The new house in hell is coming along nicely, thanks for asking. Not literal hell, LOL, just regional, seasonal: the unholy Santa Ana winds, the clockwork forest fires, the charred layers of stacked earth that will one day read like the growth rings of the trees they devour. The study of growth rings is called dendrochronology, which sounds like endocrinology, the study of hormones, the kind that our devouring our son, a female soul trapped in a state of maleness trapped in a state lacking basic human compassion. The caterpillar was born a caterpillar must remain a caterpillar. Butterfly as social construct. Butterflyism as a side effect of reading questionable books. It’s fine. Questionable books, combustible books, whatever. We understand. We’re fine, we’ll get past. We’ll get passed. There is a bridge overpass near my house; I drive under it every day on my way to work and sometimes I see gray chunks of concrete fall from above and detonate in the shoulder of the road and I’ve complained to the city council, the mayor, the county engineer, but all they want to know is why I’m anti-bridge, anti-transportation. Someone’s going to get killed, I say. Why can’t you love our wonderful infrastructure, they ask. Our town is cynical. Our town is cyclical. Our town is a cicada; it buries itself and re-emerges every few decades. Our town is named after a former enemy of state. There is a statue in the center of our town square that keeps being removed and reinstalled and the pigeons aren’t sure where to shit anymore. I feel an increasing urgency to scream but it leaves my throat as more of a wail/song, a whale song, for when the whales stop singing and we’ll be the ones that must preserve song. Of thee I sing, but not well, just warbling along with the teleprompter, a post-election-year karaoke. The teleprompter itself is being prompted; by what I’m unsure. The teleprompter is spitting out an endless list of the side-effects of too much screen time. My daughter was the last one in her class to get a screen and it’s my fault. I’m a bad parent. I’ll try to do better. On the plus side, I’ve been keeping track of the family prescriptions. I made a spreadsheet. A med-sheet. My daughter is on meds for her many anxieties, one of which is obsessively counting them all (the meds and the anxieties). She’s fine. She goes to a school that holds monthly emergency drills, like my own elementary school did all those years ago, but now the teachers draw black curtains across the windows facing the hallway and I’m sure that part is new, as is the school district’s real-time security app that makes us feel part-time-secure. My therapist says there’s an app for everything now, there’s even an app that can send you advance warnings about the Santa Ana winds, so maybe that’s one less terror in my future. I feel better today, bed-rested, enough to email another official about the condition of the bridge overpass. I’m patriotic, I add this time. You can love something to the point where you feel its decay in your bones, like an ache. This ache is just a caring trying not to leave the body. It’s fine. Really. I’m getting older; aches are to be expected, so I’m focusing on self-care. I’ve found a new route to work. I joined a pickleball league. We’ll have you guys out to see the new house, when it’s done, before it’s gone.
Joe Kapitan writes fiction and creative nonfiction from a pine grove south of Cleveland. He is the author of a fiction chapbook, a short story collection, and many individual pieces published online and in print. He serves as an assistant CNF editor at Pithead Chapel.