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  • Troubled Colon
  • Robert Gipe (bio)

My boyfriend, Willett, is in the bathroom. He has a troubled colon. I’m in love with a boy with a troubled colon. I say this in my mind to the stringy-headed girl up in the check-cashing booth at the grocery store in Willett’s town in Tennessee. I don’t say it out loud. I say it in my mind. What I say out loud is:

“Can I use this phone?”

And that girl says “yis” through her nose and turns and walks away like she can’t bear to watch me using her phone. But it’s not her phone. It’s the store’s phone. Her phone says “dial 1–800-hateful.”

I call my aunt June and say, “What are you doing?” She says, “Nothing,” and I say, “This boy is strange. He talks all the time, and he ate too many hot peppers at the Chinese and he’s been in the bathroom a half hour.” My aunt June says, “Is he okay?” And I say, “I guess,” and I turn around and my boyfriend, Willett, is coming up the dog food aisle with toilet paper stuck on his shoe. I hear that girl in the check-cashing booth snort, and I know I better stay on the phone or I will have to whip her stringy-headed Tennessee ass right in the middle of her snotty Tennessee store.

I can tell by Willett’s face he is going to come up to me and start talking like each of my ears has its own brain, like I could understand what he is saying with one and what June is saying with the other. Sure enough, he says, “If we had a house, what would you want in it?”

I say, “I have to go Aunt June,” and she says, “Wait,” but the phone is already hung up. Willett stands in front of me, breathing through his mouth, and I want to squeeze his big soft head. The feeling is new and strange, and I have to go to the front of the store, towards the light on the other side of the giant glass windows. The buckles and chains on Willett’s punk rock pants make a racket, and I can hardly hear him when he says, “Know what I’d want?”

I stop. My mind is all mixed up, and I don’t know where I’m at. I put my hand on a buggy and say, “What?” [End Page 170]

“I’d want me one of them power flush commodes like they have in stores.” I just look at him, and he says, “Can you imagine that kind of power in a domestic setting?” And then he says, “whoooooosh.”

I put my hand on his cheek and squeeze. I say, “How is your stomach?” And he says, “Better.” I squeeze his other cheek with my other hand and say, “Do I make you nervous?”

He gets a piece of candy out of his pocket and puts it in his mouth. Then he takes another piece of candy out of his pocket and offers it to me. All this with me standing there holding his cheeks. I shake my head. He puts the second piece of candy in his mouth and says, “Everything makes me nervous.”

I squeeze his cheeks between my fingers a little and say, “How nervous do I make you compared to everything else?”

“Way less,” he says, chewing. “Way way less.”

And I keep squeezing his cheeks between my fingers, and he keeps chewing, and I am fine with a boyfriend who ain’t likely to slap me, ain’t likely to sell pills, ain’t likely to terrorize woodland creatures nor cuss out the law. And I am glad I have run off from home and quit school, and when that stringy-headed heifer from the check-cashing booth walks by us texting on her phone, about us no doubt, I hang onto Willett’s cheeks and do not knock her down though I easily could. [End Page 171]

Robert Gipe

Robert Gipe is a native of Kingsport, Tennessee, who directs...

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