| ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM |
| ***BIO*** C. Allen Rearick lives in cleveland, ohio. he was born in 1978. his ass hurts from shitting too much, and if he had the chance, he'd punch you in the stomach untill you got pancreatic cancer. no, seriously. his work has appeared or will appear in such online and print journals as: open wide magazine, opium magazine, remark, words dance, dogmatika, identity theory, poesy, get underground and many more. visit him online at: www.callenrearick.com |
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| © 2008 zygoteinmycoffee Ink. |
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| A Place we never want to call home |
| by C. Allen Rearick |
| He lies in a hooded sweat
atop his bed, eyes closed yet still awake and restless, in hopes the room, cold and empty on this, a dark December night, will disappear. The walls hold him numb. His breath, pale with anxiety, spells insomnia across the window’s frozen panes as he goes over the night again and again in his mind. The tips of his fingers twitch. Stained with sin, they press into his mind the image of a young girl’s supple thighs, smooth and whole. His hands, hungry to unwrap her sex, forcing them open like a rescue worker’s skilled hands applying the jaws of life to the compressed metal of a deadly car wreck. And for her, this is precisely what life has become. Down by the riverbanks, where, after church every Sunday he’d catch crayfish, torture frogs and skip stones, he left her like a dying dog, half-beaten, faced shoved down in its own shit to prove a point. On the other side of town life will pause. A father’s fist will splinter drywall as a mother’s tears fall to break her, like a windshield spider-webbed into a thousand pieces. The cracks in their voices a sound too heavy to describe. The boy’s mother too will cry, not for him, but for a young girl’s lost chance at life, normal and carefree. Cheerleading practices canceled, prom, driving lessons, the tall skinny, blond-headed boy with the dark-rimmed glasses in the back of algebra class with whom she shared her first kiss beside the hallway water fountain after class, no longer of strict importance. From a prison cell, his father, who once said, Every whore deserves a chance to die. will shake his head, disappointed in his son’s weakness, his inability to finish the job. For me, life will continue, a constant reminder of hell and the things over which I have no control, in these, the revelations of a small town to which I’ve never been. |
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| Feb. 2008 |
| 102 |