How Blousey Blue Ended Up Married...The First Time by Tomi Shaw
In her father's barn next to the split firewood, nothing
matters to Blousey Blue but the smoke curling off the tip of her cigarette,
not the tobacco hanging newly cut from the rafters overhead, not the chickens
incubating their eggs in the corner nests of the horse stalls, not the milk
cow head hanging low in the soupy shade of this tilting lean-to, nothing but
smoke and lying; the lie growing in her belly from the tumbling she and Johnny
Dean took in the stacked bales of hay, twine wrapped and easily spreadable,
like her legs when Johnny Dean splayed his tobacco-gummed hands on each thigh
and opened her wide to receive him, keeping his weight off her spindly bones
by propping himself up on his beefy forearms, when hay stuck to wet spots,
chaff pushed into places not suited to chaff, when breathing and sweating became
the exact same thing, when finishing was just the beginning because now she's
pregnant and she needs a good lie, one that excuses her from any responsibility,
one that puts the whole thing on his enormous shoulders, to carry forever with
him what it means precisely to fuck Blousey Blue then leave her for the next
hot ass whose legs spread easily when his hands splay themselves into the heat
of her soft skin—Kimmy's her name, and she's been warned off him—the
word, four letters long and ugly sings in Blousey Blue's head as she butts
the smoke, rises from the packed dirt floor to set this trap, to get Johnny
Dean to do what he should, to prevent her father from killing her; she braces
her hands on each side of the center pole that supports the loft, takes two
deep breaths and on the count of three rears back and slams the right side
of her face into the pole and she feels the skin break, the blood start to
trickle like his semen between her legs where just an hour ago she wiled him
into her again, she prodded him to take her hard, bruising her thighs and she
knows this will look exactly like what she needs it to look like: like she
didn't want it and eight months from now when the baby's early…well…babies
sometimes do that, now don't they…by then it won't matter that her face
is swelling and she can't see anything but red mist out of her right eye, it
won't matter that Johnny Dean called her a bitch-in-heat, it won't matter that
he fucked Kimmy because by then he'll be her husband, the father of her first
born and she'll be taken care of, living happily every after and out of her
father's reach.
Tomi Shaw
Tomi Shaw lives in Kentucky, late of the woods but now in the big city lights.
She loves the sound of rain tat-tattering on a tin roof. Summer weekends finds
her at the drag strip in a bittersweet-colored Mustang, cutting killer reaction
times and putting guys on the trailer home. Her work has appeared in Absinthe
Literary Review, Flashquake, Snow Monkey, Wild
Violet, Penthouse and elsewhere.
Most recently in Clean Sheets and Literary Mama. Reach her
online at: www.tomishaw.com or
at
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