Me and Johnny, Johnny and I

They couldn't tell us nothin' bout our love. They wouldn't know it if it slapped their momma cross they face! Love is much more than dingy street oils and perfumes. It's more than fancy underwear that makes your crotch itch—more than what the whole town could ever grasp about what love was, but yet everyone in the town knew about me and Johnny. Johnny and I. Most all of them disapproving, shaking their heads like they been in and up, out and about, knowing all there is to know about us. Johnny was always out on that boat—fishing for a living. But we like to call them voyages. That's the picture he would paint bout his trips when he'd come home and explain 'em to me. Once he told me 'bout how this humongous Kraken attacked the ship when most everyone was sleeping and how he leaped overboard and pierced the creature with his tiny little ole' fishing rod! Could you imagine?! Or the time a mermaid got caught in a net and tried to seduce my Johnny—telling him how he could live with her under the water and see things he'd never seen. I asked Johnny if he had thought about going with her—the mermaid. He admitted to thinking about it for a few seconds but said he didn't need to explore any other worlds cause he got paradise with me.

With Johnny out at sea I'd be home running my own business selling dinners to folks who either was too busy or lazy to cook or just plain didn't know how. I had to keep myself busy cause he'd be gone for weeks on end and I had no way of knowing when he'd be back. So every night I'd lay out a dinner for him just in case and before I'd lay down to bed, I made sure to get down on my rusty knees to send a prayer for Johhny to come back safe. Them days when he did come home, he always had this new gem to give me. They'd be the most beautiful, magical gems I ever did see and each one had a different color, a different feel, and got increasingly interesting and beautiful. I swear he gets them from some kind of jeweler, but he tells me he swims to the bottom of the ocean to find them.

The town hates us together. Hate us cause they're plagued with old, common men and common women with no idea how to care for one another. Infidelity plagued the town—full of ring snatchers and hiders!—cause nobody was satisfied with themselves and damn sure not with each other! Meanwhile, Johnny and I never needed to glance at anyone else—not even in the slightest. What for? I'm convinced everybody's just too lazy to love. So of course when Johnny and I would go out on the town, maybe a park on a nice, sunny day—eating strawberry jam toast under the crisp sun folks would turn their noses up at us like they were smelling their own bull. Cause I sho' smelt it!

Freshly cut grass smells sweet. And ants pattered their way onto our red and white patterned quilt as I laid on my back with my face to the sky—the breeze caressing our brown skin. Johnny sprawled out like a baby himself atop my bosom. I could smell the blue magic from his scalp—looking down on him feeding from me like I was his momma—like he was safe in this grand, big world of wild Kraken and mermaid and crazy folk! I was strong...and he was vulnerable; see, I gave him life! And that's the kinda love we had. The love everyone was looking down on. But it was never 'bout them. They would just never have a love, a sanction, a truth like us. Like me and Johnny. Like Johnny and I.