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Adam Moorad

Plateau

Plattekill

Batavia

Plateau

His heart attacks itself.  She rolls him over and summons the Medicine Man from the bingo parlor.  An Indian enters the Airstream an hour later, briefcase in hand containing a car battery and a set of jumper cables. Help him, she says. The Indian ushers her backward and clamps the cables to the sick man’s nipples.  His body flounders.  His mouth foams, teeth chattering white until he wakes, wet and sparking. She sponges his face.  Feeds him milk. The Indian snags a hornet from his pocket and grinds it with his thumb into a fine powder, scooping a bump from his palm with a shiv shaved from animal bone.  Snort this, the Indian says, pointing the blade. It’s a blood thinner. The man does not respond.  Please, she pleads.  You’re turning blue.  The Indian forces the dust down the man’s nostrils.  He survives, though every time he bumps a leg it bleeds uncontrollably.

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Plattekill

She shucks a turtle and boils it in vinegar broth.  Stirs it with a whisk.  Doles it into a paper cup and serves it with a ration of toast and beans.  The child devours it.  To her, it seems thinner than usual, its skin pale, face sunken and mumpy. Her spacey blue eyes water.  He is standing in the yard alone, watching the stacks smoke across the river. He cocks a caulking gun, sticks it up his nose. Hail Mary, he says and pulls the trigger. Life, he thinks, is just a habit anyway.

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Batavia

The child snipes a varmint with a .44. Head shaved. Nose rings swinging in a rush towards the kill.  The child touches varmint’s throat. Feels its swallow. Counts heartbeats until there’s nothing.  The varmint’s mouth falls open, appendages spread like a weathervane in the wild wheat, nose pointed south.  The child holds the varmint up by the feet and sniffs the bullet hole in the abdomen, never before sensing such warmth. Dusk settles on the ridge forming fog. A dense chill moves through the child, dropping the varmint, riding a dirt bike home. 

 

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Adam Moorad is a poet, salesman, and mountaineer. He is the author of Oak Ridge (Turtleneck Press, 2012). He lives in Brooklyn. Visit him here: adamadamadamadamadam.blogspot.com.

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