“Heat” by Paul Padilla
One of my friends is outside running around in circles screaming “the sky isn’t blue it has no color!” She’s holding a picture of the ocean and the sun that she drew with her little brother’s crayons. The sea is Listerine green. The sun is orange like a Skittle. There are arrows all over the map referencing reflection. She has it all figured out. She doesn’t see the jobless meteorologist peering through his window in his smiley-face underoos and foggy black-rimmed glasses. I think he’s holding a knife or a small whip. He closes the curtain, probably sees his nervous reflection off the picture of himself on his first day as the morning weather guy for the local KNOX station. Frozen fresh-faced smile and waxy hair. Blue tie and green screen backdrop. He has someone tied up in the kitchen. He thinks ‘fuck the sky I’m not impressed by it’. My friend is about to knock on his door.
My other friend is heavily annunciating a love ballad from the seventies and spraying sweat on a skinny and pale malaria-infested mother of three with a tattoo of a red butterfly spread out on her sagging butt cheeks in an amateur porn flick in Glendale, Southern California. He is not using protection. She does not feel a thing as she looks away from the camera; remembers the night with the disco ball lights, the first time she kissed a man.
Oh and my other friend has just taken a sniper’s bullet off of his head on a rooftop of a deserted Arabian brothel. He wasn’t looking. He was reloading. When he opens up his eyes, he sees his helmet laying there with a dent in it. His buddy from Stillwater, Arkansas smiles and spits. Dimples underneath that helmet drove the girls wild back home, especially at the Okey Doke. Bar and grill type. Where he lost his money and a beer and a bet on a dart throw and had to enlist. Lost his girlfriend that night too but he didn’t care. He heard you could meet elegant women overseas. He looks down at my buddy. “Lucky sumobitch.” About to spit again, then a bullet rips through his dimples leaving oil-drip holes, his tongue splats on my friend’s forehead and teeth fall clinking into my friend’s helmet pirouetting like the ballerina dancers he dreamed of loving.
One of my other friends is digging up the dirt by the freeway exit to find skeletons of dogs for an art project. Bones and fangs and shit. I think she’s looking for her mother who was a cashier at Safeway or some place like that. That’s where she disappeared. Last person she talked to, a co-worker by the name of Wilbert, said she was aching for adventure, took off without saying goodbye but gave him a kiss on the lips cause she was so excited. My friend said she was kidnapped or killed by Wilbert under orders from the upper management for infringing on store protocol which states that employees should not have intimate relations with upper-management, employees, and/or customers. My friend says the CEO of Safeway is in on it. “My mother was loving and carefree and romantic, should those be reasons to die?” Still, she says she’s digging for dogs, which doesn’t make sense, they make her cry. She had a puppy as a child and it was killed when her mother ran over it and the guy in the passenger seat rolled down the window, drank from a bottle, and said something like “dog eat dog world” or “it’s a tough world” or “you have a girl?” Something like that.
I walk outside and lie down in the grass. No shade. I’m wearing a baseball cap with a snake eating its own tail because it’s an interesting conversation piece. I’m also wearing flip-flops and swimming trunks but I don’t have a pool or anything and have no shirt because I’d like to complete my farmer’s tan. There’s a vulture circling above me in tiny dotted lines. I left a burrito in the microwave. It’s boiling out here. It’s the heat. Makes us crazy. Maybe not. Just the way it works. Feeling burned by the sun makes me feel like getting up and doing something spontaneous. Travel. Meet someone new, an air flight attendant maybe, share a laugh, share a cola. A better job. A newer truck. Volunteer. Help somebody. The sprinklers come on and I get a sense of things starting over as I tuck my hands behind my head. Eyes feel good closed. I feel part sun and part water. Half heat and kinda cool. The vulture is not for me. Can’t be. I’m just getting by and I’ve got too many problems to be dead. I’m alive because I want a lemonade with ice and an umbrella.
Copyright © 2010, Paul Padilla