Leather Death Fruit And Flying — A Consideration I. Glaring off black steel and thick chrome of a dozen airbrushed Harleys lined up like a column of black seeds on the sidewalk’s ledge, the sun screams: “For the sake of Henry Ford, stop the madness.” Yes, there are men with long beards and goatees, dark jeans and leather vests, sunglass wrapped around their tanned skulls and women with black shirts and bandannas, long hair and blue tattoos who hang off their men like jukebox songs after last call, like juice dripping from an elbow, a wrist. II. Greasy spoon. Old men and women with coffee. Plates of toasted hash-browns and
and stacked chipped beef. Cigarettes smoldering in yellow ashtrays. Everyone eyes the scene outside. III. The crowd gathers like ants on a dropped ice cream cone. Like old men at the porn store. Like flowers on a casket. IV. A biker studies the geography of watermelon littering the street--juice and pits and green shells with the guts hanging out. He finds an unbroken one thrown against his bike’s tire, picks it up, breaks, bites, chews, spits seeds into the gutter. V The history of the moment--what they saw: The couple with matching black helmets raced by on a rice burner as the rusted Chevy bearing hundreds of watermelons pulled out. An argument of metal and flesh ensued. People on the street dropped their bags. People in the stores gaped. People in their cars pulled over. A woman with short red hair jogged down the street with her hand over her mouth like she was going to be sick. Like she saw a woman in a movie who witnessed something horrific, and this was how that actress had reacted. The wife or girlfriend lay still in the gutter’s arm, her helmet cracked and beaming: a split black egg in the sun. Originally published in Sub-Terrain |
