Everyone A Stranger

Phyllis,

I ain’t forgot what you said to your daughter the day I married her. I’m a day out of the tank and somewhere in South Dakota. The girls at the gas station looked at me like I’m crazy when I asked where I am. Maybe I am. Crazy. I don’t have a change of clothes or direction or hardly a dollar to my name. I’m missing a handful of beard Cathy yanked out my face and my eye’s black from that man she’s gone to running with. But they’re all rude here anyway. Looks they give you and the little they’ll say. Everyone a stranger.

I ain’t forgot what you told her, and I remember what she said. She’d be right there with me long as she felt like being. Jesus was their truth to that. She was gone soon as the feeling passed. First I blamed the guy and that jacked-up pickup and that smile of his and all the shit it eats. Then I blamed you a while. I know how you like to crawl inside her ear, spin the words around for everything she sees. Now I think maybe you was just warning me. That’s a kind way of looking, I guess, but you turned out right either way.

Out here the plain just keeps picking up and rising, mostly like home but drier and no one’s trying to do anything with it. All prairie grass and sunflowers. The sky stays purple. Billboards far as you can see. If I keep going I imagine it rising to great sprawling peak, or maybe it only falls away again and disappears. Dip in a landlocked sea. I don’t reckon there’s much need for this, but there’s not much farther I figure to go, and I remember how you told her I was a quick fix to the wrong problem. I’ve been thinking about it mile after mile and I think it’s close to the case. I think she wants to make everybody love her but still just knows the one way. I think she’s always at an altar and halfway through a vow. Never matters what’s behind. I think about you standing there shaking with your list of reasons and your big damn-it-all finish. You said it’d be hell and ugly. Said I’d be gone before long. You said the end would be quick. You were right.

MARVIN SHACKELFORD is the author of the collections Endless Building (poems) and Tall Tales from the Ladies’ Auxiliary (stories, forthcoming). His work has, or soon will have, appeared in The Kenyon Review, Wigleaf, Hobart, and Tar River Poetry. He resides in the Texas Panhandle with his wife, Shea, and earns a living in agriculture.