The Shake, but not how Neal McCoy did it
Local paper says shake-and-bake forces the cook to hold a flammable concoction up close and’s less safe than cooking up time-tested red-n-black. Sheriff out in Franklin County says it’s like holding a flame thrower.
Damned if they ever felt them chemicals expand in your hand as you shake and shake and shake, that thin plastic old soda bottle gets tighter and tighter and tighter, you think it’ll burst, then you shake a little more.
It’s a game now but there ain’t a prize, and no one’s watching, even if you think there’s police out in them woods. Even if there were, here you are, shaking like Jerry Lee Lewis come on the radio, and that bottle keeps expanding: Mtn. Dew 2-liter turning Sprite-green. From across the kitchen, the old head showing you the ropes grunts, “Best burp that ‘fore it bursts.”
You wedge that thin bottle between your right arm and the top of your rib cage. Been seeing a lot more detail in that rib cage lately. You wedge that thin bottle tight, really clamp down, and slowly turn its white cap to the left.
The white cap’s ridges cut into the thin skin of your fingers, you’d swear it’s drawing blood, but you slowly turn. A hiss rings out and stings the inside of your ears, the bottle slightly collapses into itself, and that smell!
A smell that chokes the life out of each nose hair, a smell that’s more’n a smell: it puckers the back of your throat and your scalp ruffles, you feel the pins and needles up there just like taking that first hit off a fresh foil … goddamn! Close that cap up and keep shaking!
©2022 Hoss Chapman All rights reserved.
Hoss Chapman is a worker and poet from Southeast Missouri with quite a past and a formidable rap sheet. Holler at him at leadbeltchapman@protonmail.com