Caboose by Morgenrede
We were in your hometown of Searcy, Arkansas, sitting on the edge of that bridge by the train tracks and you said, after taking a drag from your cigarette, “It’s so boring here, I bet you the police will probably show up any second and tell us to move.” Sure enough, a cop car drove onto the bridge and a big lady sitting in the passenger seat told us politely that it wasn’t safe to be sitting on a bridge dangling our feet over the water when traffic would be picking up. You flicked your cigarette into the river, I gathered our things, and we left without arguing. This was my first memory of our time together, and I knew I loved you then, because I felt the same resentment, the same sense of adventure that was inherent in souls like ours, who knew that the entire world was dead set on keeping us doing what we were supposed to be doing. The last memory I have of our time together was when we met up in Brinkley, Arkansas. I forgot my backpack at your mom’s house and your dad found my spare car key that he misplaced when he was fixing my bumper, so we arranged a date in June for the drop-off. You showed up wearing a light pink dress resembling a long tutu and white boots that had black laces. Your skin was light-brown and smoothed like wet clay. You had quit smoking then, and it showed that you were taking care of yourself. You led us into town and bought peaches from a gentleman parked off the main road, then we walked toward that Central Delta Depot Museum. You stopped and pointed out an old Southern Pacific caboose next to the main building that caught your eye. We snuck past security and climbed inside. It smelled like stalled history, cobweb leather ripping apart as the sun blistered the outside hull. You gave me that dastardly look you always gave me and pulled up your pink dress to show me that pair of apple blossom red underwear you would put on to entice me. It was about supper time, only cricket chirps filled the air, so we found a spot shadowed from public view and had passionate middle of the summer train car sex that left me wheezing and wanting you all to myself, wanting you to suck every breath I exhaled out of my tireless mouth. When the child we never had started to drip down your legs and tickle your ankles, a wind ripped through the train car, and I wanted the caboose to magically start moving and take us far away. But that never happened. After we cleaned up we found ourselves still stationary, still in Brinkley. I led us to a café for burgers and milkshakes. I wasn’t even halfway done before you ran outside to chase after an armadillo that you were convinced did not have leprosy. I caught up to you when the little hard-shell bastard ran under a building and it made you cry something awful, because you said that everybody always left, you even told me someday that I would leave you, but I was there then to shut you up by kissing you harder than I had ever kissed anybody. That was the last time we’d be happy together. I don’t count the other times we saw each other together in Arkansas after that, like when we ate fancy pizza in Conway and saw your ex in the restaurant and had a fight about when you ditched me at that shoegaze concert, or when I visited your apartment in Little Rock and you drank almost an entire twelve pack and all I did was watch you pee on your back porch, the puddle growing until it spilled through the wood leaking onto your neighbor’s porch below, and I didn’t think about looking away from the steady stream of your urine, because if I looked into your eyes I was going to see how unhappy you were, and you would see how cold I had become. A present that had once seemed so clear had turned to smoke and fog in my memories of us. We’d simply grown apart. You started drinking more and I started fucking other women that never matched up to you. Eventually we both sobered up, you before I. You reached out first, after years of silence, to apologize for all the wrongs you didn’t do. I never thought I’d hear from you again. After that conversation, I decided to sober up too, but when I sent you a text saying you inspired my sobriety, you didn’t reply back, and now I’m here writing this memorial about how much I miss you and how much I miss feeling your warm sweat sticking to my cold skin in that rusted and beat up Southern Pacific caboose in Brinkley, Arkansas.
Morgenrede is a Mid-Southern man who takes care of two cats and plays pinball in his off time. He has two self-published collections, 'Eyes Impaled by Spikes' and 'USING YOUR HAND TO BLOCK OUT THE SUN,' and one book of poetry titled 'ABUSER' that is published with Pig Roast Publishing.
