Young Writers Society

A/N: Two short shorts that I wrote on a whim. I wanted to explore a couple different characters and a couple different situations. Enjoy.

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Sunflowers

[spoiler]Darkeyed Phoebe runs through the slouching sunflowers singing some nonsense rhyme and skipping. It's sunday evening. She's still in her best church clothes – the blue flowerprint dress that falls around her like moonlight and her hair is all done up in knotty, black braids that flounce behind her. I sit in the old porch chair and I watch the child pick heavytongued bluebells growing in the planter boxes and put them in her pocket. That old minister's voice is still ringing in my head and I can still feel the pew fossilizing my back. Jesus and Damnation and Salvation buzzing in my head like a whole boxful of honeybees. I sit back and I let the whole day empty out through my skin – some kind of nasty perfume that rises through my pores and exhales into the evening like nicotine.

The sun is red and sullen on the shoulders of the horizon, like an incubating egg. Pollen and spores hanging in the air, all lit up and slow falling. Sulley's old black-nosed tractor complains up the dirt road from the fields and the dust rises up in the sky and then falls back down and covers the leaves and the scowling mailboxes in fine, summer dust. Sulley hunches over and chews tobacco and his black face is sweaty and gritty. I see him wink and smile at me across the yard. Phoebe runs up back through the garden towards me carrying a fistful of bluebells and puckered, loveless buttercups.

“Lord, girl! Not in that beautiful dress!” I say. “Slow down and walk easy for a change. There we go. Like a perfect lady.”

She smiles her white, babytoothed smile and walks nicely up the porchsteps and offers the flower bunch to me and I take it graciously and smile real nice and say, Thank you, Miss Phoebe. What lovely flowers! and she runs back down the steps and disappears into the garden. The sunflowers take custody of her like longnecked wardens. I fold my hands in my lap – they rest there: papery, sunspotted. The veins loop up through the skin like blue latitude lines on an atlas. I close my eyes as the sun dips further behind the horizon and I feel real heavy and warm and out of breath all the sudden. Phoebe laughs and I smile and I think about the potatoes on the boil in the kitchen, hopping in the pot like cold feet. Sulley has gotten off his tractor and his playing with Phoebe, slow, hingejawed old man hunkering in the sunflowers. Eyes wide and wild and wet with childishness. The day rests on my belly. This breathlessness is making me lightheaded. I feel everything emptying. The laughing and the preacher disclosing his roadmap to heaven and the bumbling potatoes knocking, knocking.

I smell things from a long time ago.

I smell the grass and the dust and old paint. The heady manure and the fresh picked flowers crippled in my hand and the sun lighting up the hayfields.

The flowers in my hands fall to the porch one by one.

And I leave Sulley and Phoebe among the sunflowers.[/spoiler]

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Treaties

Yellow foam stuck out from the ripped passenger seat of the old ford truck like sick tongues. And at every bump and pothole the car jumped, shivered, riding low and slurring on its axle. Soft radio. Fruitfly static. Some rich white balladeer drawled about the road and the scrubby country to a fingerpicked guitar. The whole cab smelled of cigarettes and oil. She sat on the passenger seat and stared at her hands, looking up at the moon, wide-eyed and white as an orderly, and the broken desert spread out and even. Mile markers stood up like reflective prairie dogs. The rancher driving the truck was wearing a sheepskin jacket and chewing sunflower seeds. His hands were shaking. This was his third day without cigarettes. He had loose, roostercomb jowels and his the lines in the skin around his eyes spread out like tributaries. She scooted as far away from him as possible. He hummed to the radio.

She could still feel his hands on her.

Thick fingers and scars and oil and tractor. She hurt. She had been crying a little, but she kept it inside now. The rancher didn't like it when she cried. Her lip was bleeding a little still.

Along the road there were gas and service stations with hard, probing light and dumpy motels with drowsy neon strips and the night buzzed with trip-lipped cicadas and electricity. Trailer parks sat low and pondering like a malpais with the flat, moon-seared trailers hunkering like plateaus. The road clicked and hummed. The balladeer warbled and crooned. Rancher spat sunflower seeds out the window and chewed aimlessly at his lip and glanced sideways at her.

Now that wasn't too bad, was it?

The truck jostled her. No sir, she said.

That's right. There's a girl. Respectful and gracious. At least you people know your place.

Yes sir.

He looked at the road again. Telephone poles leaned in monastic and black as druids of the night. Potholes gaped and the truck shuddered, tools skittering from side to side in the back.

Cold and clean and respectful.

She didn't say anything.

The rancher turned the truck up and narrow, tucked-in road, grinding the gearshift, headlights bobbing and swinging like dancing partners.

He spat again.

You can tell your father he can come pick on my land. Starting tomorrow. Three dollars a crate. Full crate. Not too full, though. And no bruised fruit. Hell, I swear if I see a single brown spot on any one of my pears, I'll throw the whole godawful lot of you out on your sorry ears. You got it?

He looked at her. She nodded.

Good.

She wondered when she would stop hurting.