by Tx, x
Normally
Special
xTx
Tiny Hardcore Press
Published by Tiny Hardcore Press
Charleston, IL
http://www.tinyhardcorepress.com
Copyright © 2011 xTx
“She Who Subjected the Sun,” originally appeared in Emprise Review. “Standoff,” originally appeared in Word Riot. “Because Seven Ate Nine,” originally appeared in Wigleaf.
Cover photo: “Little Girl in Yellow in Soho” by Robb Todd (www.robbtodd.com)
All rights reserved, including right of reproduction in whole or part in any form.
ISBN: 978-0-9824697-6-7
First Edition
Contents
Title Page
For the Girl Who Doesn’t Know She Has Everything
The Duty Mouths Bring
Water is Thrown on the Witch
The Importance of Folding Towels
Standoff
Father’s Day
Marci is Going to Shoot Up Meth With Her Friend
She Who Subjected the Sun
For Her
The Honking Was Deafening
Their Daughter Played in the Boxes
The Mill Pond
Good Boy, Fritos
A Brief History of Masturbation
Fireflies
Exactly Raisins
I Love My Dad. My Dad Loves Me.
There was no mother in that house.
An Unsteady Place
Because Seven Ate Nine
I Wish They Knew
Things I Could Tell You
Because I Am Not a Monster
About the Author
Acknowledgments
For Roxane who is helping me believe
For the Girl Who Doesn’t Know She Has Everything
A part of me inside a part of you but you didn’t know it yet. Not then. Instead, you kept on crying whenever you felt so lonely it made you want to swallow pills, cut yourself, say yes to boys. If you had known I was there, waiting to be born, maybe it would have made a difference. But you didn’t. It wasn’t time. You had to keep falling down. You had to endure everything that would eventually become scars.
A part of you inside a part of me but I didn’t know it yet. Not then. Instead, I felt as lonely as you. I did my own crying, my own cutting, my own swallowing of pills; I was made to say yes to boys—all of them. If I had known you were there, waiting to be born, maybe it would have made a difference. But I didn’t. It wasn’t time. I fell down too. Maybe not as much as you—maybe only stumbles, bumps, scrapes, burns, but still they scarred.
Those times you put down the razor, that was me forcing your hand. Those moments where you told them no, that was me giving you strength. Each time I stepped back from the ledge, that was you pulling me back. Whenever I kept walking instead of falling down, that was you holding me up.
We were saving each other then
so we could save each other now
and so we do.
And so we are.
The Duty Mouths Bring
Best friends: this tape gun, this box cutter, these boxes, the hurt floor, the ache becoming inside my walls of skin. It’s a dark corner I bust my ass in, but it’s mine. It’s a hard day, but I do it. I make sure they see me do it: they are watching anyway. Always watching.
There are no choices in poverty.
He comes up from behind me and when I turn, my hair falls into my eyes. His Cajun hand reaches and moves the strands behind my ear. When I flinch I see the light in his eyes go out and I want to take it back but it’s too late; he’s already seen me detest him. “You’re dirty,” he says, his eyes reviewing me. I do my best not to look down. I keep his eyes with mine. He puts his hand back onto the handle of his cart and pushes it away with heavy steps. It thunders as it rolls. I want him to know I am watching him go, but he doesn’t and I have lost yet another place where I could be thought of as more than.
I pull the thick stack up by the plastic cord that binds it all and heave it onto my own cart. I do this four, five, six times. My back hurts. I’m a mess. Dirty, like he said. I’m feeling every bit of being a woman. I resent the weakness of my sex.
My hair falls into my eyes.
I unfold, fold, slap, drag, and tear. Unfold, fold, slap, drag, and tear. I know who made these boxes: I see their names in the rhythm. I wipe my forehead with the back of my hand. The fronts are stained black, nails broken. I have four new cuts. My pants keep sagging, but I can’t break the rhythm to pull them home. Breaking the rhythm cuts the count. Breaking the rhythm means more time, in the end. It means I’m not as good as them, not as strong. It means they were wrong in the chance they have given me. Unfold, fold, slap, drag, tear. Unfold, fold, slap, drag, tear.
Each day I can stare at Juan for at least four hours if I wanted to, but my eyes need to be mindful of what my hands are doing, so Juan can’t be stared at, just stood across from and taken in. He sings softly in Spanish sometimes. The words sound like love. I always wonder what they mean. Even if we could talk to each other, I don’t think we would. He has a face like a minefield. I should be wary. My piles need to be as many as his or I will get marked down. If his start to surpass mine I catch his eye and smile, interrupting his rhythm, tripping up his hands, halting his song. I catch up in the moment he gives me. It’s a necessary dance, each step survival.
So many mouths; I sit alone and watch them break. Tacos, soda, sandwiches, conversation, cigarettes, laughter— nothing on their faces standstill. Mine sits quiet in the sun, wary not to break, but ready. I finish a sandwich made from donated cheese. It’s gummy and bitter. I smoke a cigarette. When the foreman yells, they filter inside. I follow, feeling future pains in almost every part of me. I think of other mouths, smaller mouths. I punch back in.
Water is Thrown on the Witch
When I see the clothes you’ve laid out for work, when I walk past the closet and I see them laid out on the bench in perfect top to bottom order, when I walk past fast and it catches my eye, my first thought is always—you melted. The pool of you is now evaporated and gone. In that moment there is a feeling of elation like a spark before I realize it’s just a flattened pile of clothes, and then I feel guilty. And then I question the spark and what it means, and it’s because I know what it means that I refuse to look at it or pretend it even happened.
The Importance of Folding Towels
I have been schooled in the art of folding towels. Excuse me, the proper way to fold towels. I have graduated magna cum lazy from the University of Why Can’t You Do Anything Right. It only took me 26 years to add proper towel folding to my list of accomplishments. It’s true. It’s number three, right behind marrying him, giving birth to Lucy, and giving birth to Sam. Or at least, that’s how he would make it seem.
“Like this,” and he’d fold the corners. Each fold was a slamming door.
“Like this.” Slam.
“Like this.” Slam.
“Like this.” Slam.
And then, “See?” A fuck you.
I stood there, as I was supposed to. My arms were crossed because that was my fuck you. That was the loudest slam of a door I was permitted to make. My own arms folded, against my own chest, still. Fists clenched, my heartbeat a hummingbird’s.
I am trying not to cry.
Sammy is crying. It’s his daddy’s door slamming that makes him cry. I turn to pick him up and his daddy tells me no. Slam.
“But the baby is crying.”
“He’s three years old, don’t call him a goddamn baby.” Slam.
My arms crossed and crossed fists clenched and clenched. See that? See how I have folded arms. See how my fists clench.
“You will learn first.”
Little Sam, still
crying, now at my leg, it’s in his arms, his arms go up, my arms are folded, my fists are clenched.
“Do it.” Slam. He throws a towel. At my face.
“Mommy has to fold a towel now, son.” Slam.
Sammy doesn’t understand and neither do I. I decide to get this over with. I fold the towel. I fold the towel. I keep folding the towel. I fold all of the towels I can. I fold every towel in the world.
Standoff
The buildings balance on the plate, precarious. I set it down safely. They stand, secure. If all goes well, they will be gone soon. I visualize a rubble of crumbs.
He’s sitting on his bedroom floor, kneecaps even with his head. His fingers click crazy on the controller concealed between his thighs. His tongue is pressed wide between lips rounded and tucked, hiding the rose of them. He’s playing Xbox. I pray today he will eat breakfast.
“I’m not hungry, mom,” he says without looking up.
He never looks up.
“You need to eat. You’re getting too thin,” I say. “Look! It’s a bacon house with a pancake roof! See the toast tower? Chocolate milk juice!”
My voice sounds like a cheerleader’s.
He almost grunts and then says something about “we gotta kill these guys” into his headset mouthpiece. I stand for a moment deciding whether to touch his hair before I leave his room. I cannot risk him pulling away again; my heart has too many knives right now. Yet the pinprick of possibility that he would let me heavies my hesitation, such a prize.
I decide the risk is too great and I go.
When I check on him, an hour later, the food still sits, cold, like me.
I take the food buildings away. They crumble into the sink.
***
He is tucked in and I leave with my one guarantee still warm on my lips. It has been eight or more days since he stopped sleeping next to me. The space is cold again, wide again. Even when he was there, it was not much smaller, his frame so flimsy inside the most burdensome of gaps—a dead father’s side of a bed.
During the first days he’d crawl in from my side and roll over the top of me until his body rested perpendicular next to mine, two lines in a broken barcode. He’d stay that way through the night, as if by leaving the gap vacant, it might be filled again.
It made me regret the tales we’d tell him of fairies coming in the night, taking and leaving things in our beds while we slept.
The last one that visited only took.
***
He’s never really been a big eater so this struggle is not new, but the circumstances are so dire and life-changing, and therein lies my worry. I need to know what to do. His care is my concern. Mine alone.
I ask myself what I did before and the answer is—nothing. It was his father.
“Race you to the bottom of the bowl, champ!”
And so would go the stew.
“Two more bites and you get an extra half–hour of Xbox tonight!”
And so would go the spaghetti.
“Twelve more peas and I believe we will be the World Pea Eating Champions. We can do this!”
And so would go the peas.
I would make a certificate on the computer with both of their names and present it to them after the meal. It would hang on the fridge with the rest of them—Pork Chop Eating Champions, Baked Potato Eating Champions, Asparagus Eating Champions, and so on.
They are still there, overlapping and white, feathering our refrigerator.
I am not sure what I should do with them.
I am not sure of many things now.
I think there should be a “t” at the end of the word “loss.”
***
At the dinner table with the emptiest chair, I continue my contrivance: Darth Vader head meatloaf, hot dog pirate ship, macaroni and cheese man.
A hot fudge sundae volcano.
I try to lead by example, eating the mast off the pirate ship, the right leg off the mac and cheese man, and spooning a forkful of Darth Vader helmet into my mouth. I chew enthusiastically and force myself to swallow.
“Mmmm… it’s good, baby. Try some. At least eat the sail or those two arms.”
He picks at it all, trying, but not really trying, to appear as if he’s eating.
“If you eat three forkfuls, I’ll kiss Chester,” I tell him. Chester is our goldfish.
“Can I go play XBox, please?”
Defeated, I clear the table. Dishes and food amass in the sink with a smell that taunts of failure. Chester swims, stupid.
I go to my bathroom and vomit my hard work into the toilet.
I lie down on our bed. My bed.
Across the house, the sound of chainsaws.
***
My son’s PE teacher leaves a message about his lack of class participation and asks me to phone her. I call her back and we make an appointment to discuss things.
When the day comes I drive to the school, park, and start walking. It’s only after many minutes of turns into long hallways and wandering down concrete corridors I realize I am lost. For a moment I feel invisible. For a moment I want to stay there.
The PE teacher’s name is Ms. Boyce. She looks like she is better than me. I sit across from her while she eases me politely into the matter at hand. I try to make my face look normal. It seems like it should be able to do that on its own, but still, I feel as if I need to force it somehow.
I don’t want her to know.
When her monologue breaks I ask her if she is a mother and if she knows any recipes that nine-year-old boys really like. I tell her I’ve been trying things with cheese and bacon.
She tilts her head and looks at me with her brow furrowed and then changes the subject back to my son’s withdrawing from the class, his lack of attention, and, of course, his weight.
I make sounds of agreement and understanding, nodding with my normal face and then, when she pauses, I ask her, “What about quesadillas? Don’t they like quesadillas? I thought I could use a cookie cutter and make them into…”
“Mrs. Stevens!” she interrupts, and then, softer, “Please, I need you to take this seriously.”
I tell her, “It’s ‘Ms. Stevens’ now.”
She mutters something in apology and our meeting fumbles to a polite close.
I walk back to my car, questioning my response. Does becoming a widow change your status to Ms. or am I still Mrs.?
I’m not sure.
I feel like I should know this sort of thing, or that I’m supposed to know.
But I don’t.
I don’t know much of anything lately.
***
It’s his father’s birthday, but he doesn’t know this. I know because I wake up alone again.
It’s a Sunday. My husband died on a Sunday. Or it could’ve been Saturday. When someone dies during the night there is no official time stamp. The day of his death was a best guess made by officials who needed to turn in paperwork. I have decided he died on a Sunday because that is when I woke up to him, unresponsive, unmoving, un…John.
Even though my touch knew better, I decided he died five minutes before I woke. I want to believe he stayed warm and sleeping next to me through the night, letting go at the last second. The thought of an entire night of him lifeless next to me, in a place where so much life was spent, was too much. The thought that the last hours we had were wasted on sleeping when we could’ve spent our night doing anything but was too horrible to bear. We could have made love, we could have tangled ourselves sweetly, we could have held each other hard and read our lives back to each other until it was time for him to go.
He could have prepared his son.
Or me.
Or something.
In honor of the occasion he knows nothing about I make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich cake.
He takes four bites. It feels like a gift.
***
I pick him up from school and the first thing he says is, “Brian Welsh’s mom overfed their hamster and it died.”
> His tone is tinged with accusation.
“I think you overfed.”
I don’t know what to say. I know one cause of heart attacks is being overweight. I know his dad was the champion of many meals; the evidence hangs heavy in our kitchen. It weighs down our fridge.
Our lives.
The sight of the part of one of the things I have tried not to look at blackens my insides. A torrent of blame washes over me and I begin to drown.
