| |||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
|
You hump your duffle
bag down stairs, wishing like hell you had one last chance to ‘ponder'
now you've thought up the whole enticing idea of humping your duffle
bag, but the truth is, that joke has been run not just into the ground
but right through the earth's crust, where boiling hot magma does to it
what a good writer would have done after the first five or six times it
got used.
Oh sweet crappity Christ, the whole damn clan's turned out. There's no place but the roof for your gear and the inside is stuffed like a clown car with your loathsome, inbred relatives! Oh, well. Nothing for it but to squeeze in. Dad starts up the car as you try to get comfortable, wedged between your older half sister Lawanda Jean who once ‘messed you up' with a home made ‘shiv' for ‘dating' her ‘boyfriend' and your Great Aunt Tillie who's five 0'clock shadow feels like an industrial belt-sander squeezed against the flesh of your arm, and who may lack the plumbing to be anybody's ‘Aunt' anything. Things aren't helped out by Cletus, the family dog that's rumored to have been dead since last May being along for the ride, or your little brother Caleb who insists on being addressed as ‘The Late Lillian Gish' wedged under your feet. Maybe the front seat would have been better, and you try to crane forward to scope out the situation as your dad guns the old Studebaker Town n' Country up to thirty mph and squeezes onto the expressway.
Wouldn't have done any good anyway. Dad's up there and his tumor takes
up most of the space between him and Tamasha, the little Arab girl who
showed up shortly after he got back from the gulf war and whom Dad
insists your Mom gave birth to and that Mom's only joking when she calls
him a "Filthy Fucking Liar." The way back is out of the question as
well. First of all, no seatbelts, and second, it's pretty much full of
the Quintuplets. Festus, Fat Marlon, Buzzy, Joe and Li'l ‘President'
Lincoln are rolling around back there, laughing and shouting, the drool
from their slack, congenitally malformed mouths pooling and flowing
freely along their mostly naked limbs. It would be bad enough if anyone
had the vaguest idea how the Quints were related to the rest of you and
GOOD LORD was that GRANMDA back there too? Hard to tell, but none of the
Quints have any jailhouse Tattoos yet and it would explain the faint
odor or Chiclets. . |
a
