Glorified
“I had become some kind of device ….” -Dan Gutstein, “In the Twilight, in the Twilight Corrupted by Indifferent Lumens”
Gina called up Stacey and asked him if he wanted to make love while she still had two breasts.
He replied, “You didn’t need to go and get cancer for me to make love to you.”
Gina paused and chose her words: “I’d like to think of it as a mercy fuck all the same.”
They met in the shell of the tiny house Gina was building at Cutty Beach. He arrived precisely at the appointed time carrying a six-pack of no-label beer.
Gina asked him if he wanted to walk down to the beach before they said goodbye to her breast.
He answered, “Do you want to make this into something romantic or stick to the original plan of ‘mercy fuck’?”
She said, “Fuck you. What is that damn ass-in-the-wind beer anyway?”
He explained that it was one of his homebrews, a malty porter tinctured with heirloom hops from his yard and bay leaf from an obliging neighbor’s tree. He had carefully reserved a portion of the batch for bottle conditioning and squirreled it away for a special occasion.
“This is your special occasion?” Gina queried.
He rolled his eyes. “Which breast is it?”
“The right.”
He pulled out his key chain, which was actually a chain of key chains. It sported eight different bottle openers, presumably swag from beer events, linked together with the world’s smallest carabiners. He selected the opener sporting a vixen whose legs bowed to form the gripper. He popped open a bottle and handed it to Gina.
“This would be better in a glass,” he said, as he walked toward Gina until his chest touched hers.
Gina shrugged and took a long draught from the bottle. It tasted like a last sip of French press coffee, turned cold and viscous in the bottom of the cup, layered with a fragment of soil clinging to something green from the garden.
He pulled off her old T-shirt with the pit bull decal then took her beer and set it on the unfinished window ledge. As a younger person, Gina set many beer bottles on unfinished window ledges in unoccupied shells of homes. It was something to do in the pre-superhighway South, when Gina and her siblings were not riding around in Rancheros and El Caminos. Now, here she was, with a beer bottle on the ledge of her own shell home.
As Stacey swept his mouth lightly over Gina’s right breast, he held firmly to the left, the one with the peace dove tattoo. Gina occasionally thought that if she would lose a breast, it would be that one, as if it had been branded for culling. A semi-famous poet once told her that a dove was no more than a glorified pigeon. Well, she reckoned, the glorified pigeon had the last laugh now.
Gina kicked Stacey out as soon as the sixth bottle landed on the ledge. She sat in the center of her tiny shell home in the company of her incongruent breasts. The pigeon, in all its glory, would have to be enough.
My Other Car Is a Truck
Jesse’s midlife crisis was a ‘78 Ford Ranchero GT. She made no apologies about her affection for a half-coupe, half-truck post-muscle car chimera, even as colleagues made down payments on futuristic electric vehicles.
Back in the seventies, Jesse and her sister Julie sustained a decade-long obsession with bumper stickers proclaiming, “My other car is a _______.” They filled the passenger seat of their dad’s Chevy Caprice Classic with sarcastic remarks about the fantasy choices of others: “My other car is a Rolls,” or a Porsche, Ferrari or the improbable Cessna. In a world super-saturated with motoring options, Jesse herself only ever wanted the much-maligned Ranchero.
Julie, by the age of 40, had already scored her nostalgia ride: a ‘72 Mustang in Gold Glow, which without the mirage-inducing humidity of the Carolinas looked more like whole-grain mustard brown. Nonetheless, Julie never refused a chance for a photograph of herself perched atop the Mustang’s hood with her Kate Jackson shag haircut.
At 50, Jesse decided it was time to claim her Ranchero. She had been beating around town all her adult life in a progression of pickup trucks, all very reliable, all iconic representations of the great American pickup. They were good and proper trucks, trucks that would make her Grandpa Frank proud, but Jesse figured that since most Rancheros were now as old as she was, the clock was ticking on her dream of a sorta truck.
She messaged an online seller advertising a ‘78 Ranchero. After four days, Jesse received a call: “This is Shelby from Gatlinburg. I have the Ranch. You’re welcome to stop by, but you probably want some pictures first.”
Jesse instantly liked the lilt of Shelby’s voice, the way he made the offer of pictures sound like a service personalized just for her. She told him not to bother, that she was so anxious to see the Ranchero that she could drive the 413 miles to Tennessee whenever Shelby found it convenient.
“Well, sure. OK. All right. Then I reckon we had better shoot for Sunday,” he replied.
Jesse filled both tanks of her bona fide truck with gas to last her the entire way to Gatlinburg. When she reached Shelby’s house, an add-on to the garage he operated, she realized it would be too late to view her future Ranchero in sunlight. Through her cranked down window, she recognized Shelby’s voice: “I figured it might take you the better part of the day.”
Jesse opened the truck door and said, “I’m afraid I burned up all our daylight.”
“No matter,” Shelby replied. “I live where I work. Come on in.”
Jesse followed Shelby to the garage, where the Ranchero lay in wait under a camouflage tarp. Shelby had positioned portable work beams around the covered vehicle. Jesse thanked him for the extra effort and took this first chance to give the Ranchero owner the once-over. He looked like someone she could have gone to school with, back in the day – an unimposing boy from the South who grew up to work with his hands. He was wearing shop coveralls, which implied that although the garage was closed on Sunday, he still worked all day.
“You’ve come all this way, so I reckon you want to see it,” Shelby said as he pulled up the tarp.
The Ranchero was unmistakably red – not candy-apple red, or Ferrari red, but a cheap nail polish sort of red. A multi-tonal stripe of yellow, black, white, orange and another watered-down shade of red ran along the side.
Shelby asked, “Do you wish I had sent you a picture?”
For a minute, or perhaps five, Jesse did not answer. It was not that the sight she beheld transfixed her, although there was certainly a lot to see. It was not that she was thinking of the Ranchero at all. Jesse simply felt like she was where she was supposed to be. She felt the same level of anticipation as when she spoke to Shelby over the phone.
Jesse turned from the Ranchero, its mega-wattage spectacle, and said, “No, Shelby, not at all. It is exactly what I needed it to be.”
Heather Fuller is the author of four poetry collections, including Dick Cheney’s Heart (Edge Books), as well as stories, plays and essays. Her work appears in the anthology out of everywhere: linguistically innovative poetry by women, the audio project Women in the Avant Garde and the #MeToo Poetry Collective. She lives in Carolina Beach, NC, and works as a cardiac nurse.