How the Hula Girl Sings by Joe Meno

Author:Joe Meno
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2013-10-06T21:00:00+00:00

strange customer

This place where I worked could be as strange and unpredictable as a night out kissing Charlene. Most of the time it was pretty dull and quiet. People usually just came in and filled their cars up and paid for their gas. But other times that gas station might be lurid and mean.

It all started with a bird.

I had been involved with a big 350-cid V-8 engine in a most personal way. Those sweet silver cylinders had me pulled in right down to their fiery pistons locked in place on a glossy magazine page.

Then a black bird hit the front glass window. It knocked me right out of my daydreaming during the middle part of my shift.

BOOM!!!

I snapped right awake.

The bird hit the glass and disappeared, dropping down into the dirt. It was one of those big black crows that ate all the dead things that drifted along the side of the road, this big black crow just plowed straight into the front glass window there and snapped its feathery neck and fluttered and twitched in place, caw-caw-cawing and hissing where it had bounced off the shiny glass. Then it landed and became silent and still in the dusty gray dirt.

There was no mark that it had smacked the glass except for a single spot where the damn thing’s beak had hit. I looked out the window and stared at the spot and caught a glimpse of

Junior’s sign all in the same wink.

Fuel-line cleaner

on special

do shine

here thru

munificent dirt

I hopped from behind the counter and stepped outside. There it was, all puffed up and broken and bent, with its thick black wings fluttering and trembling in place, pounding its head against the dusty gravel as a line of blood dripped from its open beak.

CAW-CAW-CAW!!! it howled, pounding its thick little head against the ground. CAW-CAW-CAW!!! Its wings twisted up together one last time, in a kind of mockery of flight, then it fell still and collapsed on its side, breathing heavily, then lightly, then not at all.

I took all this to be a bad sign, and once I was sure it was dead and the first fly had landed upon the bird’s open eye, I picked it up by its one broken wing and dropped it out back in the trash, gritting my teeth. I went back inside and washed my hands and stared at the shiny spot on the window.

A prostitute came in like a bad dream. It was the woman I had paid to make it with the first night I spent in town. She looked skinny and long and steady, and stunk of a desperate kind of perfume.

Then there was this sound. This sound she kept making. It rose right from her chest, a jerking kind of sound, like one of the valves of her heart was loose. It was the sound of something running on down. Trapped. Her heart gave another little start as she spoke and asked for a pack of smokes, leaning against the counter with a sigh and a low broken cough.

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