We now live in a small town in the Blue Ridge mountains. As with most of Appalachia, people live in hollows. A hollow is like a hidden furrow on the planet. It would be possible to live in a hollow and never come out.

It’s that isolated. There are things under stones, and our backs are broken. Appalachia is bathed in paranoid animosity. I can’t say that we love, I suppose we do, but we are really, really good at hate. It cannot be an accident that I would live here. You are where you sleep.

We have one general store and a post office. That is all she wrote.

We call it Teenie Dick.

Everything you could possibly want is in the general store. WTF. Taco and Cheese Taquitos. Jack Links Thick Cut Hickory Smoked Bacon Jerky. Beef and Cheese Sticks. Single-Pot Portions Coffee Packets, Skullcandy Riff Wireless On-Ear Headphones, 30oz. Double Wall Vacuum Insulated Stainless Steel Tumbler Slurpee in pink only.

Big Gulp insulated Travel Mugs. High-chew Sensational Japanese Fruit Candy Superfruit. Tootsie Roll Gingerbread Cottage Kits. Salted Carmel Protein Balls. Novelty socks. Slurpee Fanny Packs. Slurpee 2 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drives. Carmel Flavored Popcorn. Carmel Flavored Fried Chicken.

You want it. We got it.

Moonshine and Bacon BBQ Burger.

There are no suburbs of Teeny Dick. Curly fries and onion rings. New Nachos Party Pack.

There are things under stones, and our backs are broken.

We do not fucking shop at the general store. We go into town for that. A long syringe has been stuck between the gristles bigger than before and funeral payments are paid installments.

Back in the woods there are some crumpled houses that do not count. As houses. Little white faces staring through the broken glass of windows. No one has been inside those shacks in years. Children of the sorrows and the dreamlessness of broken bone. The freeze will kill them all.

No one bothers us. No one knows where we live. Sometimes even we do not know where we live beyond the middle of the night where memory is without a god.

The sumac and the withered moon are bewildered. Death and sex desire us, and they can have us, too. The curtains are always drawn.

There are things under stones, and our backs are broken. I stand out on the veranda steps, smoking weed, and I watch the herds of zebras thunder down the mountain slopes creating clouds of dust and then they disappear.

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Tim Barrus

Tim Barrus Blog

Posts tagged with junk-food-of-appalachia

There Are Things Under Rocks, And Our Backs Are Broken