I got to get us married.
He remembered a place on the other side of the river, down in the defunct riverside town of SoulPort where drunks or just plain stupid folk could get themselves hitched fast as a dog can stop running to lick its butt.
LEAVING SOULPORT BY JEFFREY FLANNERY 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 35
I got to get us married, he said. But how was the goddamn question. Couldn’t go to the courthouse. No, that option was out. One look at her vacant, unknowing eyes and the magistrate would figure rightly something was wrong. He remembered a place on the other side of the river, down in the defunct riverside town of SoulPort. It had been years ago, but he recalled a small chapel over there, a shack really, where drunks or just plain stupid folk could get themselves hitched fast as a dog can stop running to lick its butt.
He sat there and picked through her jewelry box, wondering if he had already pawned her old wedding ring. He found a pair of onyx earrings which he thought she should wear, and then, with some surprise, an antique-looking ring.
What is this? he asked her. I ain’t never seen this before.
She was sitting on the bed looking down at her hands. She did not move or otherwise answer him. It was a strange ring that looked like Christ’s headband of thorns, them dirty gold strands wrapped about some brown-looking stone, not rightly appropriate but it would have to do.
I gave my first wife the largest diamond that could be found in the Quad Cities, he told her, hell maybe nothing so big could be found in Chicago then neither. Before they began making diamonds, that is, making them fake diamonds. Real diamonds are supposed to be forever you know, he said, staring into the jewelry box as if peering at the edge of some previously unfelt chamber in his mind. Too bad love ain’t, he said closing the box with a loud snap.
She jerked violently with the sound, sitting as she was on the edge of the bed, the slippers about to fall off from her purplish feet which did not quite touch the carpeted floor.
Sorry, he said, I forget sometimes.
He then dressed her up in a clean cotton sun dress, white with blue flowers, a dress he remembered she had worn to a friend’s wedding a few years ago. She loved getting gussied up cuz then she knew they were going somewhere. She was happiest whenever they left the house and went for a drive. And so on this Saturday they was going for a real drive, across the bridge that spanned the Mississippi and then descended in a snake’s tail into SoulPort.