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Christine Ma-Kellams << continued from Part 2 (Because for the past two decades dropping Will Kellams' drawers into the spin cycle was a full-time occupation. Because prior to that, when the children were still squatting on her land, it's not like her hands ever met laundry that wasn't hers, or Will's, because doing so would require venturing into no-man's bathrooms where the required reading was a nicely stacked collection of 1970s Hustler and Playboy and the occasional Victoria's Secret catalog, because 22 San Federico was the West Bank during and while the West Bank was becoming The West Bank, just without the curfews and the ethnic diversity, and there were lines-invisible, undrawn lines, as clear as predestination, as dark as day-that you did not traverse, not because of desire or permission but because God himself had decided, long before your birth, that there would be shitty and then there would be fucked, and while Vicky and Dad belonged to the former, the rest of us sure as hell belonged to the latter). Vicky has her laundry and Nick and Ben, they have me, at least on that day. We celebrate our lot as honorary orphans by going D-Day on the stash of cola in the fridge in the garage, where Dad would not notice until Vons had their next buy-one-get-two-free sale. On this day we crack open our store-brand Cokes like Tim Robbins did with his beer on the rooftop scene in The Shawshank Redemption, triumphant to hide our loss, drunk with high-fructose corn syrup and uncried tears that set up shop like squatters in our eye sockets. I open the first silvery-fuchsia can and take a long, close-mouthed sip, eyes closed and hands wide open, then promptly open a second even though the first one is still almost full, because when you're nine that's the only dick-swinging you know. Nick and Ben follow in silent synchrony, because I am older, if only by a matter of months and at that age all social dominance hierarchies rises and falls with your age, before you get old and other gods take over, like the hotness of your wife or the initials behind your name or the shade of toast that best describes your mixed child's skin or the blueness of your mistress's eyes. After can number two we each grab the remaining of our individually-owned six-packs and run into the bathroom, ignoring Darine Stern's iridescent elbows and perfect, sunset-shaped afro radiating like fire over the Pacific [9], aware of only our unspoken, hair strand of a bond as brothers without mothers. The tree of us jump in the bathtub and raise the cans high over our heads like aerial camera shots, bending, bending, bending our wrists until the coke pours like blood and we-we are washed, dark like day-old snow. That day we bath in our cokes like bad children without a cause and only a deep sense that something is profoundly, inexplicably wrong with our lives. It stays in the kinks in our relentless, never-combed hair and the cracks on our elbows, beneath the scabs that line our palm cushions and the folds in Ben's (singularly) uncircumcised penis, strange and persistent like sand stuck in a fat woman's ass. What we can not keep in our crevices and our wounds we let the drain swallow whole, watching wistfully, as if mourning for the flight of caramelized gold swirling, closing in, on that round, metallic mouth. The next morning we can not see who is on the cover of our porno stash or make out the dusty silver mouth of the drain or discern the color of the grout lining the bottom edge of the bath tub, because it is all coated in a sheet of hard chocolate brown, as shiny as it was bumpy. Only when I get closer can I see that the shiny chocolate coating broke down into individual pixels of ants upon more ants, piling like twitching dead bodies on the Middle Passage. DadDadDadDadDad! I call, running, giddy and proud almost, though for what I can't say. In a more perfect world I would tell you that Dad is in the kitchen, dousing his multigrain sandwich bread in glossy, cinnamon-stained eggs when I find him, hair tousled and glasses already on, barefoot and smiling. He would be frowning when he sees me, because he is concerned, because he hears me say his name without spaces in between, because he is there, and ready, and there. In a kinder, more reasonable story the dialogue between us would go here, line catching line, and you would know who said what and you would hear the tone in our thick morning voices. You would see us in your mind's eye, half naked and wild and quiet, like blindly staged still-life paintings flying across the canvass of your consciousness. You would know. You would believe. |
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ISSN 2150-6795 |