Joe Manus

Frozen Treat

I run towards the melodic chimes of the ice cream truck. I always have. 

Moving vessel filled with promise.

A Siren's call to those exhausted.

Reminder to all of a childhood zeitgeist.

I have always run towards.

Then I became a drug dealer.

I used an ice cream truck as a ridiculous cover to saunter from supply to demand. Kids lamentably chased it as I drove past them without stopping. I was not good enough at it to make a career of it. I was a good guy and a bad guy all inside of a heartbeat.

Stainless bracelets after being pulled from that truck.

My one allotted phone call was to dad, who immediately hung up on the automated intro.

I turned 21 in a detention center cell.

I was served Pruno, in a leftover Cup O Noodles container, by a bank robber, in boxer briefs.

My first week, one of the men there, an accused murderer, received divorce papers.

I woke up to his ballooned face posturing in mine. He had hung himself dead with the payphone cord. I still see his face some nights. I still hear the gassy mumble he belched from his rotting innards. 

My sister died that year, she went free, while I lay bound. I got the story over an antiquated static line from dad. 

"She is dead and you never even said goodbye you fucking loser."

He was hurting.

So was I.

I was released to bury her with an escort from two correctional officers.

The same funeral that celebrated her life also shined bright lights on the death of me. All stared at my cuffed wrists and ankles.

I was returned that night to a hollow, barred box and to a beat down over a filthy mattress. Fists from a man who was charged with  stabbing his daughter in the face. I normally would have lost that matchup, but my hurt emboldened a ragged monster who had slept through too much, for too long. 

I hurt him badly.

I lost a part of me back then.

I gained a personal anthaneum of outlooks towards life and criminals though.

I still throw out a pack of cigarettes and lighter a hundred yards in front of the progress of a prison road detail every so often.

I still wave with honesty, when next to a transport. 

Diminutive eyes peaking from diminutive slots as I roll freely.

Cattle car of missed potentials.

I know all criminals are not hate-filled maniacs. Most are the human residue left behind from their evaporating hard as fuck environs. 

I still run towards the melodic chimes of the ice cream truck, 

because what was once frozen has thawed. 

Joe Manus is a lifetime resident of the South. He was educated in the public schools of rural Georgia, receiving his high school diploma in 1992. Joe is an award winning furniture designer. He believes in living the best and the worst of the human experience and writing about it. This year he has been published by Yale University's The Perch, Crack The Spine Year End Anthology, Coffin Bell Journal, Watershed Review, and Ringling College's Shift.