Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania): Something Solid: The Nineties: "The Rustic Inscrutable"

Carrie, a pretty brunette with bag-edged eyes, was
another obvious small-town siren, and was stationed,
strangely, right across from Jen in Leete Hall. My
young mind was naïve about such things. Carrie bothered
to flop me, sloppily, from a murky marriage into her bed,
oblivious as I was to my own confusion. Nights knee-
deep in discomfort, Carrie my accomplice, I slipped
into nothingness and no-man’s land. Jen and I had
the shotgun marriage ended for us, and oh what a shotgun
it was— a loaded one. That much, I sort of knew.
But Jen had disappeared off-campus completely. Carrie and Jen
both knew some score, in a game which had yet to be
introduced to me. My part was to be passed from
hand to hand— a shared asset, jinxed by the rustic inscrutable.

Something gloomy about small towns, small town
girls: macabre undercurrents follow them around,
amidst the farms, lakes, forests, extended foliage.
The grim reaper likes forests as much as cities,
and the naked flesh of small-town nubiles is as
Hawthorne’d as an even more abject Hester Prynne.
Cobwebs, soot, mud, grease, blood— it’s all
smeared on the two-backed beast, when and if
it happens there. Now, it had happened to
me twice running— suburban, well-situated,
unused to being blood-drenched, ripe to hit
my head on rocks. Jennifer made an abrupt exit
to cover the anguish. Carrie waited darkly
to be punished. I ploughed through fields, into deep water.

© Adam Fieled 2021-2026