TWO THINGS by AVERY GREGURICH
Where Sometimes There’s Daffodils
Through the blinds I watch as she shakes the can, sprays a little more green paint across the mound of snow the plows have moved from this side of the street and given over to hers. First I think it might be some out-of-place alligator, but she sees something more sinister in the shape she’s been delivered. By afternoon a dragon emerges after she has emptied three cans of hiss into the beast. Satisfied, she tosses them into a pail and disappears only to return and grab a picture with her phone. I want to know what the caption says, maybe “This dragon will find its way someday into the wind.” Or “Caution: Dragon Crossing.” Either way it stares all night into my window with red-sprayed eyes. She keeps watch over it and me, page-turning on the porch and flicking her cigarette benignly as I come home from second shift. When the dragon leaves the next morning I just have to walk over to check for its skeleton, try to find the evidence that was left behind, but the dead grass is stained only in some parts. Turning back towards the house I follow a charred path until it becomes a road, a cracked highway, a chemical river, a bridge over no water, and delivers me to this castle: a 1911 American Foursquare from which we’ve watched it all burn. Never have I seen that beast again but knowing that it was here once and what winter can do, I pull the sword out of my throat, ever thankful for the pommel, and sharpen the point to something suitable for a thing with an aerosol heart. It is now just newly December and I am not cut out for this life on guard in this endless American century.
distrusting the gps and drifting
i become a cowboy named alias sharpening my throwing knives with a promotional knife sharpener garnished from my last life insurance agent. quilt-crazed eyes squinting in case of shrapnel, i am only a deputy who wishes he was sheriff. sheriffs get to sit wherever they wish at the boarding house dining table, ask dismissive questions to the quiet boy with the parrot on his shoulder. or they can deny the invitation to dine altogether, take the snifter of brandy while still sitting on their horse, pecos, a temperamental appaloosa picked up off the set of have gun—will travel. a skiddish thing, but still knows how to make real fine footage, canters to the exact cadence of “the ballad of paladin.” turns out most times what you want and what you get is decided by whoever is tilting the bottle. some days the bottle is empty. some nights you won’t even need a glass. even if i was what i always wanted to be, i guess i’d still take the trigger fingers off all my fallen enemies, mostly imagined, and bury them in someone else’s jade-fringed saddle bag. these fingers would belong to outlaws and rough customers clear by their big wandering eyes and intent to commit acts that we as a ragged collective have deemed impolite. cutting town at the end of each day’s episode, i’ll throw my knives behind me in a practiced star-shaped pattern, nicking wanted posters pinned beside hotel barroom mirrors. once i cut the headsman’s knot clean off a sheep farmer set to hang for his animals’ crimes. remember it’s every jailee who wants to wear the badge, forgetting for a moment that it is where they always used to aim when they were the ones haunting the laws. later, in the radio serial about my adventures, they will cast richard boone to read my voice, to relieve my ghost of its job, and i will finally retire far away from there. i’ll get to head up towards the big house this life in warrants has wrought, and i’ll take off my hat, covered in stage dust and sun-shocked. i’ll sling that ten-gallon up towards the big open sky in that sweet by and by, aiming for the rusted stuck-north weathervane up on the roof. that rooster is always crowing, hollering at the sun to stay, or maybe go, like that car horn behind me, goddammit, can’t you see that i am lost?
Avery Gregurich (he/him) is a writer living and working in Marengo, Iowa. He was raised next to the Mississippi River, and has never strayed too far from it. More of his work can be found at averygregurich.com.