See, in Ezekiel, Mississippi we were all on tenterhooks. There wasn’t much to tether us to life. Weeks before, rumors that we had a Panda Express coming flooded the local news. But when it was found to be untrue, a spiritual despair covered the town. Folks devised strange ways to kill themselves. Ms. Jenks drank enough soy sauce to stop her heart. Kitternoodle came down so hard with the Jesus-feels, he laid down in a pile of kalanchoes and swore he’d never move again.
For us in Ezekiel, outrage was everything. Our emotional pendulum swung between grievance and despair. Some out of town journos even showed up to do a story on our franchise failure (“Panda Express Too Good for Mississippi”), but they couldn’t be greased by municipal money to slant the story. And three weeks later, everyone pretended to be peeved over the scathing article, even though all of us were secretly pleased to see our names in print.
None of us were on the straight, but not everything was our fault. We didn’t have the best educations. Back in school, our sex ed. teach, Missy Minx, once wrote “Everything Butt” on the board, and never lived it down.
Last weekend, at Bad Boi’s insistence, we’d taken a grim excursion to get Don Henley, our joint custody Husky mix, neutered, but truth be told it was Kitternoodle who acted like his balls were gone. He lurched through weekends in cargo pants, inhaling Keebler cookies. I know Kitternoodle sounds like a bag of dicks, but the truth is he used to be a groovy guy before he grew a chongo and put a hot tub in his backyard. Everyone in town wanted to give it a dip.