THE NIGHT OUR FACES MELTED INTO MONSTERS

We are not a normal couple and never will be. We will drive around in my monster truck with our elbows hanging out the windows spitting sunflower seeds at the sun, naked from the waist down, scraping raccoon carcasses from the baking pavement as we whistle. We don’t get paid for our services, but we feel an obligation to offer these animals some dignity, morbid and dirty as it is.

 

The roads we work seldom have other vehicles during the day, for we live in the hills where the forest fires delivered an orgy of destruction. At night, hundreds of trucks driven by drunks head this direction to the old roadhouse where whores know the men by their names. We are free and wild in this country, not like the monthly visit to Costco that sustains our existence. We are not savages; do not feast on the dead meat we transport to the fire.

 

How can we escape the gazes in public places? They are cruel. That night our faces melted into monsters we became angels.

 

We will make love with the windows open in the afternoon beneath the eucalyptus trees between exit 7 and exit 8, hoping the breeze can carry the aroma of rotting maggots away from our nostrils. We have a clothes hanger for a radio antenna and that works fine. Our earlobes are stumps and our noses prosthetic, but our genitals are perfect, ornaments of a Christmas tree that twinkles for eternity.

 

Though most of the earth is scorched this spot has been saved. When we climax we will watch the miserable faces of crippled animals in the bed of the truck, reminded of our own deformities and for that one moment it doesn’t matter. When we’re finished we’ll put on our shirts and wipe away the sweat and drive deeper into this clandestine land the government thinks is a private ranch. The secret militia will protect us. They feel bad for our disfigurement.

 

The moon will rise higher and we will drink homemade beer, roast marshmallows and S'mores in the burning corpses sacrificed by the forest, listening to the fire crackle, faces illuminated by the devil, viewing perpetuity in the stars, juices dripping between porous embers. The coyotes will howl, we will cuddle beside the flames and fall asleep beneath a soiled blanket that keeps us safe from the world, the public, the reality that society burns the flesh from us all, though some have it worse than others.

 

About Matthew Dexter:

Matthew Dexter lives in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Like the nomadic Pericú natives before him, he survives on a hunter-gatherer subsistence diet of shrimp tacos, smoked marlin, cold beer, and warm sunshine.