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Ground By James Owens "Just a one-whore town," she jokes from her barstool, watching the men watch her, deciding who's on for tonight. Since the mine closed and the company pulled out with a wink and a promise, the bodies are running soft, and they come to her humbled, a way she hates to see, no fight left. She takes a body back home with her and into the long drift toward morning, which returns him to an angry wife, her to empty rooms and hours to fill. She could leave, and she thinks of other towns and men with more light in their eyes, money in their pockets. But she walks by the bus station and watches the departures, not boarding, smiling a little at the taillights as they blink west and out of sight. On weekends one or another of the men drives with her up into the battered hills, the stripped and gored flats, mined bare and dusty as Arizona desert, where they picnic, conduct business, and she takes the beaten men inside her like a last clinging to hope, an offer to possibility of what she has, as if wishing life would take root, as if the runnelled and worthless hills could spring into sweet meadow grass. |
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Document last modified on: 08/19/2003