There's No Place Like Home

I come from a land of red neck drinkers, who mount deer heads on walls without sheetrock. It was a simpler time then. You shot or hooked what you ate. I can smell the butter blackening in Gram’s cast-iron fry pan, the smell mixing with that of the open flame on the gas water heater, which stood in the tiny kitchen and the purple-red deer meat, as it sizzled. I can still see the gash in the imprinted flowers on the homemade butter; its beauty martyred to slather the pan. The butter, in its depression-glass dish, sits atop a white porcelain table with a red edge. I kneel on one of the chairs, staring past the potted violets out the picture window toward the house next door. My knees knock the edge and the silverware bangs in its hidden draw.

I come from a land where, through a picture perfect window, a little girl can 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.