the goddam satan bitch left us!

by jota

Posted to Poetry on 2004-03-21 10:34:00

Parent message is 623854

“the bitch left us!” thirteen-year-old Brandon screamed into the phone
(see, that’s the way he talks, just like he was raised)
“let me speak to Bob, please”
(Bob’s sixteen-year-old son had just died in Iowa, in a car wreck four weeks to the day and now Mary, his second wife had suddenly run off with a trucker from Omaha)
“bob, she just split?”
“yep, sold the business, gave me half and said keep the kid, keep the house, I ain’t never coming back”
“she’s not coming back, even to get her stuff?”
“said she was, me and Brandon, we stayed up all night till three o’clock last Saturday, she’d called and said she was coming back to get her shit, but she never showed up”
“damn”
“tell me about it”
“Bob, you gotta be seriously thinking bad thoughts here, you’re not suicidal or anything, are you?”
“no way, I got to be strong for Brandon”
(whom Bob had adopted when he married Mary because Steve, Brandon’s bio dad wanted nothing to do with him, and now his mother pulled the same shit)
“Bob, what are you going to do now?”
“ha, I’m going to live it up, me and Brandon, we’re gonna be tough, we don’t need her anyway”
“you ok, Bob? really?”
“shit man, I let her go…let her run away, she left me this boy, and I’m going to teach him right. When the shit gets deep, you don’t run, you stand your ground…and if in the middle of the night you wake up and you can’t sleep and you wonder what in the hell went wrong, why you feel doublecrossed and you wanna blame yourself, well, see you gotta tell yourself ‘hey, it’s not me, it’s everybody else…'”
“bob…”
“see man, you don’t fall in love with a womb, you fall out”