“Hope is not a strategy.”
… Sarah Palin

Billip approached her house the way a horse approaches an oblivion-haha. He had seen her of course and witnessing her had emboldened him enough to undertake this precipitous and unprecedented voyage of the heart.

For every knock on the door two in his chest cavity.

First there was a wild-eyed mother to get past.

“Hello little courter. I’ll tell Wendigo that you are here. She’s upstairs with her chem set making something new out of the dog. Whom should I say is a colly bird?”

“She doesn’t know me. Billip.”

“Noteworthy” Wendigo’s mother said going up the stairs quickly on her one leg.

Wendigo appeared presto wearing only a short Steely Dan t-shirt and a crocheted orange-and-brown merkin. Billip swallowed his tongue. It caught on his uvula and rebounded back into his teeth and he clamped down.

“Ow” Billip said.

“Who are you?” the chestnut colored Wendigo inquired rightly.

“Billip” Billip said. “I saw you at the Esso Station. I was the one with grease in my hand and you were a page from Winsome Magazine. I’ve never seen such a vision in all of my nineteen existences.”

“Billip” Wendigo said chewing on the name a bit. “What next?”

So they were married and Billip was forced to get a job that paid more than he required and he had to work much harder than he had desired but for a while having Wendigo in his bed and naked was recompense enough.

One day Billip returned from his job at Caning and Bondage DDS and found Wendigo on the couch making out with someone from her future. That was pretty much the end of Billip’s story except for a brief coda.

Coda: Billip remarried late in life but he always carried a picture of Wendigo secreted in his fob pocket. It was the famous picture of her running for Majordomo as the candidate of The Brown Shirt Party. Oftimes Billip tacked it to the headboard when he was screwing his new wife. Sometimes it helped and sometimes its magic was weak tea indeed.

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COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and Esquire/Narrative. He has published 8 novels, 4 short story collections, and 5 full-length poetry collections. His recent novel, Memphis Movie, has been optioned for a feature film. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart many times, and 2 of his poems were chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. With his wife he runs a 140 year-old bookstore in Memphis. He can be found at https://coreymesler.wordpress.com.

Photo credit: Matt Tran