Yellow Mama E zine

Milford Eyes

​

by Dale Scherfling

 

           She was twenty-six when I first knew her, though she looked older. That was the coal dust and the husband, I suppose. But her eyes never aged. Hazel, and always on the edge of something—laughter or knowledge, I couldn't tell which.

         Her name was Darlene. She lived next door in a house nearly identical to ours: the same narrow porch, the same screen door with the bent hinge that announced every arrival. We were in Milford, a company town straddling the Tennessee–West Virginia line where the soot settled into everything, even the Monday wash.

         She wore those loose house dresses. Nothing under them, which I discovered by accident and then by design. I was sixteen. She had a way of making things seem natural that weren't.

         Her husband worked days at the union hall. When he came home, he was tired and mean in a practiced way, like a man who has decided certain things about himself. Wear panties, he'd say. You're showin' all you got. She'd look at me across the room with those laughing eyes and I'd have to look away.

          For months I ran from her. She'd pull me into her lap, and I'd scramble free, burning, and go home and be alone with it. Then one afternoon I didn't run. I kissed her back, really kissed her, and we ended up against the kitchen sink with her dress up and my pants down, both of us listening for that screen door. That was how it was for the next four years, until the Marines took me.

        I went north after my discharge. Factory work along Lake Erie, the same as a thousand other men who'd left those hills. I married a woman who eventually left me, which seemed fair. I drank beer and played some ball and let a decade pass the way you do when you aren't paying attention.

        When the jobs up north disappeared, I came home. She was still next door. Still those dresses. Her eyes were the same—that was the first thing I checked, and I hated myself a little for it. We resumed without discussing it, the way you pick up a habit you never truly quit.

          She died on a Tuesday in March. The day before, we were in her kitchen one last time. Rain coming. Screen door latched. When it was over she laughed, and the laugh was the same one I'd heard at sixteen, and I understood then that I had loved her—that I had loved her a long time without knowing what to call it, and that it didn't matter now.

           I drove behind the hearse with my hands at ten and two. The hills were low and green and indifferent. I thought about the farm she'd grown up on, which I'd never seen, and all the things she'd taught me that no one had taught her.

 

         Dale Scherfling is a newspaper veteran of 30 years, serving as a sportswriter, columnist, editor, and photographer and a retired Navy journalist and photographer. His work has appeared in Third Act Magazine, Does It Have Pockets Magazine, Lost Blonde Literary, All Hands Magazine, Pacific Crossroads, Daily Californian, Naval Aviation Magazine, Propeller Magazine, and Buckeye Guard Magazine. He is the recipient of three U.S. Army Front Page Journalism Awards. He is also a college lecturer and photography and music instructor.

​

      Hillary Lyon founded and for 20 years acted as senior editor for the independent poetry publisher, Subsynchronous Press. Her horror, speculative fiction, and crime short stories, drabbles, and poems have appeared in more than 150 publications. She's an SFPA Rhysling Award nominated poet. Hillary is also the art director for Black Petals.