Cruella Deville

For Julie who said that I should stop playing it safe with my writing. That was when she found out that I actually do more poetry writing than non-fiction or fiction. So just for you Jules, here's one based on a childhood event in Memphis:

Cruella Deville

always parked her long menacing car sideways on the un-mown scorch in her yard until the night she lurched into our driveway, rode over my bicycle, the headlights two crazed eyes staring through the walls of our house, pounding her drunken fists against the door, ‘Let me in my house!’ When my father opened the door a shaft of light fell, broke into a thousand tiny pieces on the porch.
That’s when I saw the cracked ochre teeth, the red mercurochrome eyes like the time I skinned both knees, smelled grape vinegar leaking from the ends of her wild, sizzling hair. We huddled in our pajamas against our pure cotton mother who always smelled of lilac and yellow, while my dad stepped easily over the broken shards into the darkness, his voice warm music just like the minister’s on Sundays, to gentle Mrs.Deville across the imaginary line between our yards, the one my brothers dared to cross, press their virgin freckles against the big dirty window, see if Satan owned a color television. After my dad fixed my bike I slid onto the seat, closed my hands around the rubber grips and pushed off, picking up speed the pink and white plastic tassels and long flying hair streaking the sun but it never rode straight after that.

The front tire always wobbled just a little.