Buying Happiness Pt. 1

In the cardboard box town, the corners are soggy with the mold that grows in the tubs and the mildew that grows on the sides of the trailers that sit close together on the second curve of Whistlewood Road. It's not just tin-can walls covering crowded aluminum families that are stained with the splattered black ink spots, but the towns' high hat facade, tattooed with the women's catty chatter, with men who each are both politicians and Monday morning quarterbacks, with law that is just below uniformed clad bodies and black, stiff-soled shoes, with preachers and pastors held higher than God. Whistlewood Road was where they all ended up, every woman with her painted cheeks filled with Botox, every man with his mind abundant with a homegrown ego, every teenager with flickering candle hopes that melt wax with age, eventually every child born in the cardboard confines would take the easy-to-miss turn onto Whistlewood and stand on the sharp second curve; staring straight into the eyes of a gaunt woman with desert cracked lips, thin enough to disappear when a holey smile of yellowing teeth, is elicited. A tall, slim figure, whose clothes hung off of her near transparent skin like robes, named after her daddy, who'd wanted a son to carry on the family business. Wilma Harrison, but since before she was born she'd been called Willie May. Of eight trailers parked in the valley, six belonged to her, the other two were homes for both of her sons and their families. Six trailers weren't too much room for one woman, in fact, it didn't seem to be enough. Willie May's trailer park was set up much like a wagon caravan resting for the night, her six set up in a ring. Unlike the wagon fort, Willie May's ring made of the precious metals like tin and aluminum was not to keep things out but to conceal something within. The other two trailers sat just out of reach from the circle, one in worse shape than the rest was once white but now from misuse was green and black with Irish moss and creeping mildew. This one belonged to the younger of the brothers, whose family lived much like a flock of chickens- left to wander on their own, returning only for dinner. The last of the trailers, belonging to the older of the two, was painted baby blue. Small shrubs were planted beneath windows and around the exposed bricks of the foundation, an attempt at hiding what could never be covered- a pedigree. All chosen by a woman with rosy cheeks, not colored with life but instead painted on by embarrassment, longing to be detached from the Harrison name, that with it brought stares. Sadly the only way to ever remove a label like this is by amputation.