Young Writers Society

I didn’t want to look like I was drudging, but honestly I was, and I was trying not to. Honesty in the world of the crooked is a dish rarely served. And when it is, its like alcohol, specifically vodka. It burns like it’s sliding right down there, inching. And makes you grit your teeth a bit but after a while it starts to sink in. Rubs your insides like a velvet gloved hand of a quack god, it’s all warm and wet and ugh.

It was getting harder to even drudge along, I felt like the mass of me (all of a sudden) felt the pull of the nine point eight newtons in every atom of my body. We were headed for a shanty bitty neighborhood located three blocks from our shanty bitty neighborhood. And in this neighborhood resided the littlest old lady you could ever find. No, not like the ones you would expect. Soft, baked cookies, and a fat waist that you would try to get your arms around when you hug her (but never could). No, my grandmother was a monster, honest to god truth. But then again, that gives monsters like Frankenstein and the Blob such a bad image. If she weren’t born before Hitler’s death, we would have said she, was the reincarnation.

We four walking, drudging and skipping along the sidewalk made way towards the oddly yellow roofed house. The four, my parent, the good twin, and my surprisingly (but then again not so surprising) happy sister moved along to visit Gran. She lived in the house around the corner bend, no fencing, just a bit of sparse yellow lawn, and piss yellow shingles. The ageless moss covered angel looked down on to her own clasped hands. It was slightly open she was looking it to it, keeping what she had in her hands a secret that would be hers. The black nurse caught us as we turned the corner from behind the screen door. “Come quick Mr. Cave, she’s been asking for you”. He hurried and took the porch steps two for two and turned into the hot paisley pink walled room. Halt. “I think it best if y’all wait a here for a bit” she said with her hand on her hip, which she pushed out towards us. Probably out of habit.

The walking, drudging and skipping stopped as we three stood on the foot of the steps. We shank down to our usual seats on the porch steps. The nurse got tired of watching us, and returned to tend on a imaginary chore. It was this shitty neighborhood, which looked and felt like the great valley of ashes of Fitzgerald’s imagination, grey and bleak and us three. “Its weird, this weather, and the sun. I like it.” the good twin smiled at my sister, and patted her golden head as to thanking her for it. Her hair hung over her right shoulder, golden, and shimmering down from their roots. The strands that leaked from the scalp glistened and looked as if they had been made from all the shades of gold and yellow.

“What do you mean the sun?” I asked.

“You know, like there--look, how the light is catching in that window and in the water.”

“Yeah, it’s shining right through the clouds, see? – Last week in Sunday School Ms--” she added.

"It's all lies. You know that right?"

Finally. Silence. Whatever she was about to preach about god I had already learned, believed and forsaken by the age of eight. The realist in me wouldn’t allow me to take more Sunday school ear rape. And the crooked me, always said I was molded by broken shell. The silence was like a slice in the wind, defeating the ambient radio that played a constant static. The muffed sound of a soft conversions seeped through the scant window screen. Across the sun-patched street, through the moldy damp air, a flag flopped at half-mast. The flag was soggy, and it was hard to tell that once it had been ours. Now, it was a moist dark green. Partially conquered by small circular mold, it flopped left to right in the lust-less weather. How life persist in the face of an imprecated civilization.

The mumbling from the screen window stopped. “Ben, Grace—Henry, Come.” He held his hand out from one side of the screen door holding it open, and pushed the three of us into the paisley pink room. The black nurse hovered over Nan, a fruit fly over blackening soft bananas in a summer heat. Stopping, checking, moving, checking. I felt a small hot breath down my neck, “Hal, be good—she’s in a state”. I nodded. That was enough for him. The room sounded like a static line, beeping on every other count on account of Lucy’s heart. “Ah, here come the turkeys, come’ere.” We waddled awkwardly towards the rented hospital bed. Turned to children, we lined up with our tails between our legs in the face of a dying old crone.

“Grace, you are, a splitting image—of your shitless mother.”

There is it, now that’s my Nan. There was a thinning gray mesh that clouded over her brow it was teased and puffed with the comb that she always kept at bedside. It was evident in her breath; she took her breaths in excess, dragging them on. Pausing, just before she let it out again. She gave Grace a hug, holding and burying her piped nose in her bright golden hair. She stayed there taking in a millisecond of grief, the kind of grief that turned women’s hearts hard. It was the long list of rash decisions and faulty judgments written between each of the wrinkles that now folded over her brow with pain that forged a hard heart. Ophelia was not only a wrinkle, but also a theoretical tumor. We all had this tumor, the five of us. Ophelia was, well, is (I say was or is because I have no way of knowing if she is living or dead, where ever she is, was) our wife/mother/daughter. It is was a pressing dormant tumor that showed itself when it lacked cash.

She is/was a junkie, more specifically crackhead, pumped up on crack, cocaine or blow whatever they call it now. I remember when we were still living in that motel. It must have some time in the summer months, because Grace was still inside her, until winter came around. She spent most of the day in the bathroom when our dad was at work, every so often she would bang the door “Boys, no fighting!” just to keep us on our toes. What she did in that bathroom was a true mystery. And one day we saw her, golden hair writhing over the balls of her shoulders, smothered in a hog’s sweat trembling. Her hands clasped cold, the white of her eyes staring at the off white ply wood shutters through us seeing the celestial outliers out in the furthest corner of space. A malignant tumor.

She let her go, and signaled for another.

“Now, Markus, my least favorite.”

“Hey Nan—“ he said.

“Shut up and let me hold you,” He did as he was told as she gave him a soft pat on the back. He had forgotten for a second that he was dealing with an imperial bit-

“And now Henry Cave, you evil little prick”

“Nan, you know me too well.” She smelled old, like cold cream and lavender powder. But more than that she smelled of the IV drip that was in her wrist, hot like medicine and yellow piss.

“Now enough-- Get off me.” She held my shoulders at each end and shook me.

“ Little boy—“ she coughed

“Mom, I think that’s enou—“

“Cave, did you just call me your mother. Because-- I am not your mother Mr. Cave. And if I were your mother would slap your interrupting ass, now—I must speak to Henry Cave. Alone. Please”

The three children with their whipped tails and Mona shuffled out to the sitting room. And so it was Lucy and I in the drunken paisley room. Standing awkwardly wondering as to why my estranged grandmother would want to speak to Henry Cave. She veiled her rental hospital bed with the layers of lacey shawls. A sick feeling made me wonder how many deaths had this bed seen. I looked at her and she at me, and for the first time she looked whole and hollow. The whole of her person didn’t sit on the bed but sagged into it without form. The body and joints seemed to give way like tenderly cooked chicken thigh, feeble and soft with cooked cartilage. But she ripped off the oxygen mask with one swift movement and slipped the mask on the mantle.

“Sit—” pointing at a foldable plastic chair leaning on the window.

I brought the folded chair and set it up, it was as crooked at its owner.

“Give me a cigarette will you boy. I can see them in your back pocket.”

She wanted the cigarettes of course; I had just gotten a pack today on my way here. I handed them to her, along with my mother’s only heirloom. A Zippo lighter with Hope engraved on the side, it was still working cause she never got a real chance to use it before she lost it and ran off.

“Hmp. Hope. You know where that’s from Cave. Hope?” She said as she lit the cigarette hanging from her crinkled wet lips. There was a deep inhale, and a slight pause in the beeping static of the background. Silence sliced the uncomfortable room, the seconds slowed as nicotine filled her gray lungs, I could see it. Her eyes closed, feeling smoke infuse through the walls of her dying lungs into her blotted blood. Then the smoke fled from her nostrils, to fill the awkwardness. As she handed it back I lit myself one, and held it between my thumb and finger, it was a disease but I wanted it.

“Hope, is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul, --“ her nostril flared with rolling light gray embers, which shaded a tiny red flare that tipped the cig.

“And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,”

I watched her intently as I took in a drag, wishing to feel as much joy she was getting her breaths. But her joy was one of the damned. The pure joy of being damned and not to care. Oh to damn and be damned.

“And Sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.”

The verses haunted the nicotine fuming room. There was a wind in her voice that fused with the vapors, a sadness weighed for her motherless grandchildren, and the Zippo lighter. The false bird that sang a false song shrouded the forlorn in her damned soul. In some sick light and time a promise had been made that the damn shall be saved in grace. But now we were lost dogs on a high and unforgiving hill looking up to a empty jagged blue void.

“I’ve heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.”