Over It

I have some sort of thing going on where I’m really congested, but not actually fully sick. It’s incredibly annoying and it’s making me tired, so all I want to do is sit on the couch and watch the Golden Globes pre-show red-carpet fashion to-do. That’s probably all I’d want to do anyway, but at least I have sinus congestion as an excuse. Right now, I’m just over it all. I’m over winter and the rain and the incessant cold and dark, I’m over feeling this constant low-grade crappiness, and I’m over this nagging knee injury that never got correctly diagnosed or treated and gets worse when it gets super-cold out like it has been. Also, I didn’t sew this week or play a fascinating new game or do anything but work, so I’m drained dry of interesting things to tell you about. All of this to say, there will be no proper blog post today. Instead, I present you with a story poem to tide you over until I feel like a human being again:

 Penny the Pig

Penny's favorite sucker, her ever-lasting

gobstopper, was a plastic Fun Family Collection

boy-teenager figurine in a red striped

t-shirt and khakis, with a stiff curlicue of

yellow hair, and black slash eyebrows. His

shoes were lumpy white globs of resin

like something had gone

wrong on the assembly line.

She dug him up behind the barn the night Cecily

left him there during the hailstorm.

Penny kept him safe from the other pigs; dragged

him off and buried him each night, sat

jealously near his dirt hole,

until she dug him up again, rolled

him with her overheated tongue, and

shook him in her mouth as though to snap

his rigid little neck. After a week

he was a pockmarked mess, his brows

mottled with teeth pricks and his

blob-shoes dull with grime.

Penny had made him his own. Broken him in.

Penny screamed and grunted the night Cecily

figured where he was and stole him back. She smacked Penny

with a split-off fence panel and ran

into the house sobbing, clutching the boy by his

dented chest. She spent all night scouring

his body with a potato scrubber, and painting

his shoes with Great Grape nail polish.

She filled in his brows with magic marker and put him

back on her bed stand with the dad, the Grandpa, the

Mom, the prim sister,

and the squinty aunt with a feather hat.

Penny forgot about him after a few days, but Cecily

never found forgiveness in her heart. When Andy

ran off junior year for a job in Akron, daddy

moved up north for good, and momma

sold the property for less than it was worth, Cecily made it a point

to throw rotted crabapples at Penny until

the station wagon was packed, and we couldn’t

wait for her any more. Penny

was lumbering off toward the barn

with her ass pointed at us as we drove off towards Indiana.

I don’t think she even saw us leave. Cecily carried her

family in a ziplock bag all the way to Fort Wayne

until she forgot it one morning in a Motel Six.

Momma said we weren’t going back.

We weren’t made of gas money,

and anyway Cece needed to learn

there were consequences for carelessness.

--Kristen McHenry