Talky Tina

by

Daniel G. Snethen

Christie was divorced, seven years my senior,

had an adorable daughter and loved dolls.

Yes, Mr. Sohl, now what year exactly

was it you met Christie and her daughter?

1994 at my brother’s church—

she slept too late to attend the Baptist church.

And then?

We talked in the parking lot for three hours

about nothing and everything. I asked for

her phone number, something I’d never done before.

Ask a girl her number?

Exactly.

Did she acquiesce?

Yes, we married a year later—Christie,

Juliette and I and of course the dolls.

Christie collects dolls you know.

So you’ve said.

When exactly did they begin talking to you?

Not they, just her . . . Tina.

I didn’t even know Christie had her.

Many of Christie’s dolls are boxed, stored.

Too many to display.

Juliette turned five one May,

just eight days after my birthday,

and Christie gave her the same

doll her mother gave her when she turned five.

When did you begin talking to her?

I didn’t. She started talking to me.

The first day when no one was around.

“My name is Talky Tina and I don’t think I like you.”

“My name is Talky Tina and I’m watching you.”

“My name is Talky Tina and I’m going to hurt you.”

Come on Mr. Sohl, you don’t really . . .

That’s what Christie said.

Claimed her stepfather was the same way.

Tried to destroy Talky Tina.

Put her head in a vise, even tried to

burn her with an acetylene torch.

He heard a noise in the middle of the night.

Tripped, fell down the stairs, broke his

neck. Christie’s mother found him,

Talky Tina lying at his side.                                    

“. . . My name is Talky Tina and I love you.”

How long has Tina talked to you?

Eleven years, eleven torturous years.

Always sweet and sugary and nice when

Christie or the girls are around.                     

          “. . . My name is Talky Tina and I love you.”

But when alone, with a syrupy sugary

voice, candy coated most maleficently.                             

          “. . . My name is Talky Tina and I’m still watching you.”

And why have you just now consulted me?

The unbearable strain and Christie has

begged me for years to seek counseling.

Our relationship, mine and Christie’s,

and especially mine and Juliette’s

has been rather tense, you know, rocky.

And this morning, before I left for work,

(cigarette trembling in his hand)

she said, while no one else could hear her, she said:

“My name is Talky Tina and I’m going to kill you.”

by Daniel G. Snethen

Each drama carefully depicted

upon his Californian hide.

A black and red

octa-legged creature

precariously perched

upon its webby swing

etched onto his back.

A pink rattail wound

around his right buttock.

Peanut the homunculus

adorned in an oversized suit,

golf cleats and WWII vintage steel pot

covers his upper left thigh.

Statuesque Galatea

decorates his sculpted calf.

His tramp stamp,

reads a crimson:  NO EXIT.

Alice in Wonderland

weeps upon his chest,

teardrops dripping

from both her eyes.

A salmon-colored elastic vagina

surrounds his manhood.

Three goats confront

a rainbow of trolls

upon the bridge

of his hairless belly.

All the while a paw-print,

of his best friend, erratically moves

about the tattoo artist’s canvass,

like an electron in a cloud.

by Daniel G. Snethen

Easter Sunday 1928, the entire village

of Burlingame gathered for the annual

San Mateo County Easter-Egg Hunt.

All the grown-ups were there,

watching, waiting for the loser.

Praying it wasn’t their Tommy

or Jenny or their tooth-gapped grandchild.

Old Morris painfully remembered,

as he limped to his seat of honor at the head

of the ring of losers, how they crippled his leg

seventy-two years ago and how he was the first

of a long line of leprose losers to gain

 a seat in the ring of grisly remembrance.

Morris hoarsely announced the starting of the hunt,

whilst I and the other children scrambled,

among the dandelions, gathering colored eggs

into our wicker-woven Easter egg baskets.

I fought over these eggs at the same time

hoping I would not be the one

who claimed the egg with the mark,

the mark which would send us all into a frenzy,

where we pummeled and spit on and kicked

the little pus-eyed loser, we did not want to be.

Morris announced the mark was an orange

dot in a green circle. Relieved, it was not me.

That was my third and final hunt before we moved

to San Francisco some twenty-five miles away.

And my mother said we’d never return to that wicked town

where I helped to nearly kill that little Jackson boy

and watched his sister Shirley

viciously kicking him in his pus-eyed face.

Daniel G. Snethen

     Me, my bitch and some rez dogs were partying at Denby Dam late one Friday evening. We were all smoking peji and drinking alcohol while listening to some P-Diddy rapping from Billy’s woofers. We were all high and drunk and the girls had all stripped down to their panties ready for a midnight swim.  The moonlight shimmering off their titties was nearly as intoxicating as the drugs and the booze and it looked as if every last one of us horny bucks was going to snag a piece that night.

     I was pawing Sammi’s melons and grabbing a bit of bootie when I heard Lloyd yell.

     “What the hell, aint we got no goddamn beer left?”

     I says, “Fuck man, what you mean we aint got no beer left?”

     “Aint nothin left but this Zima shit.”

     And I reply, “Only pussies and fags drink Zima.”

     Sammi gives me a tittie-twister, whispers in my ear and we run and hop into her Daddy’s beat up powder blue 1980 Chevy pickup, screaming out the window, “We’ll be back, just going to get some more juice.”

     We could see the dust billowing up behind us in the light of the full moon and I knew something awful was going to happen when that damn owl nearly flew into our windshield.

     “What the hell,” Sammi began whimpering.

     Not thinking and being stoned to the gourd, I started laughing.

     “That shit isn’t funny, you know what my Grandfather says about owls.”

     “Yeah babe, it means someone’s going to die tonight, maybe you or I.”

     That didn’t seem to help one bit. We pulled off the gravel onto the highway just north of Wakpamini and headed her Daddy’s Chevy towards Pine Ridge. The night was really eerie. The moon was full and blood-red like the engorged gut of an anopheles mosquito. Everything glowed with a copper color and the air was hot and heavy. I laid the pedal down and had the straight-six whining at 80 and shoved 2-Pac into the dash, turned up the bass and tried to ignore the weirdness of the night.

     Solitude, complete solitude, not a car in sight, none on the highway and no-one cruising the loop, as we barreled into downtown Pine Ridge.  A disturbing sight on a Friday night just past one in the morning. I thought where the hell is everyone as I headed south out of Ridge for the Nebraska border and White Clay and the beer I’d promised the guys.   Sammi was scared but I didn’t mind, as she nestled beside me, her nipples stabbing me like two pointy darts.

     “Is it me Sam, or did we smoke some strange shit, nothing seems quite right tonight.”

     “I don’t know, I just wish we were home, Grand Daddy’s always right. As soon as we saw that owl we should have headed straight back to Evergreen.”

     “And to hell with the booze and my bro’s… riiight.”

     Suddenly the truck started lurching and I heard something banging my oil-pan. My head hit the roof and I tasted blood when I bit my tongue, but managed to keep the vehicle on the road.

     “Jesus Christ, what the fuck did I hit?”

     “What the hell you stopping for Dane?  Don’t you dare pull this mother fucking truck over...shit you pulled the mother-fucker over.”

     “Shut up Sammi, I gotta find out what I hit...probably just some big ass snapping-turtle or something.” 

     I got out of the truck to check what I’d run over and it wasn’t no big ass turtle, but it was something. It was a man.

     “Christ Sammi, I killed him. I killed this drunk bastard. How the hell was I supposed to see his ass on this mother fucking road. Shit, I’m in trouble now.”

     Then what do you suppose my bitch does? Why she gets out of the truck and walks right up to the stiff and kneels down beside it.

     “What the hell you doing? Get away from that bastard. Don’t touch it. Why the fuck you go and touch it for? Shit, let’s get out of here before the cops come.” 

     I opened the door to the Chevy and shoved her, not too gently, in and scooted her ass over and climbed in behind the wheel myself.

     “Dane,” Sammi cried.

     “Yeah.”

     “You didn’t kill him.”

     “What!!!” I stammered.

     “I said you didn’t kill him. The old fart was cold when I touched him and I felt dried blood on his neck. He was already dead when you ran over him, he was already dead!”

     A loathsome shadow floated over White Clay, a malign shadow which summoned the hairs of my back to suddenly stand at attention. I turned my head. In the rearview mirror I could see a midnight denizen hovering over the drunken corpse, its cape gently blowing like the wings of a massive bat. It slowly descended upon the gruesome repast; I ground my gears, hauled ass and got the hell out of White Clay.

by Daniel G. Snethen

Raggedy Ann and Andy

lay just where I left them

nestled side by side

up against the feather pillow.

But Ann’s scarlet locks

seemed slightly tousled

and her blue dress a bit wrinkled

plus, there was the tiniest rip

to her white pinafore.

And Andy, I swear

his freckled grin was wider

and I noticed a bead of sweat

at the center of his forehead.

by Daniel G. Snethen

The golden gibbous moon glowed

coppery red over the crimson snow.

Her red mitten frozen like a puppet

standing on four fingers, thumb raised

accusingly—pointing forward

at the blood-red paint

on a snowy wintery palette.

He raped her there. Her hymen broke.

Her virginal blood stained the snow red,

like a daub of paint on a painter’s palette.

His awful alcohol breath mingled

with his ugly grunts of gratification.

He named her baby Strawberry Snow.

They never married . . . only in the Lakota way.

She hated him but couldn’t leave—

he was her baby’s father.

Where would she go? What would she do?

All her friends were raped by their baby’s father—

who was she to expect something better?

Ten times in thirteen years she carried his seed.

Her youth destroyed, her body broken.

All of them girls, all of them violently conceived.

The people elected him to the tribal council.

He ran the sacred Initi ceremonies

for his native red brothers. They prayed to

Tunkasila, burned flesh offerings from scarred arms.

Afterwards he’d prey on her flesh, and she’d

lie in his arms, psychologically scarred inside.

Year after year the same violent pictographs

indelible on her symbolic winter count of human hide.

One wintry evening she found Strawberry Snow

bloodied, bruised, confused and crying.

Her shirt was ripped, her pants on backwards.

Her raven hair disheveled and tangled.

And like a mirror-image, the forlorn look in her eyes.

She found him beside the dwindling wood pile

trousers down, passed out in the bloody snow.

The acrid smell of his beer-bated breath

mingled with the sickening odor of strawberry

blood and incestuous cloying lust

permeating the December St. Crispin’s Eve air.

Not so much for Strawberry Snow or herself

but for her other nine daughters,

she stumbled into the tar-paper shack,

frantically retrieved his deer rifle—

the one he, laughing, used to point between her legs—

and leveled the muzzle at his head.

Swearing at the golden gibbous moon, her face glowing,

she screamed, “I’ll show him strawberry snow!”

and blew his drunken Indian head off.

by Daniel G. Snethen

Atomic bombs melted

the radiated eye sockets

of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

but that was not the end.

Choppers dropped teenage boys

upon the heartland of Mr. Kurtz

and agent orange created

a clockwork orange

while Stanley Kubrick’s

Asian poontang

said, “Me so horny.”

And that was not the end.

Abu Ghraib witnessed

the gross injustice

of a captured Muslim

being led around naked

on a dog leash

while Muslim brothers

beheaded Christian infidels.

That was not the end.

Grasshopper self-asphyxiated

hanging in a closet

in Bangkok killed Kill Bill

but that was not the end.

When the Lizard King died,

that was not the end.

It was the beginning.

Decades rolled along

with the blue bus

and the end continued without end,

until ultimately the end to the end ended,

and at the end of the end

came the end of Man-zarek

and the beginning of Sartre’s

existential hell without Doors.

by Daniel G. Snethen

I was already a dead man,

living on borrowed time.

Dillon was going to hunt me down.

Festus, Doc, Kitty and Newly,

Burke and Sam and even Louie,

had all gathered for Doc’s wedding

with Anne in Saint Joseph town.

Dillon was going to hunt me down.

I hated that black bag-carrying quack

and with my Colt I cut the pill-pusher down.

Dillon was going to hunt me down.

Festus lamented, “You ornery old codger.”

Holding the dying dear doctor in his arms,

his bewhiskered face turned to a frown.

Dillon was going to hunt me down.

Yes, Dillon was going to gun me down.

No place to run, no place to hide

in that damned Missouri town.

Yes, Dillon would definitely hunt me down,

place my corpse 6 feet in the ground.

And the crowd would gather round . . .

Kitty and Newly, Burke, Sam and Louie

and that saloon whore named Anne,

all smiling to see me planted in the ground,

cuz I’m the bastard who shot Doc down.

by Daniel G. Snethen

I saw it laying there, on the shoulder of the road

between the Prairie Ranch Resort and Sharps Corner.

Just past the water tower,

near the spot where Todd was executed.

At the time, I thought nothing of it,

other than that is was a little strange

to see just one shoe on the shoulder of a road

anywhere, let alone here, where Todd died.

Though it looked exactly like one

from the pair I had purchased her                                                     

through Amazon.com,

it never occurred to me it could be hers.

I didn’t realize she was missing

and I didn’t notice the bizarre,

almost artistic spattering of blue ink,

which they had collected when she power-washed

some printer’s ink buckets for me.

Had I noticed this spattering of blue

as well as her own blood splatter

mixed in the blackness of her converse canvas

like a tiny Milky Way of red and blue stars,

I would have stopped and perhaps

found her in time to keep her alive.

Instead, I kept on driving and she passed out

in the ditch of the road, from extreme thirst,

dehydration, and a copious loss of blood.

When the county man chewed her up

with the roadside mower, it was difficult

to tell which parts of her mangled mess

were new and which parts were the result

of the beating she had been given.

And her shoe, well it’s now evidence

and my fingerprints are all over it.

Daniel G. Snethen

When I die,

my fatted liver

is to be shipped

on ice by air

to France.

Where it shall

be processed

and packaged

in special tins

and traded to

rich and affluent

cannibals,

who wish

to wine and dine,

like Parisian socialites

on pate foie gras

of human.