No Quarters

by Bradley David

There was a farmhouse here, I know it. Back when crops made money and cornered the general store. When draft horses could stomp any newfangled automatic contraption. With kid's pay-less shoes on field mouse furrows, I'm tuned to it. She aims my dragging shoulders and squints through my bowl-cropped theodolite. Topped with coffee, hope, a young mother's wonder compassing a fledgling imagination. There, see its trace in the dirge of sun-snapped grass? A horse barn south and root cellar east. Its entrance is all blackberry brake now, but think of all the put-up beets. That means, she says, with whispers of leftover blonde perm overtaking this riddle in the wind, the homestead must be up that northern knoll. A beloved bride in lace-veiled windows, one foot dangling off the dock to feel for a sort of freedom. Perched on basalt over men in soft soil and mended flannel; their good turnip & carrots will last in her bucket until Swedish Christmas rotmos. Mrs. Brastaad at the heart of it all, her maids. Men would subsist on teat-warm milk if it weren't for their bread and pickled pork hocks, applesauce. Every cupboard is eaten up now and we can't even find the burn salve.

These autumn-warning days are cricket-hot and branch-heavy with mystery. Nobody's around, and why? With all these opportunities. Bumps underfoot must be pearls sailed from England, French cobalt colognes the size of a vapor. Fine, they're missing out on Indian-head pennies, if that's how they want to be about it. What are they in town attending to anyway; as though I want to be there. With my pocketful of quarters at Kemp's arcade. Sticky slat floor and sweating coolers with the latest cream seltzer from New York. Who would ever buy that red apple on the counter when they can have this plastic Astro Pop of cherry passionfruit pineapple?

Bradley David's poetry, fiction, essays, and genre-blending works appear or are forthcoming in HAD, Denver Quarterly, Terrain.org, The Los Angeles Review and numerous other publications. He is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee and the blended-genre senior editor at JMWW Journal. Instagram @bradley_david_w Web: www.bradley-david.com