LT Saloon

Pretty Little Housewife

From the 2009 August edition of Lutin Muse

Written by C. J. Fox

“So… you don’t love me?” I asked, calmly despite the loaded question. I leaned up against our blue Camry and folded two skinny, dingy arms across my chest.

He threw a hoe down into the ground but not with anger or any sort of feeling that might have made me feel better. It was emotionless. He was contemplative only in what he was doing, not what he had done to me. He rubbed a dirty fist against his eyebrow, slowly revolving around on two brown, unlaced, muddy boots. I bent over and picked up a red screwdriver and handed it to him.

Taking it, he said, “That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

This was not my soap opera and this sure as hell wasn’t my fairytale. Plain and simple, not even then the concern over a business deal. I was just a bottle of antifreeze he had decided not to buy.

He moved from his project in the yard and started wrenching at something in the car, the source of the loud gurgling noise I got when I tried to get to work.

“So what now?”

He looked up at me with two brown eyes, the color of the richest dirt. He snuffed out an itch on his nose with his forearm and shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know, nothing.”

“You can’t stay married to me if you don’t love me anymore.”

He pressed his arms down on the front of the car, the answer so obvious to him. “Sure I can. People do it.”

I bit the inside of my cheek and nodded. This was my life. I had a car that didn’t work, a garden that wouldn’t produce a bloom, and a husband that didn’t love me. The way it should have gone, what I should have done was pick up a Phillips and chuck it at his head and then leave him triumphantly. But I didn’t. I knew what happened to the women who did that. They ended up living in shabby one rooms just off the highway out of town and watching television that came in and out like their love lives. Maybe that was for them but it certainly wasn’t for me. I went back inside and sat at the wicker dining table, finishing my crossword. The last clue was “a postnuptial tradition” and it was a nine letter word. I scribbled “honeymoon” into the white spaces and dropped my pencil, shoving the puzzle away. The puzzle was done and I’d found my answer. Nobody ever said the key to your puzzle unlocked your dream life anyways. My father wasn’t madly in love with my mom any more than my husband was with me. My key didn’t unlock Barbie’s dreamhouse. It unlocked my inheritance and I can’t say I was altogether surprised. I’d been taught long ago that you keep the other woman around because you love her. You keep the wife around because you need something to make you seem honest, no different than adding high school to your resume.
_____________________________________
©Copyright 2009
C. J. Fox
all rights reserved

Written by Joyce Lovelace

Bright sun shines green grass

White goats play push me

Yellow butter flies
______________________________________
©2009
Joyce Lovelace
all rights reserved

"Need a little push?"

A Case of Bad Manners

From the April 2009 edition of Lutin Muse

Written by Ye Olde Scribe

There was a lot of shaking
And a mighty roar
The whore houses closed their shutters
Cats and mice paced house floors
Heavenly light and the song of angels
From the celestial portal did pour
Then God spoke and said…

“Oops, sorry… wrong door”
____________________________
©Copyright 2009
Ye Olde Scribe
all rights reserved

Evil Loose in the World

From the April 09 edition of Lutin Muse

Written by R.S. Janes

There’s evil loose in the world
Not the Biblical, Old Testament evil,
Rubbing its hands together –
Satan need not be bothered.
This is the work-a-day, average evil,
the kind that thinks:
“The only way I can get mine,
Is to take what’s yours.”
And the world itself
Is its mother and father.

The evil of power
Under the banner of deceit
The expression of power
In its true state:
“Make others do that
Which they hate.”
The only way the powerful
Can prove to themselves
They have real power.
But it’s not even enough
Just to make the peasantry
Cringe and cower.

The kernel at the core
Is that others must die
To prove power to itself
The never-ending fable
Yet the suffocating need,
The bottomless belly always needs filling
By the main course
On misery’s table
The two greatest, most harmful
Addictions in the world:
Power and greed
The two things which most disable.

Yet rarely are those who seek power
Questioned at length ‘why?’
(Perhaps because they control
The interrogation;
It’s impossible to be unbiased
When the beam is in your own eye.)
And greed must
Burn the street black
Before anyone notices
This fire-breathing dragon,
Scaly and coarse,
Sucking the soul out of
Life and limb,
Turning a walk in the park
Into a marathon at the
Rat-race course.

What religion does not require
Suffering and sacrifice
As the toll of an
Unyielding King?
Does not rely on
Obedience and money
For its existence,
The essence of its being?
What earthly institution
Does not compel
Compliance and fealty
As its due?
Feeding its gaping reflection of
Raw power,
On the hypocritical coin of
Mammon to renew?

Why isn’t greed
A recognized disease?
Lust for power
A capital crime?
Certainly the effects are as
Terrible from either
As any scourge of our time.
But then both are
Too strong a lure,
Preventing those who suffer
With the sickness
From ever finding a cure.

Until these twin blights
Of human history
Are treated and tamed
The tree’s roots will remain infected,
The fruit rotten, the heart lame
And the Devil will sit
With his feet up on the desk,
Nothing to do
But laugh at our illusions,
As we ruin ourselves without his help,
Eyes closed and hands grasping,
Trying to mold the universe
To our avaricious delusions.
_______________________________________
©Copyright 2002-2009
R.S. Janes
All Rights Reserved.

(Painting courtesy of Night Gallery)

The Hooker and the Pearl-Gray Luxury Car

From the August 2009 Lutin Muse issue

Written by R.S. Janes

The pearl-gray luxury car circled the block a few times. The girls on the street had already concluded it wasn’t a cop, as the driver had refused a couple of invitations – if it had been a cop, he wouldn’t have been so choosy, any quick bust would have been fine.

But who was this guy? Middle-aged, thinning hair on top with a little gray on the sides, and a pair of brown square-frame glasses, just circling the block looking at the girls. One girl whispered to another that perhaps he was some weirdo – street radars went up: keep an eye on the pearl-gray luxury car.

The block was actually several blocks, and the girls hid in the doorways when the police cruisers occasionally plowed by. It was a game: the cops knew very well that this was hooker turf after eleven at night and they could pull them all in, but why bother with the paperwork, unless some citizen complained? They’d all be out here the next night anyway. As long as the cops didn’t catch them actively soliciting, or any sexual acts conducted in public, they usually left the girls alone – some even indulged on the way home from a shift, although in civilian clothes. But that was the regular uniformed guys – plainclothes vice detectives sometimes trolled around and cracked some working girl just to add a quick scalp to their arrest record, but they were easy to spot – either dressed up too wild or too loud and obnoxious. They emitted clues to their true identity like flop sweat.

But the guy in the pearl-gray luxury car didn’t give off any such clues. If nothing else, no plainclothes cop would be driving around in such a nice ride – they always drove dull-colored Fords and Chevy’s. He circled again, and one of the girls said aloud she hoped a police car would come by – this guy is creepy, maybe the cops would scare him off.

Then, on the fifth circuit, he finally pulled to the curb. Out of the shadows emerged a thin white girl with long straight brown hair. None of the girls knew her well – she was a newcomer and kind of aloof. If it had been one of the regulars, they might have warned her, but this girl was arrogant and didn’t respond to their friendly overtures, so let her take care of herself. Still, they kept an eye out anyway, just out of habit, as she got into the pearl-gray luxury car and it turned the corner into the darkness of a side street.

Inside the car, the girl asked, “Looking for a date?”

The driver, clearly embarrassed, replied in a mumble, “Well, yes, but it’s really not for me.”

Her eyebrows descended in a frown. “What are you talking about?”

“I hope you can understand this,” he said, pulling the car over in front of an alleyway and shutting off the engine, “See, my son is 19 and he’s – uh – somewhat autistic, but he’s not crazy or anything like that. He’s discovered sex and he’s fixated on this woman he can never have, and he’s a virgin. It’s been hard to get him to focus on anything other than sex lately and I thought, well, why not just let him have sex and maybe he can get over it and we can get back to his education. He was doing well before this, uh, obsession with sex started.”

“So, you’re trying to get your son laid?” She relaxed a little, but still kept her finger on her pepper-spray canister, hidden in her purse.

“Yes, but he wants a woman who looks like this.” The man produced a crackled, weathered color photograph from his coat pocket. “I thought you looked the most like her of the women on the street tonight.”

She studied the photo for a moment. “Not that it’s my business, but who is it?”

“It was his teacher from eighth grade. She’s dead now and he always thought he would grow up to marry her, even though she was twenty-five years older. I tried to tell him it’s never going to happen, that she’s gone, but he still talks about it. Then last week he said if he could have sex with her once, he’d forget all about her. I said that was impossible, and he went into hysterics.”

“Weird,” she exclaimed under her breath. “It sounds like he needs a therapist.”

“I’ve tried that route, but it didn’t work, so I thought I’d try this. If you don’t want to do it, I understand.”

“How much are you willing to pay for this, uh — service – and where will it happen?”

“I rented a couple of rooms at the Days Inn just down the street and I’ll pay whatever you want, within reason. Just be nice to him for an hour or so, have sex with him, and tell him you have to leave to go teach in Australia.”

“Australia?”

“Yes. Melbourne. That’s where she planned to go when she died in a plane crash. Oh, and her name was Marletta, if it should come up – Marletta Tutter.”

“So, you’re asking me to pretend to be this Marletta Tutter, spend about an hour with your son, and have sex with him, is that right?”

“That’s right. And I’ll drive you back here when you’re finished.”

“Would you be in the room?”

“No, no — I’ll be in the room next door.”

“You say he’s not dangerous or crazy.”

“No, absolutely not. He just has a learning disability and gets a little over-emotional at times, but never violent.”

“What does his mother think of all this?”

“His mother isn’t with us anymore.”

“Huh. This is the weirdest damned thing I ever heard of, but I’ll do it – I need the money. Okay, $300 bucks — and I want the cash up front.”

“You want the money in advance?”

“That’s the deal,” she opened the car door slightly, “or I’m gone.”

“Okay, sure, that’s no problem, but I hope I can trust you to keep your end of the bargain.”

As she shut the car door, he fished in his coat pocket and came up with fifteen rumpled twenty-dollar bills and handed them to her. She counted them as he started the car.

“Before you pull off, there is one thing,” she said, as she took her finger off the pepper-spray trigger and put the money in her handbag.

“Oh, what’s that?”

And she then reached deeper in her purse for her badge.
__________________________________________
©2009
R.S. Janes.
all rights reserved.

Image courtesy of gotfootage.com

The Burden

From the May 2009 issue of Lutin Muse

Written by Jenn Weinshenker

“Storm’s comin in from the west
looks rough
we’d better put up those chairs in the shed.”

“You think we’ll have a tornado this time?”

“Might, could.”

“Look at those clouds.
Don’t they look like the scales of a fish?
Have you ever seen such a thing before?”

“The wind is ripping through them trees
they’re all over the place
we’d better pull in that table too.
Grab that end?”

“You know, I never thought about it before
But I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what people thought.
Tornadoes were dragons flying around,
shaking the earth,
breathing smoke and fire
and destroying everything in its way?”

“It makes total sense.”

“I mean, we talk about it now and we know what tornadoes do.
If something heavy like a truck
Finds its way to the top of some tree
We are confounded by it.
People must have seen lots of immoveable things
Picked up and thrown the distance only a god could have?
Lightning must have been quite the arrow,
Thunder, thunder that could run through a tree
And electrocute a whole herd of sheep
Huddling together in the midst of the storm
How do you explain something like that
when you don’t know what it is?”

“I can see that.
I know what tornadoes are
and they still scare me.
The sky is turning neon green.
We’d better get inside.
Have you seen Ruby?”

“No.
Is she out?”

“I think so.”

“Rubeee.
There you are girl.
Let’s get you inside.”

We hurried down the basement stairs
and crawled beneath the mattresses
we had propped up
against the far back
cement block wall.

We felt the wind rattling around our old brick house as
rain and hale pelted through the windows and walls.
It sounded like a war zone out there.

“You think the house will hold?”

“Hope so.”

The ground under the foundation
started to move,
like it was floating on waves of water.
For a brief instant it felt like all of the air
had been sucked out of the room,
and then
it got quiet.
No birds, no crickets,
not the sound of a human being,
nothing.
And then it hit again.

All night storms
carved their way through the prairieland corridor.
In the morning we heard voices murmuring outside.
We looked around.
There were streaks of light across the concrete floor.

Ruby was gone.
So was the house.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, are you?”

“I’m still alive
but my muscles are sore as hell.”

We crawled out from under our soggy cave
and walked up the stairs into a
great big wide open.

Bright sparks of sun reflected off of shards of broken glass.
Bricks, splintered wood, kitchen appliances
and cars had been indiscriminately thrown over the
remaining
scrap yard.

At the corner we could see young people
walking away
so many of them
walking right off the end of the earth.
It was as though the whole planet was encircled by them.
And it didn’t matter where you were in the line
Because it never ended
Not the spinning and
Not the people

They were hauling this bloodstained rope.
It was thicker than a mason’s fist.
From one shoulder to the next
they strained forward
and marched.

“What are you carrying?”

“Don’t know
but don’t worry.”
“We’re almost there.”

We stood there and watched the living organism
carrying its burden
of muscle and flesh
without end
without complaint.

____________________________
©2009
Jenn Weinshenker
All Rights Reserved

———–Lutin Muse———

This month’s edition included a six months review of just a few of the super submissions to past Lutin Muse journals, as well as new poems and even more prose. Like what you see? Please feel free to check out past journals.

The LT Saloon Lutin Muse Literary Journal, October 2009