The Latter Days
By
Matt McGuire
Peeling an apple in housecoat and Revlon, the long ribbon of fruitskin twirling off the paring knife, arthritic chipped rose pink split fingernail polish, she glances from side to side in expectation of what? The haggard reaper creeping on toetips to avoid disturbing Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? Her Lord and Savior returning in glory to the tune of Gabriel's cornet? A familial ghost, perhaps the long rotten patriarch, the sawmiller cum Vitalis dripster, seersucking playboy? His iron workleather fingers poised over her shoulder for that pat on the back she never received, the true patrimony of a niggard king prized above Spanish gold or the caress of purple?
Her weight is proportionate to the winters she's spent in frustrated, chaste isolation since the VA took his prostate and the gathering of stick fuel, maters, and the monthly check took his pride. She peers into the woods where the hobos live and curses the State and those rough mendicant phantoms that seem to grow larger, and more terrifying, with each tick of the cuckoo clock.
She bows her head in reverence to a Calvinist demigod known as Austerity. She peeps through her fingers at Victor Newman and secretly longs to lie with him on a beach outside the old hotel in
Miami, the only paradise she's ever known, where everything is 1953 in technicolor, a broad toothed Negro in white linen serving them Ginger Ale with a twist of lime, the way it used to taste, before the Mexicans and the A-rabs and MSG ruined ever setting foot outside of Watauga county again.
In the night, He calls to her.
Watch for me daughter, for a vigilant eye never sleeps.
The vinyl blinds split in a narrow diamond as the world and Watauga sleep amid the decadence and folly of the Latter Days.
