Calamity Clean

I ask you to consider, not that a girl died, but that she almost lived for a few hours of her quick and dissipating life.

When you date a rugged journalist, hoping to whisk away to dangerous but survivable lands, at the whim of his strong jaw and militant pen, you never count his copper-white dazzling teeth lying to you as they scurry up truth from the depths of polluted waters and middle-eastern landfills.

But lie he did, as the evidence of an already family collided and atom-smashed the dreams she’d nurtured with him of having little rock-ribbed babes to follow his adventurous footfalls.

Returning to Kansas, where fields run quieter, and waters flirt with nobody, Jericha Joe hated her long black alluring hair. What was the point of a perfect lure which only caught piranha?

That is why she’d shaved that night to the proximity of stubble that attracts a certain type in this epoch, but which the bible called prostitutish when it painted jelly-fish-electric pictures with it’s ancient unique brush.

She felt like a man that night, whilst she steered with one hand on the bumpy terrain, rubbing her skull, feeling that part of her coming skeleton.

It felt good to face death.

How did she know she might die that eve?

Well, that happens sometimes when you head towards home with your pigeon wings too soiled to roost anywhere near the roots of your soul’s once virginity.

The planet is full of magnets — don’t forget. You can drink all the crisp ales and whisky you please. But nothing refutes those laws of attract and aversion.

Her final ride had everything to do with both, but in the end it was mostly about metal which pushes each other away.

The original love of her soul — but not her body, he lived in this heartland. She’d returned to tell her story. To apologize to his cherubic face. She’d returned to feel a real kiss on her cheek one last time. And after she’d gotten it? She‘d ride like the wind in those ugly oil-stained overalls from late childhood.

She’d scream at the moon in a way that would of scared her, if it were someone else’s noise.

But this was her hoop and hollar. Her banshee weep.

She knew the terrain would not support her, in those perfectly simple wheat-filled prayer-dog runs. She knew even flatlands had very deep wells and pitch forks left out. She was a missile heading for something either way

But she didn’t know how a tiny little brook would swallow her down and sweep aside her mighty fast bike.

But she knew that she’d hit her head. That part was clear from her premonitions.

Nothing but such a blow and a turn could wash away the demons that had ridden with her for years.

I won’t say she didn’t hope she could have had the best of all possible worlds.

Only that’s not allowed in a galaxy with gravity and such. One has to always be making choices. And on that night she chose mystery and an end to her pain. And she did it in the cleanest way she could remember. And as her head went into those pools she smiled to feel the holiest of boring kisses there, still a little warm on the perfect part of her cheek.