Popshot Magazine – August 2019

“I can see your heart’s sore. It’s a crying shame to see a girl so pretty, so blue.”
“It isn’t fair,” she started, but then blushed at her own voice, a schoolgirl’s whine.
But Elvis only nodded. “I can fi x that, if you’ll let me.”
“How?”
“You want somethin’, don’t you?” He pulled her close. Angela felt heat travel up
her spine. “Two lanes wide, unrolling like a black fl ag...”
She started. “How did you?”
“It don’t matter. I can get it for you. I can get you the road.”
Elvis’s skin was warm. He twirled her again to the edge of the clearing where her
toe skimmed a crop of mushrooms, and wound her back. His teeth shone in the
moonlight, impossibly white.
Her heart felt like it was about to burst and fl ood her body with poison.
“Angie, you’re not meant for a podunk town like this! Monday’s washing day,
Sunday’s church-day, and every other day the same. You stay here, kids are gonna
ruin that neat little waist before you’re twenty-fi ve.”
His hand moved in slow circles on her back.
“Then help me,” she said. “Please.”
“Sure thing,” he crooned. “But I’ll need something in return.”
Elvis smiled and from the corner of his mouth crept a tongue black as tar and long
as the future, forked at the end.
“Yes,” said Angie. She moved closer.
Elvis laughed. “Ain’t you even gonna ask what it is?”
Angie considered for a moment. “Is it anything I’ll miss?”
“No.”
“Then it doesn’t matter, does it?”
Angie moved forwards and kissed Elvis on his snarling mouth. The music kicked
up its heels and jumped from blues to rock 'n’ roll. Elvis swung her into a new dance,
one she didn’t know the steps to. They danced until she wore through her cotton
socks, till the balls of her feet were bloody and streaked with mud; they danced back
in time, from tango and foxtrot to court reels and jigs, until they were barely dancing
at all, but twisting and leaping to a pounding, solitary drum.
They danced until Elvis’s hair shook loose from its pompadour and fell in strands
around his face. The horns that had been hidden gleamed in the moonlight until she
recognised anew those bowed thighs, those swivelling hips, that crook-legged thrust
that drove girls to faint. Those quickstepping feet blurred into blue suede hooves.
Angie didn’t mind. She liked him better that way.
She crawled home with the waking of the birds. She wasn’t tired. Her blood felt
electrifi ed; she felt like she’d never be tired again. Over breakfast her mother told
her she’d had some news from the postman. Mrs Gardner had died of a heart attack.
Angie felt nothing. There hadn’t been time to post the signatures to the Council, and
no-one could fi nd the form. Another vote was held the week after the funeral.
The road was approved by a margin of one.
Angie climbed to the roof of her house and stayed there until the workmen arrived
to carve out the road. The fresh tar smelled like sulphur.