Less Than Perfect

I came from a land of redneck drinkers, who mounted deer heads on walls without sheetrock. It was a simpler time. You shot or hooked what you ate. A wood stove heated the whole house. It ran on bottled propane when wood was scarce. I can still smell the blackening butter and hear the purple-red deer meat sizzling in Gram’s cast-iron fry pan on that day. I can see the knife gash in the imprint of flowers on the homemade butter. Its beauty marred to lather the pan as mine had been. Each day since then, as I knelt on the chair staring past the potted violets toward the house next door, I'd shiver. whispers breach the bedroom walls: chain-locked door I came from a land where, through a picture perfect window, a little girl could see rows of candy-colored gladiola’s growing beside the home of the neighbor boys. The boys whose Father liked to flash his private parts to little girls. No, this was not the end of the yellow brick road, but the land of bullies, beer, and bullshit pedophiles, far from picture perfect.