"Darlene." An Unfinished Story

A Story by bryandredla

I'm sure its a true story somewhere

Nothing is more disappointing than trying to figure out what you’re going to be because your parents keep bringing it up. “What is the big thing you’re going to do with the one life you have?” F**k I mean is nothing scarier than the fact that you don’t know. That you’ll never know. Not like anyone plans to be a gas station attendant, but the world needs them. I guarantee that “Jimmy,” down at the Pump and Peel didn’t plan to work at that station on his twenty-seventh birthday, but I highly doubt it was from a lack of planning. Some people just need to be in this world to ask if you know about the corn nut deal that’s going on. You see Pump and Peel Jimmy isn’t a bad guy, sure he is the guy who stares at your girlfriends a*s every time she goes to grab a iced tea from the station, but that’s just Pump and Peel Jimmy, your girlfriends a*s is the highlight of his day. Jimmy even moved the iced teas from the middle of the shelf to the bottom row so “they’d get colder,” ok Jimmy well go with that sounds better than “she doesn’t bend her knees when she gets her drink off the bottom shelf.” And he just hates when she bends her knees. Pump and Peel Jimmy lives at home with his folks still, he calls it a “pretty good gig,” sure occasionally his dad will stir up some s**t from his past because it’s the reason he asks “cash or credit?” now between hits from Jimmy’s doobie. That’s just Jimmy’s dad though. Military Mel, the kids call him, he’s missing a leg and tells war stories on the porch drunk sometimes, but Military Mel never was in a war, he was in a war but not in a war, in a war. He was the man who takes notes, writes down the speeches they make before any press got ahold of the story. But Military Mel lost his leg a long time after the war, to be honest it was kind of sad. It was the previous generation that knows the true story, it was before Pump and Peel Jimmy was born. Big as the world is, with each birth it shrinks a little more. This town used to be smaller, less people, so everybody knew everybody. Mel was a big shot, when he had both legs for kicking a*s. He was successful as you could be, for about as long as anyone was in this shithole of a town. He had his own business, he made and sold his own moonshine. Overnight Military Mel became Malpractice Mel, but only behind his back, never to his face. He was a doctor of making moonshine, once in a while you can still find a lid around town half buried in dirt written in old marker on the silver top written, “Mad Mels Full Moon.” Peaches, Mel can’t stand the smell of them to this day, on account of the peach moonshine batch that cost him his leg. The irony of a fruit almost making him a vegetable. Mel was always a heavy smoker, whether it was pot or tobacco nobody ever cared to ask. That night Mel must have been sampling his Peach Full Moon because the front of his overalls were covered in it, well piss and shine. Mel got real drunk that night, much as it hurt him, probably saved his life, that much alcohol in the blood. If you drink enough it’ll slow it down, the blood flow that is. When your legs saturated and you’re piss drunk having fell asleep with the cherry still glowing from your smoke, you’ll do just about anything to stop your leg from being on fire. Especially if you can’t get out of those damn overalls you’ve been meaning to have your wife fix the clasp on. Anything to get out, hell even if it means taking your left leg off at the knee with your own machete, you keep by your shine tanks ‘case anybody interferes with your distilling process. So after you hack the first time you probably realize, well maybe you don’t, not until the second or third swing of your arm down on your leg, that “S**t! You weren’t stuck in the overalls at all,” you just assumed they were the pair with the broken clasp and panicked. By now your leg is not attached anymore, just the last bit of pant leg is holding the new slab of meat that used to be your calf to the rest of you that’s not gonna become barbeque if you can help it. Through the flame you give the pant leg one final hack and you can hear the jean rip, followed by the thud of your calf hitting the hard dirt below you. Sure you could try to save it but you’ve got one leg now, running to the other side of the house where the hose is, isn’t really an option. All you can do is sit back where you were, the last time you had use for a matching pair of shoes. All you can do is watch your skin burn off of your “ex-leg,” maybe you call for your wife “Darlene!” Maybe you don’t, you’re drunk and bleeding out, you stop for a second and try to remember this feeling you’re having. Or at least memorize it, since you think you are about to die, just might be the last memory you ever get, don’t worry you’re just losing consciousness, not dead, not quite yet.