Crazy Straws

Paula was a woman vain and homely without her curling iron. Her mouth was a wanting reservoir for men’s garbage. Her children were siphons gulping her life force through crazy straws. Paula used hairspray in excess, shellacking everything above the neck and sometimes even her thumbs. Below the waist she felt nothing. Her husband was incidental, he pet as he should at her firm fixed coiffure. Work was respite for him, for her. Strange sweaty men in both sanctuaries; his on the river on a barge and hers in her marriage bed and behind the cover of the levee.