When getting off twenty-two, sitting on her sun-bleached black leather stool at the second pump from the right was Shirlene. One by one they’d stop, drink as much as they could before getting cut off. No one ever asked if there was enough to go around and she’d been on the other side of a fist when there wasn’t. So, she filled them up to the brim, sometimes willing something from nothing, like she was the Jesus of Mississippi.
His tears pulled a string on hers and then they drowned in the same river.
When he exhaled, he threw his head back and released the smoke through his nostrils with such force that they looked like the smokestacks of an unregulated coal plant at sunset.
