Adrian was a Uranium Miner.

Sissy

Last time I saw Sissy was from the window of the car leaving Arkansas for North Carolina. I was a little boy and she was a little girl in a straight cotton dress. It had some sort of pattern on it. She might have been crying. I felt a lump in my throat.
I remember when before then we were on the street. There was a hill we were on like a ridge and he land fell away to where below was another road, street.
It was summer. There was dirt in the ditch beside the road, and brown grass attempted another color. Sissy had a strange voice. It was deeper than other girls, like near scratchy. I’ve known two girls with that voice.
Sissy loved me. I remember the way she held out her hand as the car accelerated away. The window of the car is the frame of our life in this life. Every music video, every band, goes for a drive. They are in the frames of the windows. The windows out of the car frame what they see.
I can she her hand held out like in a silent movie. We didn’t know anything about how to act. We just were. We didn’t know our parents. We didn’t know anything, because we were kids. First grade was a big deal. I’d done first grade. Then we left town.
So the love between us was all ours. True romance. Nothing psychological like the known patterns of how mom or dad treated you. We loved each other equally. We had found each other in the yards and streets of the huge world that other people lived in.
She held her hand out with the fingers spread. She held it still. She was crying.
I was in the car. All of us were in the back seat. We were small people.
We didn’t know anything.
Write? Get two way radios? Where was I before?
It was Jonesboro Arkansas. Brown grass and deep dust bowl ditches. Land in steps.
End of the street where it took a turn towards the dairy farm where the milk came from and the forest started and went away towards the end of the Earth.
Then the high street, and the backyards from there all fell away and below then the next step and another lower street and then somewhere further on, the University of Arkansas.
Gold and Crimson. A football game. Marchers in tasseled tall hats.
The town was a movie theater.
I never went into a store. I never bought anything.
Saturday and we watched cartoons.
I remember Sissy and I playing in the leaves. First sex was just showing each other what we had in-between our legs.
We were seen doing it by someone in the window.
Dust. Dust of leaves. Itchy. Rustling sounds as we moved. Wasn’t any season.
We were innocent. Why change?
I’d been to school and everything about that was incredible and the lies started and people in uniforms nuns wore carried weapons.
Sticks with numbers on them.
Stick out your hand. I want to hit your hand. I want to hurt you. You made some noise. You cried.
I have to hit you.
Hit you. Hit you. I went to school to be hit. I went to school to be lied to.
We didn’t know what love was. Some of life is forever. I know Sissy remembers me.