Iglesia …………Episode 2

.

.

.

.

.The phone rang.

She had just huddled around her coffee and a tiny spark of inner warmth she had suddenly found lurking about. Fuck it, that was Frank’s job. No way was she getting up.

.

After the third ring the snoring stopped. After the fourth, a profane muttering arose. After the fifth the ringing stopped. After a few minutes the door burst open and Frank strode in, cigar smoke trailing around him like flames from the Hindenburg. His newly slept in, disarrayed fringes of hair made him look vaguely like a salt and pepper Bozo the Clown. Once again she had the urge to arrest him for felony comb over.

“Pack up, we’re gone.”

The smoke encased words hung in the air like salvation itself. She felt warmer already.

“They got Tan?”

“Caught him trying to swim the border, ” Frank coughed. “We don’t need to watch the little fish anymore, let’s go home.” A battalion sized SWAT team pulled up outside the window and swarmed the house across the street.

“Home” she said.

Dammit. Here we go again, she thought, as she thought of home, as the word home itself set her off on yet another uncontrollable tangled thought tangent. The vibrational frequency of the word itself sucking her into another episodal memory. Sometimes she felt like she was just an expository ploy in some cheap novel.

Again she wondered if other folks….she resisted saying ‘normal’ folks …..as she still held out hope for being ‘normal’ herself….did other folks do this? Go off on long internal rambles trying to make sense of their lives? Just like wondering how cold she was in comparison to others, it was not something you could really ask someone else. Well, not and still hold out for normality. She considered asking Frank if he went off on long mental thought tangents triggered by a feeling or a word or a smell that popped up.

Then she laughed at herself. Frank looked at her in that way and then went back to packing. There was a small explosion across the street. She packed too, but as she did she thought about home.

Which hurt.

Since it was under water now.

When she thought about …that, she always smelled wet chicken feathers. Weird. Growing up on her families spread on the coast had been wonderful. Goats, chickens, cows and horses. Vultures and hawks soaring in the azure bowl of endless sky. Summer heat bouncing of the blacktop and the smell of baking tumbleweeds and sagebrush and the salt of the sea air. Back when living on the coast was a good thing. She remembered how her Moth… “HEY!” Do you want to get out of this dump or what?” There was another small explosion and the smell of tear gas wafting. Some sporadic gunfire.

She threw her empty coffee cup at him and started hauling their equipment down to the van. She was cold again, down on the pavement. The house across the street was quiet, now.