As soon as I hold the sword in my hands, I feel stronger than the jacked up Ford F150 that that dickhead Jasper parks up on his lawn, so strong that I swing the huge ass blade around in the pawn shop like I’m about to slice the head off a dragon that scorched my village into some burnt ass toast. When I finally stop the display of raw fucking power, Bert is staring at me like he’s just seen a Christmas miracle. He can’t say anything for a minute. Then he says, “Shit have mercy.”
“Fucking right,” I say.
“Where’d you learn to do that?” he asks.
“Back in the days,” I say.
“What days?” he asks.
“Long before your time.”
Bert is ancient and crusty, like in his sixties, maybe even older, so he says, “What?”
“I want it,” I say. He won’t understand the days I’m talking about. No use trying.
“It’s five hundred dollars,” he says. “It was owned by a Lord in England.”
“I’ll give you my Datsun,” I say.
Bert looks out the window at my 1991 faded yellow Datsun.
“It’s a collector’s item,” I say.
“It’s a piece of shit,” he says.
“You’re a piece of shit,” I bark back at him.
“Gimmie the sword.”
“Take my Datsun.”
He lurches out from behind the counter. His bloated belly filled beyond capacity with stale Busch Light and rancid beef. I get ready. To slay him. He sees that and stops coming at the tiny woman with the lazy eye and the giant ass sword. He’s smart enough to know his next move needs to be analyzed, carefully.
“I don’t want anything to go down in here,” he says.
He’s thinking long and hard about how about to navigate this fucked up situation — only fucked up for him though, not for me. This is feeling so perfectly right and unfucked that I got goose pimples. I definitely didn’t feel like this this morning.
This morning I woke up in Bethany’s front yard.
“Since you won’t let Jesus help you sober up, I think you should try Taylor,” she said before I could even make sense of where I was.
She had a half off coupon for Taylor’s hypnotherapy inTulsa. She said it was worth a shot because he cured Jennifer of her sex addiction, at least for this month. While I was drinking Bethany’s Folgers, trying to piece together last night, she told me that we are other people throughout time. Those other souls, she said, are now in our soul, and they have all kinds of traumas. That might be why I drink so much. Taylor can help you with that, she said. He does past life regression therapy.
Sounded like horse shit but I agreed to go because the shame of my drunken antics, what I could remember of them, kept making me cry, and wishing I had never been born and taken that first sip of Strawberry Hill when I was eleven, so why not.
With a static droning noise from a little speaker mixed with these weird alien voices whispering indecipherable shit, the weirdo with a pony tail sent my brain to where I saw knights in armor, big sweaty horses, sparkling rivers, rolling green hills, and hungry women with dirty faces who were scared of a creature that ate moss and babies feet.
When the noise stopped, I ejected from those ass backward times, and was back in the reclining chair where Taylor was looking down at me from above, like a psycho god.
“How was your journey?” he asked me in a really soft voice that was like a whisper, but not really a whisper. I hated that creepy not-exactly-a-whisper kind of talking.
“I have to go,” I said. Too weird.
On the drive back to Catoosa, I felt like there was someone in my head that wasn’t me. I didn’t want to talk about it. I wasn’t sure where I was anymore. I needed to be around something I understood, so I headed straight for happy hour at Pickle Charlies. On my way there, I saw the sword in the ExtraCash Pawn window and I went right in there and told Bert I needed to see it. He told me to get out. Last month I came in after happy hour with Pipe Stephens and peed my pants while looking at gold chains and yelling “dope bling” over and over.
This time, I told Bert I was stone cold sober, and that my new hobby was studying things from olden times, like this sword, because I had been reading the bible and wanted to understand Jesus’ history. He looked at me funny, but he is a Christian, so what I said, which made zero sense to me, meant something to him. He took the sword out of the cage, and, probably thinking he shouldn’t, handed it over to me.
And now we are in a tense as hell bartering standoff, a Datsun for a sword. I can feel the wind whipping through the green hills, and smell horse shit. Bert can see the strong fury of knightly-ness in my eyes, which gets him to say, “I can probably get something for it.”
“That’s right,” I say.
“It’s a collector’s item,” I remind him as I walk to the door with my sword.
Outside ExtraCash, I hold up the sword with one hand and we start walking down the street, not giving a shit about all these Okies staring at us. When we get to the cross walk, we pay no attention to the Don’t Walk sign, which causes a Ford Escort to screech to a stop, barely bumping into our legs.
Without a thought, we raise the sword in the air, spin the blade around and with both our knightly hands, we thrust it straight down into the hood. Smoke and sparks erupt into our face, The engine screams.
“You crazy bitch. You stabbed my car,” the driver yells.
Tightening our new strong hands around the blade that’s dug deep into our first kill, we watch the smoke rise up over the streets of Catoosa and float out into the rolling green hills and ancient, sparkling rivers.