#rowanduvalmg

[salingerisaghost]

If Salinger had Snapchat

@spookysalinger

[salingerisaghost]

smoke & retribution | salinger + rowan

Twenty minutes had passed since Gail had run off to do whatever she spent her afternoons doing when she wasn’t with the man perched on a bar stool along her kitchen island. Volunteering with birds or feeding the elderly at the park, one or the other or some variation in-between. In any case, he’d promised to stay put. His agenda was a suspiciously empty one & she’d recognized this so when a knock came at the door that wasn’t his, Salinger took to finishing his sentence before looking up from the paper folded in half in front of him. Untethering himself from his seat, he walked into the hall towards the persistent knock only to catch a glimpse of a familiar frame through a pane of glass. Behind his eyes, a flash of rage but, Salinger paused, just out of the line of sight. He looked from Rowan to the ground & shook his head in disbelief. Only he should be so lucky. It’d been weeks since he’d begun fostering his rage for the man just on the other side of the door; a lamb come for slaughter. Salinger inhaled, slow & careful, reached for the door & pulled it open.

Surprise was a marvelous thing. He might not ever wash his hands of violence, but he could at least see himself thanking God for the convenience. “Imagine the surprise.” Salinger’s voice was prickly at best, condescending at worst. “You better be going door to door to sell magazines.” He made a point of looking Rowan up & down, evidently marketing a subscription wasn’t why he’d come. Glancing over the man’s shoulder for a neighbor, or any sign of Gail, when he didn’t find it he reached for Rowan’s throat. More specifically, he snatched the man’s collar & jerked him inside, using the momentum to slam the door closed in the process. “We should talk.” Salinger spoke as if it were the most mundane thing in the world, his shoulders rolling with cruelness as he straightened his cuffs that had been offset by the exertion.

[salingerisaghost]

True Grit | 9 YEARS PRIOR + rowan & salinger

The breeze through the open passenger window scented the interior of the car with freshly mown grass & water, summer things & soap suds. It was temporary. The interior of Salinger’s prized Fastback came with, & would never be without, the subtle scent of gasoline that lingered on the vinyl seats. The air conditioning recycled the toxic air, ensuring that every time the pistons were firing, you could smell the blood of it. Preference had grown from necessity, but not every nuance came from its original owner. (A man named Roy had been the original owner, turning over the keys a man he suspected was some sort of poker player or designer drug dealer. He’d kept the car in its original condition.) Neither a poker player nor drug dealer, Salinger had replaced the transmission twelve years ago out of necessity & upgraded the car from a 289 to a 347 out of selfish desire for more power under the hood. The result was a profound & hellish growl of a turnover every time he twisted the key in the ignition.

 A compliment shouted across the yard from one his neighbors was followed by an even less asked for “My midlife crisis meant Mets season tickets – I should’ve gone with a car. Definitely.” Salinger, as the inventor of sly remarks, was impervious to them. His smile was ruthless in the sharp reflection on the hood of the Mustang. He made a habit of avoiding his neighbors. A few years was nothing to him, but if the kid who’d been playing out front when he’d first moved in was going to college & the mysterious next door neighbor still look like he might pick up his mom, Salinger was in trouble. So was his dad. -- Salinger said nothing. His only response came by way of the tight smile & a hand over his shoulder as he wrapped the hose around his elbow. He threaded his way back to the garage where he dumped the green loops. Pitching a rag that had been hanging out of his back pocket towards the mouth of the garage, he careened back to the car. The Highland Green paint untarnished; polished & poured over, she was a thing of beauty.

Wayward appreciation came in the form of the accelerator inching towards the floorboard. Greeted with a ruckus that could be felt from the soles of his shoe & under his hand on the gears. Water evaporated of the header in the same fashion that Salinger’s usual qualms could be burned temporarily. They’d condensate back. He missed his life. He missed everything about it: the carelessness, the extravagance but he didn’t have to miss the gas pedal beneath his foot. Free time felt like an empty curse more often than it felt like a blessing so it was best to pretend he didn’t know exactly where he was going when he sat at the light outside his neighborhood. 

Resisting the allure of a green light, Salinger waited for a funeral procession as it crossed the intersection. A trail of flashers beamed behind the hearse that had already gone by. His eyes flicked unceremoniously into the rearview mirror as the car behind him honked. Refusing to follow the funeral & not particularly bothered to miss the light, Salinger sat still. His look in the mirror might’ve killed the driver behind him for all he knew because the car didn’t honk again as the light went yellow, then red. A bad joke about dying to get into the cemetery passed through his head. Recognizing it as being something his father would say, he immediately felt the urge to put the cigarette hanging between his lips out on his arm. 

He made a fair straggler. Someone wandering from the final goodbyes spoken to a portrait of a man Salinger hadn’t cared to look towards. He wasn’t close enough to see the wireframes, or that the man was older than he was when he’d died. Thirty-nine was a ridiculous age. It sat on the cusp & carried altogether unsavory tropes of being the ideal age to have been married to the woman you’d eventually divorce & live in the house you’d come to hate with the kid that would inevitably resent you. This was not Salinger’s reality. There was nothing casual or mundane about him, even before Bentley. He did, however, look sullen or sick over it as he paced by the line of parked cars. He flitted further away as mourners began to file back to their practical mid-sized Toyotas. Warily, he watched them from afar until something caught his attention. It was in fact a someone, but the hat on their head had Salinger’s head swiveling to see if there were others. Had he been paying so little attention that he hadn’t noticed a niche group of Texans mourning a fallen cowboy? Surely not. Upon closer inspection, he found that there was only one. A hook formed at the corner of his mouth as Salinger’s grinned. A man out of time perhaps? An eccentric? Not clothed in funeral garb himself, Salinger might’ve stood out himself. Catching the other man’s eyes, Salinger pointed languidly towards the crown of his head before flipping it into what might’ve been a thinly veiled sarcastic thumbs up or a genuine compliment towards the visage of the late John Wayne.

[hellbentley-blog]

❌

“Get the fuck out of the woods. It’s twenty fifteen for god’s sake. It doesn’t make him seem cool. It makes him seem creepy. There are isolated places in town where he could live and still be just as cowboy as he’d like.”

[salingerisaghost]

There are some roads you shouldn't go down. Because maps used to say, "There be dragons here." Now they don't. But that doesn't mean the dragons aren't there. 

[salingerisaghost]

^ Rowan

Two? Seems greedy.

Roses are redViolets are blueI still plan on curb stomping you.

[salingerisaghost]

^ Rowan

God saw me hungry, so he created Chicken MarsalaHe same me thirsty, so he created nice scotchHe saw me walking, so he created the Jaguar F-TypeHe saw me without problems, so he created yo ass.

[salingerisaghost]

Blood Still Stains | Rowan & Salinger

God fucking damn it. He’d had no intentions of staying at the school before, but now he was even less inclined. As he turned a corner he spotted the side of Rowan’s head bobbing towards him & stopped on a dime. Under his three-piece, his blood crawled. Torn between trying to play nice for Gail’s sake & wanting to rip the other man’s throat out for eliciting her rage - Salinger was firmly stuck between two entirely different magnetic field’s. He went to turn, to walk the other way but he was positive Rowan had seen him too & as he began to double back from the way he came he gave pause again. He turned back around. There went his streak that had lasted all of .08 seconds.  He didn’t trust Rowan to walk behind him anyway. “Well if it isn’t the Boy Scout himself.”