Bessie Nightly

                           Pardon my late-pajama afterglow dear Bessie, as a light drizzle settles beneath the lazy residential backyard tree-stump perimeter. In ages grown worn through afternoon fabric embroidering and brisk lunchtime seasoning. Bessie offers me desolate bedtime stories and hand-me down garments of grim yesterdays along stained-glass Baptist cathedrals. Centuries weaved by the old thimble and brass medallion. Once upon a century: a trophy wife, a young beautiful bride to a well decorated World War 2 veteran. Old rusted tea kettles and brand varnished brush strokes.
                          Vintage nylon tucked away neatly in bedroom drawers, layered in faded timeline sequins. Bourbon and dingy drapery align her household windows. Dusted in the graveyard aftermath, gone overseas in abandoned railway transportation boundary-line stations. The old summer grove homeland stretches out beyond the winding Mississippi. Drunk by 5 p.m. and nowhere close to the ancient burial wetlands, mama would rub Kentucky whiskey on her gums as an infant.
                          "The Wright Brothers got nothing on me, who would have known the bastards were right", she stares into her nightly scotch highball. I sit across from Bessie, between a plywood coffee-table, below incandescent light fixtures, sighing intermittently, as random thoughts breeze through my fatigued conscious. Martha (my ex-wife) was a young vibrant woman; with an uncanny knack for crossword puzzles, when she grew heated she would insult me in Latin. Well-read and insanely bipolar, I would know when she stopped taking her medication. I can only listen to Bessie for so long before I become extremely drunk and anti-social. A character flaw I always possessed (even as a young boy in cemetery courtyard surroundings)
                           I moved in with old Bessie about a year and a half ago, when I could no longer afford to pay mortgage on the estate after Martha left (bah! she took the kids with her, she can have 'em!) I earn my keep by stripping down to my bare essentials on cue, (when the vocals come in on track 8 of Sinatra's first studio album, it is a great album though.) Continuing onward we commence to have a rather personal exchange of angel food cake and peppermint patties, she then stuffs a two-dollar bill up my anus, laughs hysterically so that angel food cake disperses from her nose out onto the plywood coffee table (some cake lands in her highball as well, she slugs it all down in one clamorous gulp when the song ends and the ceremony climaxes). She then throws her elderly granny panties at me, making me parade in front of the living room window butt-ass naked with the panties around my neck, usually by this time of the evening I'm so intoxicated that I don't even care anymore. Thank god for Bessie though, she is a damned good looking gal for an eighty-nine year old. I'm still that lost little boy that needs old Bessie to take care of me. Martha was right, she knew I started seeing Bessie before she left me.