Aubrey ate sixteen biscuits that first night. The coolest cousin I had, he scarfed down forty doughnuts on a bet he made with my daddy. Thing is, everybody thought Aubrey was a blue-eyed, lamppost-skinny eunuch who mantraed in the pastures of Fayette County, I need to fuck, Fred, I need to fuck. But he forgot that when he played the guitar. On a hunch one day, I introduced him to Junebug, my Stratocaster the color of ketchup, and man, it was ludicrous love at first sight. Not with Junebug, but with music. After he picked cotton in the fields and snacked on biscuits and bananas, he’d grab hold of Neptune, his twelve-string Rickenbacker, turn on his amp, and played outrageous songs he composed after he ate too much pumpernickel. Then he listened to Queen after his first girlfriend, Rinata, ruined his no-sex life by giving him a hard-on after she sat on his lap. I need to fuck, Rinata, I need to fuck. And he did. He didn’t suck at that either: They had two sets of twins and they formed a band called Bodell Thundercrap. They loved the underground clubs. performing different music, but specialized in rockabilly. One night they played Warehouse of Love, their fans’ favorite, and encored with Xystus, My Cotton Lovin’ Weevil: Aubrey ripped the joint up, playing that Stratocaster better than Hendrix at Monterey, when all of a sudden, he stopped, yelled Bring me somma that yummy zucchini I had yesterday, along with my biscuits and doughnuts. After he ate, he dropped dead.
David Spicer has poems in Tipton Poetry Journal, Santa Clara Review, Reed Magazine, The Literary Nest, Synaeresis, Hamilton Stone Review, Chiron Review, Alcatraz, Gargoyle, Third Wednesday, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net three times and a Pushcart once. He is the author of Everybody Has a Story and six chapbooks; his latest is Tribe of Two (Seven CirclePress).