Ordering with this link is for items being mailed in the USA.
If you are ordering issues to be mailed to the U.K., go to the Down in the Dirt main page for U.K. shipping.
Macomb Spires believed there was life in just about everything. Every two liter bottle of diet soda, every peanut in the red metal can, every strip of glazed floss that he would save in the small drawer under the sink until the whole spool was empty.
Saffron Spires tolerated her husband’s peculiarities. She handed over her cigarette butts so he could save them in the ashtray until the entire pack was gone. She held onto used napkins and paper towels, she kept the little silver air vacuumed tops from her cans of Pringels and made sure to put it all in the spots where he liked them. In the beginning she thought it was cute, something kind of innocent. It made her tear up a little to see him collect the little dried bits of cheese off the floor after they had tacos. Saffron used to watch him in those first few months of marriage and put a painted nail to the corner of her eye attempting to staunch the black mascara run she could feel coming.
For a time after her marriage Saffron still had her looks even though she was five years older than her husband. Her hair had refrained from going stoically white; she had yet to see the damage done to the veins in her right calf from a recent blood clot, so skirts were still an option. She had yet to receive the silver scar on her shoulder where Dr. Caspone would rip out a mole he assumed was cancerous even though the test results came back negative.
All the boys at the office still looked at Saffron they seemed excited just to stand next to her in the elevator. Mr. Renton still came over after lunch every day and perched on the edge of her desk to chit-chat, especially when she was wearing her loose black blouse that she knew even God himself attempted to peak down every now and then.
That time went quickly for Saffron.
A day after their second anniversary and Saffron’s forty-third birthday they didn’t hold the elevator for her. She took the stairs and felt the cellulite on her legs shift in the opposite direction of her trembling muscles. She sweat so profusely going up the three flights that her hair no longer obeyed her and sat atop her head like a two year olds crayon scribbles. Saffron had come home that day thankful that Macomb would be there, that he didn’t judge her or refuse her no matter what kind of consoling she needed or wanted. It was that night in the middle of their coitus that she noticed Macomb staring worriedly at the discarded green sleeve from a stick of gum on the dresser. That was more than Saffron decided she could stand.
Saffron didn’t come home the next evening. For almost three years she had come home promptly at five and Macomb had her dinner ready. It was quarter after when Macomb reluctantly pulled the phone off the receiver and punched in her office number. He got her machine. He looked at the clock. He asked it if it was the right time. He got no answer. He knew she should have been home.
Macomb went into the living room and turned on the television. He kept it on low because she hated the noise of the television especially when she first got home from work. Macomb had just stopped watching television all together but now he wondered if there might have been an accident so he chanced turning it on. None of the sparkling commentators behind their expansive desks had much to say about anything other than the weather. She should have been home.
At quarter to six Macomb drained the rice and poured the over cooked granules back into the orange box before setting it gently into the trash.
Saffron went to her sisters. She didn’t answer any questions. She took her supper in the boys game room in the basement. She cried over her cheeseburger macaroni.
Saffron made a fool of herself in the afternoon meeting that day. She laughed a bit to long at one of Mr. Renton’s jokes. Then she put her hand on his arm with her head full up of thoughts of a different life. The life she thought of was one where strange eyes did nothing for her, and worry didn’t press down on her like the humidity, where she didn’t feel like scratching the skin right off her bones every time she let a word slip from between her lips. They were all looking at her in the little meeting room. Mr. Renton removed her hand.
Leanne Ray came downstairs after she put the kids down. She was four years older than Saffron but looked ten years younger. Saffron watched her sister scoop up video game cartridges and DVD cases wondering if it was all them cigarettes that caused her to get old so quick, but then she noticed the lit one in her sisters hand.
“You gonna call Macomb?”
“Hell with that loony.”
Macomb set out with no idea where Saffron might be but some kind of understated knowledge that it was a husband’s duty to go looking for his missing wife. He drove slowly with his brights on and the radio coming in low. He decided to try the beer joint up the hill. He imagined maybe someone at the office had been promoted or was leaving and they were celebrating and she had just forgotten to call. Maybe, he thought, even though it had never happened before.
The place up the hill was famous, or rather infamous for getting people drunk then putting them behind the wheel of their vehicles and sending them down the hill in neutral. It was something like a right of passage. You turn twenty-one you go up the hill drink until you pass out and wake up in the cow pasture strapped behind the wheel of your car. Everyone knew you didn’t head up the hill after a certain hour. Everyone knew to take the back road behind the mill.
Marty Mcmurtry had been drinking since one that afternoon, since receiving his walking papers from the disposal company upon them getting word of his third D.U.I. Marty had just been propped up behind the wheel of his twice repossessed red Mustang and sent down the hill when Macomb turned up it. Marty ended up in the passenger seat of Macomb’s sputtering Honda upside down pinned there by a section of the windshield.
Macomb ended up in the gravel almost ten yards away from both vehicles. His left leg was still in his car. They finally found him way back in the bushes, long after he had bled out. He crawled that far apparently trying to capture the clear plastic knob one held on to in order to roll down the car window. The little sucker had popped off on impact and easily picked its way through the gravel.
Saffron didn’t feel a thing. She stayed with her sister for a month turning away all consolations. When she left for San Antonio she found she had not been thinking much about Macomb at all but her Daddy instead. He’d been gone for over fifteen years; he was a miner and caught the black lung. He came home at night dark as an African. He would get something to eat then go out drinking. He’d come back with blood on him, sometimes his own sometimes not. He liked to sit by Saffron’s bed late at night and fondle her little pre-pubescent breasts. He liked to kiss and lick her earlobes.
Saffron smoked as she drove with the windows down. When she finished she almost saved the butt, almost crushed the cherry and set it in the ashtray like she used to do waiting until the whole pack was used and Macomb could assemble it like some crazy puzzle. She caught herself and flicked it out the window. Her daddy was a bastard she thought, but at least he was a real man.
