Corker's Stem

The day the harridan’s mother died it rained a doggish rain. The sky opened up its great maw, teeth chattering against clouds grayer than old linen, and poured. The last time it rained with such recital was when the harridan was a little girl, and her mother a middle-aged housewife with bunted hair and cobalt blue eyes. She remembered her mother’s scrimshaw face, years of fret and worry having clawed there way past bone and ligament, flaps, corrugations of skin, into the sinew that defines feature and grace. Her mother’s face was a reminder that life is harder when lived from the inside of a gin bottle, a stoke-pipe, fate prescribed by a crooker with a scribbler’s rote, one eye closed, the other looking from the inside out. Children bore out of haste, the besotted aftermath of chicken wings and porter, the timing just a hair off, panties balled up and soaked through with discontentment and corker’s stem.

Einer der nichts merkte she said, not knowing what she said or why she said it. These phrases, words and sentences parsed together, came to her without her being aware of there origin or why they came to her and not someone else, the shamble leg man or the alms woman, some bootblack or a crucifier. Phrases like this seemed to hang in the air like dandelion spore, or those russet puffballs her brother kicked with the toe of his boot, releasing a cloud dulcet scat.