How: I Met my Husband in Fraud

When I was newly in Brevard, there were still contra dances. Each week, men and women, young people too, sometimes people in between because there was still room for that in NC before the morality play potty bill, would take to the floor. These folks were hill people, people in wood clogs, people in “rockabilly” leather shoes, and people in fine respectable wear with clogging shoes or contra leather bottoms.

The invitation had snowflakes. My dad had been on the square dancing team in high school, my mom was refused to be allowed out at night for anything active. That was the time of integration where one lone brown student joined the school in their grade. Square dancing apparently has roots before the racism documentation.

I just know that our little town had a thing for contra and all kinds of other dances.

I met my first husband there. He was there with sunflowers on his clipboard he carried for art. I fit better with others. Our pain must have drawn us together, or maybe it was the drama teacher who put the missing bits together for us. We did our routine so many times it became Marx Brothers meets homeschooling drama class with me taking the Harpo-who-Speaks role and going down because of it.

“Be you not unequally yoked.” Even conservative Churchians as we called the, and I quote, “faith fuckheads” from an anonymous source — this out of the mouths of several religions — agree.

There are scams in this world, and then there are young men who climb ladders to hang banners for the dance I threw after and spend too long clipping the old banners from hundreds of meetings and dances in that old Union Hall. We waxed until the floor shined, while instead my home should have been more porous they say. Instead they forgot every committee meeting over here, because people joked about “spraying the forest” and I missed the joke.

I figured out the joke was the holocaust of the forest under fears cannabis may grow when I tasted pine needle tea and came back with poison. “Bark eaters,” I felt the insult from the Norselands through the White Pine agreement, through the Adirondack chair my great-grands built out of bentwood and my grandpa I never met built from planks. Somehow they were there, the Hall where my great-grandpa was not a Union member I hear, but passed by in his new Chrysler every two years before the bottom fell out of the market again with another Hoovering.

Adirondack means bark-eater, an insult. Yet my ex would sit and eat nothing till the point of scurvy because they broke him, somehow, before I “got” him. They talk about rabbit women, and snake women, and bopping people on heads to tell them what they are. Eventually you hear secret languages out of someone’s mouth as they sleep and feel how close Native wars are down below. The conch blows, and we cannot answer. We must not, though the same actions must be done — or most of the same while we did not need the lash except the freedom to get one or make one and sell it at the adult store.

Check the ground. Theirs is a dust, a scream of tradition where one land is a carrot patch, and another the cotton field, and both sides fight about what it means to touch dirt. The majority seems to have no idea why I laugh, or that gardening helps heal because of touching both and doing other callings during the day. Mine is a loam of knowing about people eating brains, literally and figuratively so they can hear what people instructed, and then steal it. They forget precise language is not British, just like they forget the Old World was not monolithic in classisms and romanizations of such — like screaming at me for being racist as I do not repeat stereotypes.

Me? “It’s because you’re YOU”, he said. Who knows.

I miss my ex.

I refuse to miss our work, or the work he said he was in love with, beyond that of art to what art is good for — the deepening, the preservation, the snap in the air that means we’re doing something. Instead he’s in a gang where they have “jurisdictions” and not in the legal way. Everything is so fake and scripted, from clothing to how to kiss. I was supposedly given 10 years away from “torture”.

I resign.

Our dancers are insulted, and gone with the homophone to wind, sorta. We are not peasants, but the peasantry still refuses to stop the carrot patch and cotton patch and Round-Up patch — or to understand I am not knocking corn or advocating slavery.

They say this wearing cotton.

So I type. I get a gatekeeper thinking I don’t have stick-to-it-enough because I didn’t dance the way he wanted to with a screener at a Wild Wing. I don’t have an answer to that, but save my dancing for private where he cannot call dos-e-doh and flip flop on Know Nothing moneymakers.

Whore families are the ruination of this community, and none are really from here. Except the ones that are. Funny to see a Redskins boggin on someone in summer claiming to be Cherokee when they said last week their tribal affiliations are something I know to be historically at odds with the Cherokee. Who are not monolithic, and not often any more in touch with history than you or I are — even if we’re also part or wholly going by that name.

So men die alone and impoverished while their look alikes peacock with our families who are chosen. I had to toss my dildo because someone used it. It smelled nasty and I smelled it on me and wanted to move to a new chapter.

Let’s all move to a new chapter. His friends dumped the bugs to destroy the ash while working to remove “pollard” and “home” from our lives. We’re not safe while they run amuck.

Honestly, everyone knows the crud. Let’s learn some of the glory.

Aethelwold — Brevard, NC