jimmy sue.

two birds sit on a fence post. one is blue, the other red. a cardinal. the birds peck their necks towards each other and away as if they are talking and also observing something else, perhaps watching the two figures who appear below them, stepping into the cemetery, leaves crunching underneath their feet.

the only other presence in this graveyard, a single man attending the graves in the far corner, his leaf blower blowing away. clearing away branches and cobwebs and wet leaves from the graves. it is not the oldest or newest graves that make him saddest, but the ones right in the middle. Too old to be remembered or visited every week and too recent to be interesting to those visting the cemetery for kicks. he is unclear which these two people are—mourners or voyeurs. he supposes they could be both. both is an altogether natural thing to be. voyeurism isn’t a crime, after all we set huge stones at the end of our dead bodies with glaring titles: BELOVED WIFE AND DAUGHTER. he wonders if you don’t have relationships to defined yourself by, do you put BELOVED POSTMAN? can you be a beloved person without other eyes to validate your existence? he sets these thoughts aside as his leaf blower becomes jammed.

goddamnit.

he whispers under his breath. this always happens, but the county won’t pay for a new one. fine, he says, it’s your funeral, at every budget meeting, without a hint of humor. people are so flimsy these days.

he watches the duo quietly now as the leaf blower gives one last great snort, like a dying camel, and goes silent. without his tool, he feels far more exposed. they are walking slowly. one has a striped scarf—pink and brown and red—all colors that too closely resemble one another, he reasons. the scarfed person appears to be female, though she either has quite short hair or it is shoved up underneath her green beanie. the other is wearing a spiffy black wool jacket with the collar popped in such a way as if to signal, “i’m not from around here.”

the worker wonders where he is from. he could be from a great big city far from this little town. mostly people are only from the great big city of chicago, about a two hour drive away. he’d only been twice. once for an award he won. and two for a job interview at the sears tower. he had dreamt for a while of being a security guard there, but then 9/11 happened and he reasoned that he’d be far safer in winnebago than in chicago working at the sears tower. and besides, he didn’t even know where he would find a place to live in chicago. he did like their beer selections though. winnebago did not have much in the way of exciting new drafts, as they call them in the cities.

sometimes in his kitchen at night, he would pretend to be at a fancy beer tasting. he would take down his best mugs and clean them extra good and put them in a row on the table. then he would put on his tuxedo t-shirt and comb what little hair he had back so that it stayed put—it’s little lines like composition pages on the sides of his head. then he would pour a guinness, and a stout and other kinds of beers and he would drink each glass and say things like, “ah, the hops. the hops!!” sometimes he got so drunk he would accidentally drop the glasses on the floor. he had lost several mugs this way now and made a rule that he had to sign a promise to himself to not get too drunk. just drunk enough that his third wife’s face left his mind and that he could jack off to the model in the farm ’n’ fleet catalogue. she was atop a tractor, which he liked. he liked a woman who’s not afraid of hard work and simple things. but she also needed to be soft. the kind of softness that he could melt into. the kind of softness that would pick up his smashed beer glass and coo, “it’s quite alright, jimmy sue. you’ve had too much for you.” and she would take him in her hands, rhymes aside, and give him the best darn hand job this side of the mississippi.

he was a big fan of hand jobs. maybe it was the blue collar worker in him, but he felt that hands are the most beautiful part of a person’s body. he kept his meticulously manicured. so much so that glynn at the grocery store had noticed and now slipped vaseline into his shopping bag for free each week. he didn’t actually like to use the vaseline as he found it to be too simple for his hands, but he cherished having a secret with someone and winked at glynn each week.

glynn had been married to her husband since high school. jimmy sue had been in her biology and science classes. he always thought she was a little too plain. as the years passed and he saw her at the grocery store, he began to change his mind. he saw how gentle she was with her hands. the way she slowly and gracefully rotated her right hand from holding the change in a flat palm to clutching it in her hand to drop into the customer’s open hand. he bet those hands would give good handjobs. that rotation is something you gotta practice because peoples’ wrists sure get stiff over the years

jimmy had once enlisted the help of a prostitute after his third wife left him. she had driven in from a few towns over, a much bigger place than winnebago. she had stringy blonde hair and wore jeggings and a john deere sweatshirt. underneath, she had on a pair of cotton underwear and a white cotton bra from farm ’n’ fleet. when he remarked that she sure didn’t get dressed up for the occasion, she replied,

“i came from my cousin’s christening. you can’t wear silky panties in a church. cotton is the lord’s fabric.”

he shrugged and ask her to hold him in her hands and let him feel the lord’s power.