(Sonny Boy Williamson’s blues classics reinterpreted)

1.

Three a.m. and the coffee skin was thick enough to skate across. I listened for heels on the stairs, the click of the screen door, but heard only the refrigerator humming a tune it couldn’t possibly know.

Took me a long time, long time to find out my mistake
You can bet your bottom dollar, ain’t fattening no more frogs for snakes

I had told her the frog-and-snake thing over venison and morels I picked myself above the ruined mill on Deep Creek. She’d worn a blue-green dress that looked like pond water reflecting setting sun. I remember thinking: that’s the color a man drowns in. She smiled at the frog and snake story. I tried to catalog the smile. Amusement? Patience? Or the kindness of someone who knows you’re performing before you know it yourself.

Now, she dreamed that I was a kissin’ her
On down by the mill
She’d dream that she’d taken me from
That girl up on the hill

Beneath the front window leaned her unicorn clock (acrylic on wood, fine art kissing kitsch), its hands frozen for years. She loved the useless thing. I measured the dead mechanism, then lost an hour on Amazon picking the exact shaft diameter, thread length, hand style. Details matter.

But first, could we find out what went wrong? I disconnected, tested continuity, checked for a bind, and listened again. The hum – or its absence – could tell me nothing. Still, I traced the edge of the case, felt for the tiniest resistance, imagined the coil shifting beneath my touch.

She asked if frogs really tasted like knowledge. I said only if you cooked them slow, with doubt and regret. She laughed so hard the candle guttered. But I’d just put more snake on the table than I’d meant to. She caught the mote of a pause when I stopped myself from straightening the candle.

She was the dreamest girl
The dreamest girl I most ever seen

The new movement arrived with six pairs of hands. I laid them out like tarot cards, wondering if anyone would notice an hour hand married to the wrong minute. I’d measured the inset twice and chosen the three-eighths movement, though I had doubts about the depth. Just in case, I’d already walked to Ace for a single Everbilt fender washer, bright enough to show every fingerprint of doubt.

Installation took thirty seconds. The old mechanism went into a drawer with all the other pieces that once belonged somewhere. The clock looked identical, but felt somehow different, like it had learned a secret.

That was the night I felt the first cold coil around my ankle.

Later, when the affair was coughing blood, I blamed more worldly men. I can’t dance – it doesn’t load right. I pictured them in Teslas, playing jazz, their beards shaped like the decisions they agonize over.

Oh been so long, been a mighty long time.
Yes a mighty long time since I seen that girl of mine

Sometimes, driving the back roads at dusk, I’d pass a slough and see her reflection in black water. Sometimes the reflection had my face. Sometimes it smiled like it knew the joke. Frog? Or snake?

2.

He was gone and the kissing dreams had faded. Who won the breakup?

I keep taking the same left past a collapsed barn with the Sinclair sign still bleeding green, and somehow I’m always coming up on it again. You saw it on Twilight Zone. The odometer isn’t moving. That’s how I know I’m still inside the dream he left me.

My mind was a room he enjoyed furnishing. I’d sit on the counter while he cooked – I couldn’t boil water when we met. I’ll grant him that. And he’d feed me concepts the way other men feed you strawberries. I grew up with X-Files and Nine Inch Nails. He gave me real art, history, literature. Not pretentious crap but the kind you hoard. I grew fat on it. Addicted.

Like I need an addiction. My thought turned sleek and cold-blooded.

My dreams inverted. I’d be sitting alone, and liking it, then there he’d be, fixing things I never used, and things that were broken but worked well enough. He seemed to audition for intimacy.

Now an’ I’m goin’ away, baby
Just to worry you off my mind

Tonight, I cook. I’m craving chicken. I’m not seeking fame here, just something with enough moving parts to keep me honest. The ingredients line up like suspects. Shallots, white wine, a sprig of thyme that’s tired but still willing. The thighs wait off to the side, trimmed and patted dry. Salt and pepper both sides. I want crisp skin.

Skin down in the pan, they hissed at me, and the smell shifted from raw to something that makes the neighbors reconsider their life choices. I did. Don’t fuss with the thighs. If you poke too early, the skin will tear.

I mince my shallots microscopic. Knife work is the closest thing I have to meditation. There’s no arguing with a blade that demands truth. From an onion or otherwise.

I remove the chicken once it loosens from the pan. In go the shallots, and the wine lifts the browned bits. The sauce pulls itself together and thickens like a story with unneeded characters. Heat on low.

I’d be walking the ridge and the ground would soften, turn to loam, then to water. I’d sink to the ankles, then the knees, and something muscular would brush my calf. No bite, just tasting the temperature. I looked down and saw his face under the surface, mouth open in a silent croak. Then it was my own face, older, eyes already filmed with the green of deep water.

I add stock, thyme, a whisper of cream. Soften it. Chicken back in the pan and then simmer. I load the D-minor Partita on Spotify and headphones.

The sauce coats the back of a spoon. I taste it, and it tastes back, which is how you know you’ve gotten somewhere. I plate the chicken with potatoes. Nothing theatrical. Just a little structure.

Snakes? Now the Bible prefers linear time, a story with a big bang and an end. Not loops, endless returns, and recurrence. The ouroboros, the snake that eats its tail, showed up in Greece and Mesopotamia. Put a cyclic symbol creature inside a linear story and you got tension.

Behind a clock face is a nest of gears that no one sees. Most folk just look at the hands. I tried replacements. They spoke depth in the voice of a dryer sheet with a taste for Wikipedia. None leave tracks when they walk across a lit room. None make the air go thick and listenable.

I wake up pounding my fist on the bed. I’m quoting dead Germans and want to bite my own tongue off. One says clocks murder everything alive about time, turn it into a corpse on a conveyor belt. I know their names. I can quote them. But why? Knowledge I wish I didn’t have, I tell myself, humming the partita.

Don’t start me to talkin’. I’ll tell everything I know.

Last week I found a morel growing through the floorboard of my car. Passenger side. I think I might be dreaming someone who’s trying to wake up from me. The Sinclair sign’s still bleeding green and the odometer hasn’t budged.

Oh been so long, been a mighty long time.

3.

The woman came at the blue hour when the bats stitch the sky together. She stood on the plank that used to be a dance floor before the flood of ’63 carried the jukebox down Deep Creek still playing Sonny Boy. She touched the face in the reflection.

She looked thinner. Hunger can do that, even if it’s the mind that’s starving.

She asked the water the questions people always ask when the music stops:

“Did he love me the way a man loves a woman, or the way a man loves a mirror?”

“Did I love him, or did I love being transformed into someone worth ruining?”

It was like she had read the script. I pressed a smile back down and let one eye break the surface.

“You loved me,” I told her.

She stood on the bank. A turtle hauled itself onto a sun-warmed log. Something regal in its refusal to hurry. The turtle blinked slowly, a gesture suggesting amusement. I nodded, thin as a drawn line – acknowledging the age, the armor, the calm.

The water held the crooked reflections of bottlebrush sedge. A few loose seeds clung to the stems. When a dragonfly landed, the stem leaned, and the whole cluster tilted just a hair.

She stepped in. The water took her weight without sound. Her hand found mine. Cold met cold. The scales remembered every classic she’d devoured whole.

I tasted the new skin budding under the old one – thin, translucent, the color of creek ice at breakup.

Above us, the mill wheel groaned. The years ran backward: the flood returned the jukebox, the mill stood up straight. The venison walked back into deer. Somewhere a screen door clicked shut.

I live it through my diary
And I read all my problems now are free

“Grow a new skin,” I told her. “You’ve earned it.”

And in that hush, I slipped beneath the water, silent on the downbeat.

Don’t start me to talkin’. I’ll tell everything I know.

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