 |
| Illustration by Randy Allende |
Mrs. Miller, wheelchair-bound, grazed fistfuls of weeds,
watching her forty-year-old son, Marvin, play devil sticks.
Blond helmet-hair, undisturbed by the wind,
dexterous hands hitting the center stick,
Marvin moonwalked and flowed through wave dance motions
with his New Balance-clad feet.
His girlfriend, Ping, sat on the curb,
hood and black hair covering her face,
gunshots and explosions emanating from her tablet.
Marvin droned on with his litany of complaints:
“I told them about the milk jugs on the balcony,
It’s an eyesore, just ghetto.
Maybe that’s what they do in Africa?
I don’t know. I’ve never been there.
But this is Canada, last I checked.
Who in their right mind would want to live in a building like this?”
Mrs. Miller looked across the street
at the towering brown-brick building
with small black balconies and windows.
It appeared made of Legos,
except for the pile of empty jugs on the fourth floor,
which looked like a cluster of eggs.
A gust of wind knocked one out, and it fell on the manicured lawn,
spurting ejaculate on the grass.
The woman raised her pleading eyes higher still;
The sky was the clear blue of antiseptic mouthwash.
She began eating gravel-and-glass mix from her bag of Lays,
trying to crush the stones like jellybeans,
but smashing her stained teeth instead,
jagged pieces of rock and enamel slicing the back of her throat.
Still, Marvin’s nagging voice leaked
through her quaking facade and the grinding of her jaws.
“Normal women intimidate me, so arrogant and confident…
With a hot Down Syndrome chick, I’d be set for life,
But a meek Chinese like Ping is good too,
Doesn’t talk back, barely knows a lick of English…
On the downside, she’s as flat as a board,
and is as hairy as a monkey.
And you know how much I hate hair, don’t you, ma?”
Mrs. Miller pulled up her sweaty dark grey t-shirt,
lifted her tubular, wrinkled breasts to her bloody lips,
ripped off the brown areolas with her ruined teeth
and chewed them like gum.
Oblivious, Marvin continued his juggling-and-dance act,
His black eyes focused on the sticks,
eyes that, even as a newborn, his mom remembered,
spoke of almost empty, musty backrooms
with mismatched pairs of shoes and old sale signs;
eyes like Ping Pong balls dipped in the sludge of an abandoned oil well.
How many times did he perform his circus routine in the mirror?
Mrs. Miller wondered bitterly.
His whole essence was trapped in a mirror.
She gave birth to a hominid reflection,
to a not-fully-there;
A fake birth, which was truly a drawn-out, toxic miscarriage.
Marvin was just a faded stickman scratched on the wall of a cave.
In her mind, Mrs. Miller retraced the steps of her guilt:
Marvin had avoided the forceps,
But not the fists of bullies.
Did they go after him because he was weak,
Or did he become weak as a result?
Her mind was stumped by the chicken-or-egg paradox.
Either way, Marvin had retreated to the periphery of existence,
to the painless exile of self-erasure.
Marvin dropped the sticks on the ground,
inhaled and exhaled deeply, as if awakening his inner chakras,
and began building a ball of energy with his arms around his chest,
above his pot-belly,
in the style of Master Roshi’s Ki Wave martial arts move.
With his palm, he thrust a shockwave of spiritual energy
toward a murder of magpies feasting on a flattened squirrel,
but the birds continued their pecking undisturbed.
Marvin began building an astral ball again,
with renewed intensity,
while he filled his mom in on the technical details
of a BJ machine he ordered from Amazon,
as Ping was firmly opposed to oral.
“It was my Christmas present for myself,
A little treat.
But someone stole my package.
I suspect the rowdy black kids from down the hall.
I mean -- who else?”
Mrs. Miller regurgitated, burning bile rising up her slashed throat
jetting through the stones crowded at the back of her mouth
like a spring of urine.
She tried to swallow it back
but began gagging and tearing up,
inhaling deeply through her nose.
Dandelion seeds landed inside her dilated nostrils,
Her whole body went rigid for a split second,
then was rocked by an explosive sneeze.
The debris clogging her throat turning into shotgun pellets
piercing through her brain and eyeballs.
Her vision shrank into a tunnel of pulsing flesh
and she was wrapped in an immaculate, soothing darkness.