anti:freeze

If you can imagine panning for concrete chips like they were gold, then you can imagine my grandmother's porch in Froelich, Iowa. This was my father's mother. She lived 100 miles away, in a town with four houses and an abandoned country store. I always slept the whole drive, waking when the car tires popped over the gravel, or when we slowed at the intersection with the rusted Stop sign planted in a small cement island. And if you can imagine the taste of blisters, or the texture of a dirty penny scraping against your teeth, or stale water leaking from a rusty pump in the backyard, or plastic checker pieces clicking against each other inside the box, then you can imagine how the flakes tasted when I put them in my mouth, pieces of the porch chipping away at my teeth. I used to walk to the abandoned store and stare through the dirty windows, dreaming of women in checkered dresses, or men with their overalls and cracked hands. There was a sign hanging over the front door, one of those classic Coca-Cola ads, the ones you see on collector's tins, from when the kick was cocaine, not caffeine, always a brunette starlet raising her glass, always the deep red background. It was fading. All that was left of the brunette was a round hip, a lock of hair, and the shiny bones of her ankle. Sometimes I stood on the little bridge over the creek and looked at the trash in the water, old bicycles and tires, pieces of tractors - who could get away with litter in this town? Once, I saw a blue leg sticking out from beneath an oily motor, but no one believed me.