Cotter Pin Blues

The desperate young painter seized onto a 5-gallon plastic bucket and upturned it for her to sit, not expecting it to be with oily cotter pins that spill out and he says, "Today we is sad with a cosmic paranoia, Lucy. A cosmic way bigger than me and you. Way bigger, way bigger."

"Damn good looking cotter pins," she says with an obvious eye to mechanical arts.

"Help yourself."

The tattoo on Lucy Breedloves's left forearm depicts the Chernobyl sarcophagus, above that on her bicep she flexes a map of Three-Mile Island. My sweet disaster, mama. Sweet disaster. Lucy leans over to pick through the loose cotter pins, "So what the fuck?"

A point and shoot kind of dame. If ever there was a one to throw a small stone, to chuck a glass pebble.

"No call to get nasty, Lucy," says John.

"This crinkle ass titbit is a reject," as she quick flicks the bent-splayed cotter pin into the impregnate air. Sheetrock wall bounce. "I come to get my fortune. I come to see you paint this, this... mural thing." Sniff glue, sniff five-day old mayo.

"What for?"

"I like to see your juicy cheeks wiggle."

"I don't do fortunes," in step to take up his widest brush. That 6" model from Bishop's Hardware he had took from Matthew's wooden box the night before last. A cosmic arc beyond the sort of primitive cave paintings that would give us rabbit years and duck bills, or leastways those marks that resemble some odd unfathomable script by which to keep an account for the recon of pay day.

"Oh, here I thought it was some sort of shit-arsed religion thing. The not blabbering off at the mouth, I mean, a vow of fucking silence. So don't tell me. You can paint it on the wall. Like that," she points.

"You come by me the wrong way," says John. "You should be to Matthew."

"These things are like mechanical sperms," her crimson dyed hair hangs down, their tips dance above the floor. Yammer damn nanny doodle bug dee dee. Her skinny knees jostle, always a swig of picker's strum in her sass. Yoodle noodle slip brown gravy.

"I have no special reason to be silent fucking, or otherwise, Lucy. What you want here?"

"Like I said, I want my fortune, John. Tell me now, tell me forever, tell my future," a small pin held up between thumb and forefinger, "Like this. See, they got heads and tails, and look, this one over here is bent over." She shoots John through a tear-drop of a gray iris eye.

"I don't usually read cotter pins, but I would say that one is particularly phallic," with one wide brush stroke he rips a vasectomy of disasters from here to the end. Hell in yellow.

"What the fuck? I think I was adopted," says Lucy as she suddenly stands up from the bucket. Flip flap flap of a broken electric fan. "Do you want this cotter pin?"