Wasted Words

jupiter ascending

i.
A man is not a man, Zeus’s father would intone when blind on bathtub gin, until he’s killed his pa. Not a real death, ya ken? Kill his spirit. Kill his livelihood. Cut him down to your size if ya want to get ahead. Which all stood to reason, for that was precisely how Pa had come to inherit the farm, the house, and that poor weeping willow standing like a lighthouse in a sea of barley. Pa was only a young man when he took Grandapa’s stone sickle and—slift!—took off his manhood in a single twist. No matter how hard he scrubbed, Pa could never remove the scrim of urethral blood from the sickle’s blade. And so it hung on the back of the barn, held aloft between two roofing nails drilled into the board, its handle smooth and gleaming from two generations of sweaty palms. 

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I am twenty-four goddamned years old. Why is making a phone call to another adult so terror inducing?

I only knew half of the relatives in the room. The other half were familiar faces of uncertain lineage, people I recognized from reunions and picnics.  We all fell under the genealogical umbrella with my great-grandmother at its head. That same grandmother, in the bedroom, whom we were all there to see. Hard candies and warm finger sandwiches and burnt supermarket coffee in Styrofoam cups. No one had anything to say. The house stank like meat going bad. We all knew it. We all knew why.

It was my turn.

Great-grandmother was swaddled in a sarcophagus of blankets. That meaty aroma cloyed up the breathing air. I didn’t recognize her. That woman, that large woman, had shrank into a mattress depression. Thin, like a bag of antlers, with willow branches for arms. A face too narrow, too damned narrow. Age was eating her alive.

Grandmother stood on one side of the bed, Mother on the other. Four generations in one room. I stood at the foot of the bed, unable to move closer without nausea rising up my throat.

‘Who’s this?’ Great-grandma asked.

‘It’s Jared,’ my grandmother replied.

‘Who?’

‘Jared. It’s Lanette’s son, remember?’

‘I don’t, I don’t think I do.’

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Now that I have an actual, verified job I can re-prioritize my time away from endless hours sifting through Careerbuilder and actually work on stuff that matters to me. Such things include:

• compiling a short story collection/novella to test the self-publication waters
• visit K (soon soon soon soon)
• cut a large swathe through my reading list
• get more serious about marathon/fight training
• pay bills/meet people/become a sociable member of my community/other ‘adult’ bullshit
• buy a new suit? I’d like something that’s actually tailored to my frame and not the sizes-too-large hand-me-down from my father’s college days

It rained precisely when and where the preacherman promised it would, a dour square of downtown that stretched from Elm Street to the used bookstore. It rained for as long as the preacherman promised, totaling from first to last drops a good three days and three nights, the gutters choked with mud, the paperbacks swelling with humidity. I stood on the edge of that storm, a bubble only a few hundred feet across. A shimmering window, a dust-colored door that had been predicted by the sermons.

The preacher, his words grew darker after his little miracle. The pews began to fill more regularly. The collection plate overflowed. He decried the faithless, and they were marked with ashen brands on the tops of their hands. He swore of plague and the Revelation angels blowing their trumpets on the morrow, and the dogs in the street coughed red ropes of spit between their gnashing teeth. One morning the statues had disappeared off the tops of their plinths, their heavy footprints receding into the distance. We lost sight of the sun.

But the day became weeks became months, and still we woke in the morning. The preacherman stopped all services except for Sunday mass, and then abandoned that as well. He holed up in the rectory, drinking deeply from pitchers of water that sluiced in his stomach as the merlot blood of Christ. What is that called? I asked myself one morning when the thought appeared like unwelcomed hail. Transubstantiation, I answered later in the shower as the answer came to me from the haze of my boyhood days in Catholic school, my soapy hands cupping my genitals. Long streaks of sin ran red down my legs, snaking down the drain without leaving a mark.