Issue Forty-Two

I was punched in the face on Halloween and I was in slow classes but in the instant of the punch I understood higher math

Do you remember posing on the front steps, cradling your fresh-from-the-hospital baby sister? Eleven-year-old head bent, black hornrims sliding down your nose.

Cremated fingernails or white lily pollen or the dust of tissues at a hundred funerals—though nobody she’s loved has ever died.

My friend Shannon sewed a Halloween costume for her son Alex. He said he wanted to be a witch. Shannon asked me to pick up a broom from the supermarket on the way home from work.

I run into my fifteen-year-old self in the chip aisle at the Nifty Mart. This is the stuff bored middle-aged people tweet about. If you could say four words to your teenaged self, what would they be?

I first see you through the screen of our store-brand tissue-like curtain; its gauze a virginal white.

She scans the starry sky, scries smoke and mirrors. Cross-examines the cat. Consults soggy tea leaves, pockets rose quartz, throws bones, a fit, visits psychics, stamps her feet. Missed it when love tiptoed by, then died.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re going to say if it was you, you would have stayed. Maybe you would have panicked and taken off but you think you would have gone back and done the right thing.

Sit with your back strapped to the wooden chair, and hide the tremors in your hands while you watch your mother carve up the carcass, blood-wedged fingernails prodding its macerated flesh on the table. Hold back your tears as your father tears the ivory tusks with a saw-toothed knife, his mouth gnawing on its meat.

It was inaudible, an intermission of everyday life on Earth. Perhaps a vignette, a residual tremor stemming from the Big Bang, something that altered the microbes and the water, and nobody saw it save for a droid operating a dish somewhere near the Bering Sea.

There wasn’t much to say. Your mother was Peter Banning in Hook, on an extended stay of metaphorically on all fours, rooting around for her globes of sand and soda-lime.

The neighbor kid snapped his leg on a trampoline. I watched from my bedroom this morning as his parents dragged the trampoline to the curb with disgust, leaving it a crumpled skeleton of moss-stained wires and poles.

On Tuesday morning, Time got the hiccups. Not your ordinary, drink-some-water-upside-down hiccups. These were cosmic hiccups that made minutes skip like scratched vinyl and hours fold into origami swans.

He wasn’t religious. But he’d read the Bible, front to back. He wasn’t college educated. But he knew right from wrong. When he stole the motel ash tray inscribed, “Thou Shall Not Steal – 5th Commandment,” he knew it was wrong: It’s the 8th commandment, not the 5th.

I don’t want to die. Your mother rocks and repeats it like a mantra. You climb into her bed, press your small body against hers, and feel her heart rage.