Chaz is a baseball player turned hockey pucker, an entrenched chewer of chaw, plug, qat, call it what you want. What his guitar-twanging wife, Daisy knows, and he knows too, is it makes teeth rot, heart stop, yields all manner of cancers: Mouth! Esophagus! Throat! Pancreas! When that list doesn’t stop his cud chewing, sewer-sludge-spitting, scourge of a habit she pulls back one finger for heart disease, another for stillborn offspring, a pinky for preemies, middle one for wives who are queasy, weary, and utterly disgusted (
and don’t go whining that cud—as she calls qat—
ain’t tobacco.) Chaz snuck some back from his Yemeni “hiking” trip in his duffel, lucked out it wasn’t sniffed out.
Snuffed out, she’d snorted. Habit-forming, mind-altering so they say (
just so! he agrees), gastritis-causing, esophagus-wrenching, vaso-constricting.
Yet so, so satisfying, he counters,
not to mention performance enhancing (in bed, he adds with a wily wink). To which Daisy twists her lip, cups the C-shaped maple neck of her instrument around her breast, hugs it tight, declares his vice
ain’t nothin’ but a heart-wrecker marriage-breaker, but now he can munch, spit, slather and stink all he wants because she’s done with his honking stonker of a habit and before he can hock another boggy loogie anywhere in her vicinity she’ll be halfway home to the sticky-floored clubs of Nashville with her ‘65 Strat between her thighs. She’ll strap it around her neck and stroke those steel strings ‘til they moan with melancholy and heartbreak.
Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s work appears, or is forthcoming, in Atticus Review, Centaur, CRAFT, Emerge Literary, Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn, Milk Candy Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, Ruby Literary, The Phare, and others. Books include award-winning flash collection, Wolfsong, and novel, Roots of The Banyan Tree. kathrynsilverhajo.com; facebook.com/kathryn.silverhajo; twitter.com/KSilverHajo; @kathrynsilverhajo.bsky.social
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