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Mister Beauregard
JCD Kerwin

Mister Beauregard has no heart. He keeps an antique, silver watch just above his breast coat pocket, just above his heart, so that the tick-tick-tocking mimics the thump-thump-bumping of a normal man’s heart.

He drives a Chevelle‘69, just to pass the time, as he listens to the tick-tick just above his breast bone, just across his chest, in his powder-blue, Chevy ’69. It’s leftover from the times he drove ‘till sunrise on the strip; ‘till he drove all night chasing phantoms in his vision while he looked at Mars. Now he sees shadows when he stares; he sees clouds when he knows it should be Heaven in the stars.

His eyes are made of glass, they say, because to buy his poor wife’s ashes he had to give his real ones both away. Her ashes sit near the magazines he never reads, and by the urn that keeps the fattest tabby you’d have ever seen. Its name was Max and it chased cedar waxwings in the yard.

He smokes cigars when he drives so far, and the smoke curls like clouds along the Sunset Boulevard. He dreams he’s somewhere that’s neverwhere and notquitehere because he can’t quite see or hear the ticking of reality the rest of us all breathe and fear. He’s someone else who isn’t here; someone who is nevermore…the ghost of Mister Beauregard.

(March, 2012…although I could’ve sworn it was older.)