Flutterbies

      The desert sun crept cleverly under Mal’s eyelids. In the distance, the Southern Pacific train wailed its wavering warning onto the dimpled canvas of her threadbare mind. Somewhere in another distance of an electric, nervous highway, down in the pit of her stomach, Mal felt the acid doomy, rumbling hunger of the night before jittering and clamoring its way into being. Grey-blue eyes open, shot with red, burnt by the bright junction of dusty blue skies, she rolls slowly onto to her side, palms down, hot gravelly grit digging into hands.  Mallory slowly raises herself onto wobbly legs into a squatting position and gingerly surveys the desolation of her surroundings. The ocean of desert with its life teeming underground greets her mind and overtakes her with memories of being jostled, of being threatened, of being devilishly drunk with the power of her feminine wolf-mother passions in the midst of a leering crowd of man beasts.

The throbbing in her head is like a post-millennium cataclysm caused by the small pond-worth of Corralejo Anejo she guzzled to tamp down the tumult of two years’ love lost. Benny may as well have shot her in the heart with a six-gun and left her lying on the floor of the ‘Tap Room’ with an old 45 of ‘Ring of Fire’ blaring out above the cacophony of Tuesday night on the corner of bedlam and squalor. Shit. He said he didn’t want our child. He didn’t want the life she yearned for. Why doesn’t he want me the way I want him?

     “He fucking promised me!” 

Mal screams this to nobody in particular at the dead end of the dirt road she blindly ventured down the night before in the drunken stupor of her harrowing sorrow. The thorny mesquite shivers in the wind. The potential offspring of its seed pods litter the ground and crunch under her feet as she heads back towards Speedway Boulevard. The cicadas begin to whir and stir in their lustful buzzing song as the oven begins to slowly climb to its preheat temperature designed to bake brains like fried eggs in drug fear propaganda commercials the electric babysitter bled into her mind as a young girl.  She sobs loudly, disturbing the lizards and cactus wrens only ever so slightly. They have their own physical survival to attend to.  An unending, wailing symphony of pleas clatters through her head...

    

    "What am I going to do? 

    "Why doesn’t he love me?"

    "How did I get here?"  

    "What am I going to do?!”

Her purse is missing, but thankfully her cell phone is wedged in her pocket, nestled between her throbbing, fatigued thighs and the dingy denim. Mal slowly rocks the phone up and out of her pocket, raising it up to eye level. The sun is furious now, so she shades the screen with her hand, and strains to see the time (9:23) and her heart hurts more than ever as she discovers that there are no missed calls. Ben didn’t call. Ben doesn’t care.