"QUOTEY"
by Dow Ford

After I lost my job at the mink farm I took up the slack key guitar. Minks are nasty little creatures and nowhere near as smart as a ferret, so I was okie dokie with getting f-i-r-e-d. I started playing guitar for hours at a stretch. My girlfriend, Talanee, goes over to the junior college. She said they learned in a class where a famous writer had wrote "obsession was the better part of valor." She'd get all quotey like that sometimes and I didn't always understand what she was saying. This time, though, I took it to mean I could play guitar all I wanted and didn't have to look for another job right away.

Talanee was a close-cropped little sprite who ran short course triathlons all over the country. She was sponsored by an antibacterial ointment company and a Catholic Diocese. Sweet as sorghum she was, but there was an anger than moved under her smooth skin like a snarl of electric wires. You didn't want to be anywhere near her when the finish line was in sight. She was a veterinarian too. Go to Outback, she couldn't order a dang thing off the menu but that big fried onion.

Over at the track I'd sit up in the stands with the slack key practicing scales while she ran ladder intervals with diminishing rests. Wearing less clothes than a Barbie doll and sweating like a lumberjack, she'd wrinkle her nose my way on every lap. Afterwards she'd mount the Trek and race me home. If I caught one light, one light in the twelve mile trip, I was a beat coon dog and she'd be standing in the front yard under the sprinkler when I rambled up in the pickup. "You snooze, you lose," she'd say. Something else some famous writer writed, I guess. After a few times like that, I started looking for some famous things to say too.

Then I got me a chance to impress her. See, it started raining, raining hard. And it didn't stop for days. No bike rides, no running, no swimming. Talanee was doing a thousand sit ups every four hours and had turned into a wild animal who perched in the window casement and gnawed her stone fingernails. She was a human tazer gun. I took out my slack key and carefully moved over there by her and began a little ditty I made up "especially for the occasion," as they say. It took a while, but I could see the fire dying down. Soon she was as meek as a two-hour calf. "How'd you do that?" she purrs to me.

"Music, Baby," I smirk. "Like the writer says, 'Music soothes the savage's breasts.'"

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Dow Ford lives in Poplarville, Mississippi.

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PREVIOUS WORK

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"SCARING THE GULLS" by Steven Gajadhar

"CRICKET CITY" by Claudia Smith

"CAMELOT #1" by Grant Bailie

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