Patsy Cline Over and Over and Over
by CS DeWildt
She’s cat skin boiled down to nothing, a skull on stilts as she comes through the door.
“You got the weather?” she says. She laughs loudly and loves the eyes on her, but they don’t stay. She’s wiped away with a passing glance.
Boys loved her skin once, but now she’s shriveled from the inside out. Her breath will knock you on your ass and her insides are rotting with a funk she calls the Curse.
“You pass a curse on,” she tells us often. Then she blows her smoke and croaks, “How do I pass this shit on?”
She’s barefoot tonight and her feet are the same brown as the floor. She’s a double-trunked, tree rooted there, a Christmas pine topped with a hand puppet angel. She stands there and waits for the eyes. She glows and I look, so does James in the corner, Old Becky and Young Becky throwing darts. Wyatt’s asleep on his feet at the broken juke, but he’s always listening.
“What do we say, lezbies and gentlemen? When someone gifts us a gift? We say?”
“What’s the gift?”
She smiles, but quickly shakes it away. “It doesn’t matter! Tell me what you say?”
Silence again. She sighs heavy and squats low, hikes up her skirt. She reaches inside herself for a wet plastic sandwich bag. “We say thank you! We say fucking thank you!”
She rips her roots from the floor and shuffles down the hall to the toilet. She’s singing an original, loud and on stage. Those county, fucks! Those county, fucks. I want to kill, those county fucks!
When she comes back she’s still got the tune on her mind, but her raw throat is cashed so she hums it.
CS DeWildt is a liar. He wants to hurt you. His books include the novella Candy and Cigarettes and the story collection, Dead Animals. Please visit www.csdewildt.com.
July 9, 2014
Photo by: Gessy Alvarez
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