God is a Woman in a Rice Field
by © diane green
Summertime (section) - Acrylic on Canvas - by © diane green 2005
Chapter 1
Somehow, Abby Grail knew getting around the bend on her own was gonna be tough in this old town. The Chicago streets were wearing thin. It was cold outside. The cat had barfed in the dog’s food dish. She knocked the man in her life out in round two and he had left the ring. Nothing was negotiating her freedom of understanding this truth. Another lonesome spoof: she just had to roll with the punches. She had two kids to feed, and another lifetime left of paintings, poems, and music to rejoin in holy macaroni.
Abby slept in the unfinished attic of the bungalow home she had been renting at a decent price for a couple of years in a northwest Chicago neighborhood. It was the best place yet with a basement, a 2-bedroom main floor, living room, dining room, kitchen, back porch, a yard and a 2-car garage. She had moved 4 times in 7 years since leaving her hometown of Memphis for Chicago.
It was an early February Wednesday morning. Thoughts shuffled in Abby’s head as her wings unfolded from a dreamscape’s edge. She woke up on this sun-drenched morning, rubbing the crust from her eyes and saying to herself,
“I know! I need a guitar!”
It had been years since Abby played the guitar. She came from Memphis, the universally known center of the rock and roll blues Immaculate Conception. She had been a poet songwriter and sang in two bands in the 1980s.
Loneliness and tears had washed dust off the windows like bullets of rain from a summer tornado. Abby jumped out of bed, analyzing her lanky, curved body in her fixer upper attic bedroom’s fading antique mirror. Twirling her rewound money maker with a nomadic rhythm, Abby reached her arms into the air, shaking her head and letting her booty-long red hair fly like a wildfire as she stretched out and trotted down the stairway to the kitchen.
Abby’s 5-year-old daughter, Rain Beaux, was trying to climb into the refrigerator. It was almost empty, but the soy milk carton was on the top shelf. Beaux had already reached for the wheat bread, almond butter, and homemade orange marmalade.
Abby grabbed the milk from Rain Beaux’s hand and poured it into a glass on the counter. There was a box of Nestle’s Quik Chocolate Milk Powder in the cupboard.
“Want a Quikster, Rain Beaux?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s your brother? Is he up? “
“He’s sitting on his truck under the table."
Abby poured yesterday’s leftover French press coffee into a cup and reheated it in the microwave. She handed Rain Beaux her chocolate milk, wandered with her mug of hot black coffee into the dining room and peered under the table.
“Good morning, my little man!"
Cash looked up with a lost stare, as if he were refocusing from another planet.
“You need some breakfast! Let’s get you cleaned up!”
The morning light drifted into midday as Abby dropped her kids off at the neighborhood Montessori school. Earlier in the year, she had made special arrangements with the kids’ wealthy paternal great aunt Colleen for the dollars needed to fit within that circuit. Otherwise, the Chicago public schools would give homework to her 3-year-old son. No way.
It was another unseasonably warm February day in Chicago. Normally, it would have been cold as a witch's tit. Maybe with a little twister on it—Windy City that it is.
The warming trend gave Abby hope after she lost out on yet another self-contained relationship with a guy. Even a legal one, no less! Abby had determined: “That’s it! No more relationships. No more men. Just me and my kids against the world!” Of course, Abby had no idea what the world was about to bring to her. None at all.
Abby’s new life challenge could only be maintained with her own regular self-med Cannabi-nation workings, as had been her standard thoroughfare for decades. So, without further notice, after dropping her kids off at Montessori school, she cruised over to Sir Gypsy Sojourner’s midtown studio to buy another spliffy quarter bag, O'Green.
“You doin’ ok?” Gyp asked.
“Yeah. I’m ok. But hey…. Do you know someone who might be able to sell me a guitar? Like a good one, but for not too much money. You know, just an old used guitar,” drifted off Abby.
“Yeah, I know someone. I’ll give him your number.”
Abby went back off into her La La Land of home-based freelance clothing design. She had been very successful, but these days her life had become a curmudgeon of jungle rot. She had always managed through her wildest years of thick and thin with exceptional varieties of suddenly discovered unknown talents. Abby could sell a needle to a haymaker.