【Written by Birdie Stark】
The Burro Baby did not come from anywhere, really—she lived too quickly for any mama and papa sort of nonsense. First, they found her in a wooden dynamite box on the doorstep of a fire station in Wilcox. They called her Burro Baby on account of her paunchy proportions.
Her childhood was a blink. She was a very fat little girl, taken in by an old rancher who raised her until the age of fourteen when she was old enough to possess the virtue of dishonesty.
It was then that she discovered an empty peach crate which the rancher had stuffed with cash and buried under his porch. One night she got him very drunk and dug up the crate and pilfered the money. She took a Greyhound bus into downtown Tucson, where she stayed at the Hotel Congress for five days before finding herself entirely destitute. It was there that a local bartender fell in love with her.
The first night they slept together he asked for her name and she did not know what to say; she had only ever been the Burro Baby. She undid the clasp of her bra and thought of the crate of peaches under the porch and ran her lips over the bartender’s ear and whispered that her name was Georgia. That night she fell asleep in his arms, and by the sixth day of their affair she had won a key to his apartment.
She lived there many months, humming every morning as the sun rose, pinching her nostrils to the smell of patchouli wafting up from the apartment below. First she tried to be a painter, taking the cash from the peach crate to a pharmacy where she bought a watercolor set. She sat on a park bench and painted all the colors that swirled inside of her, but by the end of the day all she had were eight soaking brown pages clasped in her fat hands.
She tried to be a singer too, but the bar behind Hotel Congress only gave her one shot. She licked her lips and said good evening Tucson but when the pianist began to strike his keys she lost her aim, and in that way she let herself unravel on the stage as every third note or so parted her lips. Afterwards she shuddered and heaved into a bush. Tendrils of spittle swung like pendulums beneath her, and when the sun rose she stopped humming.
As it happened, the only thing the Burro Baby did quite well was work at Mikey’s. She got the job after sauntering inside with the rhinestones on her jeans spangling. The man behind the counter smiled a snake’s grin and said whydontcha start tomorrow. She walked herself home, and this time when the bartender kissed her she opened her eyes to watch the ceiling.
The first few nights at Mikey’s her stomach sank under the weight of a hundred little pebbles. At midnight wily mice and men with swirling hair emerged to writhe around in the gasoline-soaked trash outside. Underneath strips of blinking red light, Mikey hung a sign which said Loitering, fadoodling, and lollygagging prohibited. It didn’t do much, so the Burro Baby kept a box cutter in her boot which she’d only ever used to open a sympathy card delivered to the wrong address. She learned to say it’s after hours man, and sometimes at closing time she banged a sheet of metal on the concrete outside and said everybody scoot! Some of the men who came to Mikey’s had met the wrong side of luck, and their teeth had yellowed and grayed before falling onto the pavement one by one.
The Burro Baby never did try any drugs. Well, not those sorts—she did try psychedelics once on a whim, hoping it might wipe off the hard caliche soil that had caked over her soul. Instead she sat planted on the sand, bubbling with laughter as a cactus up above her twisted into a great contorted spire that pierced the clouds and grazed heaven. As the mushrooms wore off she hummed a small song and only cried a little at the great miasmic stink her life had become.
Months passed, and the folks at Mikey’s liked her lots. Her nametag said Georgia because Mikey said ain’t no one feel good about no baby working this joint, so people called her peaches and when the bell on the door jingled and tubercolic grunts rolled on inside she smiled a bit at the thought of being known.
Winter came and she was eighteen years old. All the farmer’s money had disappeared, and most of her own, too. On Fridays when Mikey slipped a paycheck between her unctuous fingers she plodded to Gibson’s Grocery to buy a lottery ticket, a tabloid, and a peanut parfait twist. In this way her wages slipped away, and she found herself stuck in the patchouli-soaked apartment.
Most of the time the bartender was alright to her. In strokes of luck she came home to his drool-soaked pillow, and sometimes she stayed in the shower long enough for him to fall asleep. When he was awake it was okay, except that he liked to yell more than she cared for. A big old bubble welled up inside of her that could not quite escape. The Burro Baby did not know how to cry.
One night when he grabbed her wrist, her fat chin wrinkled and she grabbed her things and left. There was a shopping cart on Congress Street packed with newspapers, and she slept in there for quite some time. Mikey let her keep her job until she stunk too much, and then she did not work at all.
For a few years she walked the streets, and sometimes she hummed. Her clothes hung pendulously on her body, flapping in the hot breeze and stinging her skin and dripping with oil and phlegm and rarely blood. In the summer she stripped; her skin sunk into caverns and a man with a bible in his hands said that sunburns suited her. Her great stomach shrunk and by her fiftieth year she was only a beanpole. She never kissed again, and when she sucked her thumbs it was only to lick the deposits of salt which had grown there. On a day in October she kicked a metal can down Congress Street until it clunked and rolled beneath an open manhole cover. Her body bent into a question mark as she wailed, and when she dove for the can there was hardly any baby left for the great rubber tires to flatten.