his daughter.
“Tell her daddy misses her.” He said.
His mother agreed to but would forget it as the mind often does to small, unchanging details.
The wardens were outside smoking over a cattle trough.
A freezing meteor trail wandered over boiling stars and swarms of impactless fireflies.
The grass lent back and forth like a porno cam.
As he waited in his cell-block, he remembered how he used to tell his baby girl
that fireflies were the stars that couldn’t escape the earth.
It was late as hell by then.
They brought him out the next morning to sit in the electric chair until his blood quit pumping,
and those same fireflies were upturned around his daughter as she played dolls before daycare,
and they would do the same again that evening, with different members of themselves, for the life of a firefly is extremely short.
Bill missed his brother that winter.
Like all men, he was a man born with a heart doomed to fail.
The difference was his brother’s had grown bigger when nothing solicited it to.
It hadn’t deserved to fail like it did.