I Wept Into Your Toil – Jenna Obeid Mackenroth

September 21, 2026

The little agony-mosquito gets drunk off barbaric truths. There isn’t an easy way to say it, not upright, not reversed. I don’t love you. I don’t know why you pretended that I could, but that’s an old game of make believe. All behind me now. Just like the mole on my back. Fever’s splitting around the wheres we used to be and I hang the whys like towels out to dry. The vegetables are going soft even though they’re still on the vine. The locusts are closing in. Sometimes I put my chair out by the highway and catch the other people speeding. I smoke their exhaust. I envy their drives. I envy the places they have to be. Living! It’s back breaking work, isn’t it?

I have spent a fortune in quarters trying to get you to see me. But that’s what I get for forging a five-and-dime store romance. Who knew it cost so much to talk? I need a free love, I need a profitable love. Last night I called Will Bent over my personal phone, I rang at some unseemly time. He couldn’t help but remark how late it was, and that was how I knew he wasn’t the one. The one wouldn’t say “It’s late,” like it’s a question he can’t answer. Like he wasn’t sure why I rang. In fact, no true one would say “It’s late,” at all. The one would think, my, how lucky I am to have this woman ring at such a time. How lucky I am to hear her voice. Will Bent doesn’t know how lucky he is. He won’t be lucky again for a long time, I can tell you that.

Will Bent’s totally blind to fortune, anyways, and I don’t love him, either. He thinks his whole life’s a product of strategy and technique. I tried to teach him the word “advantage” and had more luck catching a fish in my bathtub. Luck? No, he says, that’s his hard work talking. Hard work for him to say it’s bullshit rotating crops like his, hard work to pay someone else to sell it all. I say it’s hard work watching him have better luck than I do, a better house, too. He keeps inviting me to see it, the land he kills and his house, says he wants me there all the time. And then he says I call too late. Anyways, that’s what Will Bent has: dead land and advantage. A fuckton of it. I could use some. Then think of what I’d be: a woman with advantage. What a sight! What a spectacle. If I had half of Will Bent’s advantage, I could own the world. I wouldn’t have to call your name over a payphone. I’d put all that advantage to good use. That’s the worst part, I mean. He has all this advantage and he doesn’t know what to do with it. And he wouldn’t know strategy or technique if they stripped and got into bed on either side of him. You know what I mean! Naked, in broad daylight, and he wouldn’t even know their names. But I know strategy and technique because they’re all I have. I’ve had to fight through three different blights in the past month. I check my leaves for borers and their babies. I barely survived them. And now, the mosquitos. I woke up with fourteen more bites this morning. You’d have thought the mosquitos drank me dry. You wouldn’t believe where they bit me! All I can do is scratch and scratch and– well, the roads are empty, it’s noon now. I guess that everyone’s gone out to the shore. They’ve a shiny casino over there, all brand new. I haven’t seen it yet. No, I don’t think I’m gonna.

Dens of inequity! That’s what we voted for. On Sundays, people used to go to God, and now they go to gamble.

No, I don’t complain. It’s money, and we could all use more of it. But it isn’t clean. And I’m a clean woman, even when I call Will Bent at the wrong hour just to hear him say the wrong lines. I’m thinking of showing up on his doorstep tonight. Is that a good idea? No, I didn’t think so.

There are a hundred other things I could be doing instead of calling you or dreaming about Will Bent’s advantage. My house needs a repainting. I could feed the cows. There’s a bunch of wild dogs trying to get to my chickens, and they need scaring off. I could go to the boardwalk, ask a fortune teller what my next best move is. Fortune teller will tell me to get out, find a new life, there’s nothing left for me here. She doesn’t know I still have a hundred rolls of quarters and all the time in the world to sit on the side of the road. So I have something. And put the blight aside, my land’s just fine. The weather is my problem, not the soil. I have good soil. I treat her well. Will Bent treats his land like a prostitute. He’s a land pimp. You can’t pimp the land.

You can’t pimp your love, either.

Not for a quarter, not for long-distance calls, not to the neighbor, not to me. One only learns this after years of attempted pimping. The epiphany arrives. It is a moment of true solitude, real conversion. And you see the nightly gradients, and they’re all these shades of impossible blue, just impossible. You don’t know blue until you’re out at night with your head leaned back to God. It’s the brutal edge of some great ending. It’s the place at the end of the highway. And we’re savage, and we’re bloodthirsty. At least, I am. I watch Will Bent pimp the land and I do nothing about it. I do it because I want his advantage. Look, the first frost’s coming. Sometimes I am the fortune teller, sometimes I know it’s time to go. But then I always find a reason to stay. The fields need tilling; the neighborhood kids need a pool, and I’m the one that’s got it. And who will watch the cows? Who will keep the dogs at bay? The world’s an impossible thing. It’s not meant to be abandoned, much less understood.