I spent Thanksgiving handcuffed to the snowblower in the shed behind our house.
Snowblower is chained to the shed because there are a lot of tweakers in our town and they like to steal snowblowers.
You can blow a whole shitload of snow high on crystal meth, make some decent money.
My dad handcuffed me to the snowblower.
I hope he don’t expect me to eat Christmas dinner with the family.
Maybe I ain’t invited anyway.
Two days before Thanksgiving I was fiddlin’ around on the internet, watching monkeys jump on to tourists from a flag pole at an embassy somewhere, some guy trying to eat an entire pig by hisself in a day–he did it, but it was all edited and stuff, so who really knows, and then I seen this girl in a bikini playing an accordion.
The accordion covered her face, and the words on the screen said her name was Hillary, and she had a rare blood cancer, and she needed money to go to Norway to play her accordion before she died.
I guess the girl in the video wore the bikini to get people to stop and peep the video.
Maybe the girl in the video is snatched or something, I don’t exactly think so.
She’s lit at the accordion though, because my grandfather taught her to play.
She ain’t real bright though, because she could have wore a different bikini, one that covered up the tattoo of the little salamander with the initials N.R., which stands for Nick Ryan, who was my best friend and her boyfriend for 8 months outta last year.
And her name ain’t Hillary, it’s Aymy Dean, and she’s my sister, which anyone in Morton coulda told ya, especially Boot Tellefer, who did the damn tattoo.
I was confused, until I read the comments, all the people who said they CashDropped her 20 bucks and God Bless her and they were prayin’ for her.
All them people out there, taking their real money and givin’ it to a girl who said she was seventeen, but she’s twenty, and she ain’t goin’ to Norway, she’s going to that tire balancing joint out on 52, that little sliver of land tucked behind the Vista Drive-In, where they got the plug on meth and ice and who the hell knows, and when I seen that video I knew she ain’t lost all that weight from that damn yoga video she got for her birthday.
I found her. Called her Hillary to her face. Slapped the damn stem right out her mouth, and yeah, my hand hit some of her face too, and that’s the only part she told our Dad.
I sat there, cuffed to that damn snowblower. Told the old man about the video, the lie.
He didn’t get it.
He’s the CEO of not getting it.
Aymy Dean, with her thirsty-ass accordion video, I know she barely touched Thanksgiving dinner.
I was handcuffed to the snowblower. A snowblower she’ll never have to steal.
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Riveting, haunting. There's a lot of bitterness in the story. I liked it a lot.
It IS haunting, seeing you in the cold shadows, handcuffed to that snowblower, hoping this is no one’s childhood memory. Because it rings true.