"I don't want the world, I just want your half."

Things fall from the sky all the time ‘round here: the whitening spine of a small bird, a red truck with no tires, yellow squash and the wreckage of bones, muddy scraps of fabric overgrown with pink tea roses, a glass printed photograph of a bare-chested boy weeping by what appears to be a campfire.

The sun whitened shed within which this tale is told reads simply J in red on the left exterior wall facing the lonesome road. The door is forged from a beer bottle’s glass: warped, brown, a prison tattoo cut across the belly of the structure. Inside, forearms splayed across the bar, a recalcitrant Permelia Dawn protests, “I am not a floozy.” She’s right; she’s not.

If we are shooting for vraisemblance then she is a dead ringer for the punctuative silence coiled between the full-sound of ocean waves. Or she’s like afterbirth: milky (not creamy), pink, lanky, plain, and riddled with debris. Her hair slinks about her temples. She barely draws breath through cracked lips, endlessly pulling on a dull gold chain looped around her greasy neck. Dampness skulks about her lean flesh evoking the vague scent of gardens. Legend has it if you lick her skin long enough you’ll eventually taste emeralds.

Permelia is aware that this introduction urges her flooziness past the borders that her limpid brown hair and dish-shaped face would suggest. This is intentional; it marches in lockstep with the repository of brutal wisdom our darling Permelia has managed to thumb down whilst waiting outside the crumbling all night truck stop that circumscribes her waking hours. Someone will pin down her arms someday; she knows that much. If possible she would like to pick who that will be, within reason of course.

“If you wanna get something back it’s got have the right look when you put it out there.” Diner talk, Sella is always saying that. That and, “Jus’ don’t get in the way of the paid whores.”

Permelia’s own hand-whittled opus of ironic detachment can be compacted into a sweet nutmeat of pithy sentiment. Her mantra – the sleazier, the easier – bears identical meaning and taste whether one is: in or out, backwards or forwards, coming up or going down. This symmetry of form and function dizzies Permelia; it swells her to bursting with verdant delight.

“My dear Captain, I’m dreadfully afraid I can’t be of any help. I’m not a floozy. Oh, I ammm not.” Permelia extends a firm, pasty hand, “I just play one on TV.” Shows teeth, “I’m Permelia Dawn. But Padre you, you can call me Poppy.” References to television stoke the flames of Permelia’s militaristic devotion to duality.

Whenever her mouth stretches out the syllables, ‘Ohn—Tee—Vee,’ air careens out spinning itself solid; the sound dallies on the surface of her lips, a selfish lover huffing the intoxicant of hope filled saliva. This deliciously addictive hope centers around Permelia’s faith that if she is, in fact, playing the role of a floozy on television she must, by logic, possess a parallel life somewhere that does not involve this existence here.

It has not yet occurred to our young Permelia (but it sure as shit will, and soon) that if she has to spit-shine feces all day just to keep afloat, erstwhile parallel Permelia can lay claim to a dog, a pony, a boyfriend, a library card and a small efficiency with a second hand couch that doesn’t smell stale in the least, if all this is so, well hot damn. That would make this here the worst joke ever told in human history. For fuck’s sake, parallel Permelia can even hold her liquor.

The ill-fated bastard that has been scuttling ever closer and closer to her for the last hour has made it within range. He mutters inanities hollowed out by scientific pomp and circumstance into her blameless left ear. She picks up on something like, “...try to pay particular attention to the clarity of the high tones...sense the total two channel stereo separation...” and so on and so forth. His presence claws at her nose hairs bringing with it a bouquet of stagnant water and decaying matter left to rot under the merciless summer sun.

More than anything Permelia pines for an existence of a caliber in which her panty drawer is perpetually tidy and color-coded. She had grander dreams at one time: taking an air balloon ride, becoming a tiger, bedding a man for once, studying to be an ichthyologist. And then the one dream so stunning she didn’t like to think about it too much because it might lose its gloss. This dream brimmed overfull with lots of twinkling little lights, a Town green, a car hood, a carnival and finally a personal loss of gravity. Permelia would float in a slow angular trajectory right up and off of the Ferris wheel, dissolving into a pillar of sugar only to dissipate in the light summer breeze. The best part of the whole thing was that no one, not a solitary soul, witnessed her wafting off.

After one too many uninspiring rounds of slap and tickle with some under inspiring gentleman, the underwear idea buoyed up to the surface of her watery consciousness. The dream was birthed like an ever-expanding sponge creature from a toy capsule submerged in a glass of water on a kitchen counter. It is, she rationalizes, the most feasible option; faded, royal blue and shaped like a giraffe this soggy desire sloshes its way along the brackish backwater of Permelia’s mind.

She has never been afraid of much except driving by gas trucks on the highway; she doesn’t want to burn up. Our girl is glutted with fight; however, she possesses little to no inclination toward flight. All things being equal Permelia just doesn’t much care; one feeling is just the same as the next. Like her father used to say whilst pissing away her stability with a sodden persistence, “It doesn’t take a wet, naked woman long to get a helping hand around Cleveland or Vladivostok or anywhere else for that matter.” Thus, her emergency – code red, break the glass, pull out the big guns – plan is to rip off her clothes and spit on herself (unless there is a lot of water close by).

Suddenly struck rabid, with an unexpected fervor the stereophile squashes his left hand between her thighs and starts to jangle around his “magic fingers.” Revulsion – instinctual, guttural, and rot gut – lurches into action. Permelia dry heaves the syllables, “I can vivisect you in a heartbeat, Jackson. Break bones and crack cartilage.” Her thighs clamp around his hand, yet his fingers persist in twitching like hacked up earthworms trying to crawl back into wet soil. With his free hand he gathers a fistful of her new peach blouse and jerks her closer. The ringed musculature of his thin lips grinds against hers, “Let’s get rid of this sepia tone bullshit and get wired to the real party.”

Her bones loosen their adjectives and unlace their flesh. In a flash of copper wire transmission Permelia knows the whole parallel/dualism grift for what it is. As her breath spirals into an infernal gallop she reflects: So, this is where terror initiates itself, through a small hole that was not there the last time you looked.

The stereophile’s moustache senses the danger first. He scans her eyes with what can only be described as a cryptanalytic focus. Barbarism percolates within his bowels, bubbling into his throat. The sound balls up and catches, trussed up like a bank robber on the criminal whipping post of language.

At this moment, Detroit Cain (which is not his real name at all) enters the joint and sees Permelia. Upon his first faint whiff of her some unknown quantity shifts quite uncomfortably within his ego. A new doxology is conquering his matter and it demands to be sung. As it infiltrates him he knows (in a stock blinding flash) five absolute truths. This is more than he will ever know again:

ONE: He has to buy her a drink and drink it with her.

TWO: An isolating magic riots around her skull and it will be her undoing.

It is manifest in a raging crown of what at first appears to be fiberglass tongues dancing above her sweet brown head of hair. He notes this because no else seems to, at least not that jackhole in the yellow sweater. Who is he and why is she with him?

These are anything but your average tongues of spirit. Upon further observance he realizes that they are pure cotton candy spinning out from her head, emerging from her ears and splitting out in a pattern akin to those line drawings of tree branches taught in elementary school art classes. (A wobbly V sideways and from one side of that haphazard V another sideways splintered V and on and on ad infinitum.) The air here is hung with intertwined sweet pink cotton V’s.

THREE: He would, at this moment, rather have a steak with her than do her. To be more frank, he would rather watch her eat a rare slab of steak without utensils than do her. If he has to eat a steak as well to earn the privilege of watching her chew her rare steak while hot blood dribbles down her chin, well then, he most certainly will.

FOUR: Number four he can’t quite explain. Her tongue is a canary. What? Her tongue is a canary and her mouth a deep, black and blasted tunnel. God only knows what will come out.

FIVE: On this last one he gets a little choked up, exhibiting his signature glumness. Number one and Number three will never happen. Or perhaps, it is just best that they never happen here. He is far too late and too green to navigate her seas.

Permelia’s temper breeches the surface right on time, all dolled up and ready to tango. In back of her skull words careen into each other and force themselves through her clamped teeth. Detroit Cain can’t quite make out what she is saying to the man in the yellow sweater. This is for the best. Just a few steps closer in and Detroit Cain would have been in love.

She rams the sound of it right down the stereophile’s throat, “Kissing wants for blood some days.” When it is done she licks her lips and wipes her mouth.

The stereophile grabs at her hair, but he recoils instantaneously about a foot from her head. His paws clenched; his worm fingers bramble torn and sticky. He bawls, “What, what, what, what...” as he launches backwards off the bar stool. His urine yellow sweater absorbs a thin drizzle of blood. His ass makes a plaintive, wet sound as he skids across the hard surface of the floor.

It felt sublime. The only thing Permelia regrets about biting him is that she had to taste him to do it.

With a weak expulsion of air he manages to choke out, “Come back when you’re ripe.” Underneath his bloody brown pants the stereophile grows limp and contents himself with sucking on his wounded lip.

Permelia loses her mind. From the cavernous O of her demented mouth the sharpest syllabic extensions screech forth, violently coupling with the most loving sounds: geese, strawberries on the porch swing, the starkest mission walls, the empty steeple rubbing along the neckline of the sky where it meets the hills and scars a black line between the two, her ankle in blood, burning a tick, a bucket on the table, wheat…

Permelia is a small child wakening from a powdered-sugar, summer night under a tall tree dream. And as quick as it had begun she falls mute; the silvered brightness of heaven goes dark, but the damage has been done. Her brain is a wind-up doll wound out and busted.

“I see you looking.” She senses Detroit Cain, “I see you looking at me.”

“Huh, and so?” sputters Cain limply.

“Was it a dog I lost? Am I looking for my dog?”

Offering his hand to her with a gesture not devoid of a schoolboy's rakish charm,“I’m Detroit Cain.”

“No.” She studies him, troubled; her eyes sinking away from him, deep into the suboceana of her blasted skull, “No, you most certainly are not.”

And with that, this Permelia Dawn, is just gone.