She was, is, and has ever been, fubar.

 

 

Her gramma used her as a wing chun Chinese boxing apparatus, beating her about the torso, where she wouldn't show.  All them days, going to school, busted up on the inside, hurting, wincing at nudges to the ribcage and back, but trying not to let it show.  She was too proud, hurt, and maintaining the status quo to let on, to show a sign, to let those winces out, those gripes of pain.  And still too, she feared for the little mush-face old mamasan, too, that maybe if the truth were out, she would be locked up; still in a worse place, the thought that telling on the little mamasan meant her eating some of the guilt too, that maybe some judge would wonder why they took the coathanger to her in the first place, what brought it on.

So she wouldn't say.

But in silence, her own form of wing chun, her own training, for her own fortitude, her own confidence, she punched at the closet door, the plaster, bloodied knuckles on the quarter-round molding.

She got fed into a woodchipper, in a freakish turn of fate, an existential lark, something of a protest, like a solar flare eating away the atmospheres of entire planets, but I, within myself, being but the casual disinvested observer, feel fine.

 

So good, in fact, I might even use the side door this time.  The others would wonder and puzzle over such, but as was the way, they could make so much of even a fly landing on the birdfeeder, sort of a Thoreau ass-fucking of nature and consequence that left one feeling rather too tired to even rattle his own chains and binders, afterward.

"Onwee en dweems" the other was intoning as I tossed my old leather satchel on the doorstep to confuse the help.  I crossed around the Jeep to the other side, looking for my hair comb for a MacGuyver trick, and I heard her doing some kind of improvised singing, between the gap in the toothflesh, "stee-ool waining, stee-ool dweeming..."

"The hell?" said one of the attendants.

"Shaving cream" I commanded from within, giving that one a bit of startle, having ingressed from the side entranced unbeknownst, myself, and happened upon, in re-doubling, towards the front entry, where they were looking for me somewhere about the pavement or the stepping stones, or even the azaleas.

Like I might have taken a nap in the shrubbery.  As if in history, that had ever happened, no precedence, no cause to even think it, but still, the mind is a wandering thing.

The beichukala looked at me, surprised, and then to the bag.

"Oh", he said.