Soap (WIP) part 2

I had everything a guy could imagine, a trendy home, a trendy car, and a trendy girlfriend. As long as the books were selling, things were pretty awesome, but when the books stopped selling there went the house, the car, and the girlfriend. That's right, my life was a country and western song. Not even a top selling one, one of those songs that starts out in your mother's kitchen. She's humming while kneading some bread. The song doesn't make it any further than the front porch, while your mother is picking peas, your sister is peeling taters, and you are practicing your whittling with a bar of soap. Yet, I suppose it doesn't need to go any further than that. Because you know deep down, no one will ever sing it the way that Mama does.

The house was one of those country colonials, located in the middle of bum fuck Egypt. The place was supposedly good for writers, you know, serenaded by the silence, listening to the wind, or whatever ridiculous bullshit your realtor came up with before they separate you from some insanely large amount of money, never would you have considered spending just a year ago, back when you were a runny nose away from being homeless. A time when that master's degree in English literature you're so damn proud of; scored you a job making a dollar and quarter more than minimum wage at the local five and dime. It leaves you longing for the nights spent at the all-night diner, how you sat in the corner booth nursing a cup of burnt mud and playing with the loose corner of Formica on the tabletop. The kind of diner where the waitresses remember your order. They are the unsung beauty queens, who couldn't catch a break. You know, they were the actresses and the singers who took this job until they landed that big role or were discovered in a record store singing along to Paul Simon. Yet, they are refilling your coffee with weary crooked smiles fifteen years later. It is there in that same booth that you scribbled the opening scene to the novel that sent you into country living. The country where no one warned you about the enormous winter propane bill, the well water, higher gasoline prices, or the noisy neighbor with droopy boobs. Now, I really don't have anything against droopy boobs on an older woman; gravity and all, but this woman was in her early thirties. Every time I had a conversation with her, I swallowed a delicious desire to scream “Go put on a damn bra!!!”