Pandora might be a good pen name...
Honestly, to my perfectionist self I'm thinking, "my god what is this tripe coming out of my head?" Oh, well.
I was hoping to give you honest down-home kitsch and pulp, maybe a dash of outrageous humor and some trashy romance on top, but for the life of me, there are these people in my head, and they have this story, and I can't see that it is funny -- at all. Since this endeavor is really more for quantity over quality, at least just until I come up with a hell of alot more bulk here, I may switch it up on myself, so I don't have to dwell on these girls anymore, and start cranking out silly juvenile stories about pirates and shoemakers and viagra salesmen. The intent was to give myself a higher amount of writing while still producing something semi-coherent. I didn't excpect to start any real character development or thematic material... Oi vey!
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Everything was worn, and smelled like cigarettes. Dim and hazy, the greyhound station windows were tinted by diesel fumes. I walked shuffling my steps over the fine, slippery coat of upswept mud dried to the linoleum. Women were washing the miles out of their black hair squeezing their heads under the taps in the tiny bathroom sinks. No one spoke. Our jaws were as iron and stiff as our legs. Our eyes like the windows felt tinted with the same greasy dust everywhere and I kept trying to sweep it away on my sleeves. We had to wait to each wash our hands in the one sink left open by the bathing women.
We had been coming what seemed so long, waiting so long, we waited for everything and waited forever, any excitement or apprehension we had once was numb now under a blanket of weariness. Mama was leading us out by the hand, sis on one side and me to the other. If mama stopped walking and holding my hand so tight I would have folded to the ground and just curled up right there on that linoleum– I felt like making that greyhound station home, the shabby vinyl chairs my new bed, for all I wanted so much to be home and drop away into dreams or nothingness.
...
His dusty jacket smeared in spots with bits of grease was almost like camouflage in the shabbiness of the greyhound station. I was so tired, when he bent to hug us all together I couldn’t make any effort to avoid being nearly smothered with my nose flat against his chest. Later, when he was near bedridden, he would take to saying to us how we didn’t come delivered by a stork like other babies, but we came delivery by a greyhound. He loved us more than anything in the world. Where our own daddy was like a ghost we never knew where he would appear to us from beyond the veil separating us from the world where fathers came from, our uncle, mama’s little brother, was a concrete and real as we could have imagined a man to be. No disappearing. No wandering in the back door, coming and going. He was rooted to the same ground as the elms and oaks tracing the lane home and as solid as the weathered granite rocks framing the wide open gate.
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