That Little Gem From the Hellfire Café

Wildly understood but less often quoted, Shirley’s hill of hemp met pre-dawn to cherry-pick a goat ringer, all absolved. Bound tightly in the pretense of the harbingers, we drift and bob without thought, leavened heads, left for dead, and thought unworthy of the sundry. My Max of Maxmillion gave a speech in the parlor about how Sweyn had swindled the turn-of-the-century boys out of their penny candy, so Disneyland’s Main Street merely upped the ante and increased the price of the candy, shifting the cent trade to the arcade.

Faded banter from a former corres-pundit, breathing heaving and thus receiving a tattered last ritual homestead, sanctified on the Winds of the Dakotas and being the last of its kind to escape the eye of Google Maps, shifting sands of thyme and rose quarry, smooth stone sentience and the pachyderm principle upon which raw memory is founded. Chapter or verse, this passage in which our hero, having found the golden marrow but left dead for silver bone, rises in permutateous blistering alchemy and turns antimony into gun metal gray hope.