"Yo, baybee! Come set 'er down a spell," barked the bare chested man with sagging cut offs from between clenched stained teeth clamped around a smoking Marlboro. He was scratching his belly with the spare fingers on his beer hand while he sucked a long drag off his cigarette with the other. Wading in the kiddie pool with dirt crusted feet he hollered again before noticing the woman cresting the ridge.
As the woman came closer, he explained that with it being the Forth of July and all, it'd be a damn shame not to celebrate best they could manage under the circumstances.
Best he could manage apparently included hauling out the bug zapper stowed in her granny's basement and setting it off a ways as if on display. He had found a small card table of sorts in the dilapidated shack out back, and tossed two ratty pillow cases he had found in the rag heap in the garage on top of it to serve as a table cloth. He then set besides it a few empty oil cans he had dug out from the barn as make-shift stools.
The thing that amused her most, though, was that he had lit a big ol' citronella candle and placed it dead center on the table as if they were dining in Paris. Only, they weren't and Rockford--the land of shirtless toothless guys and bowling ball, black-eyed gals--was about as far from Paris as you could get.
"I done put some food up why use still up thar. Bet you worked up an appetite working like a mule like you is."
"Well, I'll be damned--look what you done did! I's so famished I could eat the hide off that half dead horse over yonder. We got cole 'ens, shugga?"
"Now woman, you know I got cole 'ens! When do I eva not have cole 'ens?"
And so it was that these two favorite distant cousins who had been delegated by the family to clean out their recently deceased granny's farm house sat down for a romantic dinner of greens, grits and chiltlins beneath the pines watching the fireflies fry on the electric coils, "ooh-ing" and "ahh-ing" as the insects sizzled and sparked.
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