EAT HER DUST (revised)

We formed a hushed audience to the absurd spectacle in the parking lot of the funeral home where the service for my great Aunt Margie was held. Her sons and daughters, my aunts and uncles, stood in an anxious circle waiting to grip a handful of ashes from the swindled urn. Someone, an uncle I presume, had stolen the small gold box from the altar when no one was looking. Someone else, a logical aunt perhaps, catered the impromptu event with small white conical paper cups from the water cooler. Huddled together, a grieving football team, they shouted and elbowed over her dusty parts. My father whispered, almost completely silently mouthed, all of his words to my mother: This is your family. A freak show! A dozen grieving lunatics scooping their souvenirs like Italian ice. My mother nervously sucked her thumb, a habit carried over from infancy. My eyes expanded like inflated balloons. We would have watched with our jaws dropped, but we feared the swirling ashes. We didn’t want to accidentally eat the remains or be unwillingly spoon-fed by the wind. We just didn’t want to taste her. When my mother removed the finger from her mouth, glistening wet, she took my hand and walked me towards the car. I could feel the warm saliva pressed inside my palm as I counted my steps, a nervous habit carried over into adulthood. I climbed into the backseat and smoothed the skirt of the black crushed velvet dress with a slick palm. The clinging gray flakes (maybe her pancreas, maybe her heart) smeared across me like finger paint. My words were never whispered, never mouthed, and only thought: I've never touched anything so dead.

HER HOME

The exterior is completely the same.

Picture this: Purple crocuses with open mouths spewing yellow stamens, huddled close and side-by-side, grow in front of bushels of evergreen shrubs. They have grown in the finely manicured front yard since I can remember, pushing their way into the soil like thumbtacks to protect the ground from the effects of gravity. The front walk leading up to the purple guardians looks like the aftermath of a quake. Bricks that read "Hanson," "Potomac," and "Lifetime" awkwardly bubble from the ground, trying to fit in, trying to find a comfortable space amidst the chaos of weeds and roots. The walk leads to the door, accompanied by the weathered gold address of 254 hanging diagonally on the rainbow of brown bricks covering the front of the house (the 4 is uneven, always has been, always will be). On one of the bricks, in between the front door and the gold letters, is a thin-lined wavering heart, scratched in with a safety pin years ago.

The interior is nothing like I remember.

My childhood bedroom, up until I was thirteen, was on the first floor of the house and regretfully located between my parent's room and the bathroom. It was painted a pink antacid and adorning the walls were plastic balloons forever suspended in artificial flight. Against the back wall towered a wooden canopied crib, in which I slept for longer than I’d like to admit. I had an issue with falling, with waking up on the hard wood floor; my hands were always tucked under my chin as I lay curled and bruised. In the mornings I found my toes stretched out from in between the bars at the foot of the bed. I would often wake to a Schnauzer licking each toe as if they were ice pops melting in the summer sun, his tongue working furiously as if they would soon disappear. Or my father’s thick fingers, like scarred breakfast sausages, tickling each toe mercilessly. Or, I would wake to a debilitating cramp.

And every morning I would have to climb out of the crib. On my better, more adventurous mornings, I would pretend as if I were an escapee bound for freedom. Sometimes I had to flee the grips of a snarling witch; other times a prison guard, and once even an unwanted lover. I would grip the bars and exclaim, “Somehow, someway, I will leave this place forever!” or “You’ll never get away with this!” or, to prince charming on the other side of the bars, “Please wait for me!” (And he always did). On my more irritable mornings I would shove my chubby legs in through the bars and cry out for help, pretending I was stuck, vying for attention. The Schnauzer, Barney, would scamper in and gently set his wet mouth down on my foot, his yellow teeth softly gnawing on skin and bone. A love bite. Apparently, I wasn't yelling loud enough (something’s are always far away).

Eventually, the canopied crib was replaced with a day bed: white flowered tubing with pink and blue painted flowers hugging a single mattress. It was here I would discover what a self-induced orgasm was at the age of six years old; I thought I was a genius. Here my mother would walk in on me masturbating to a cassette tape of janet. by Janet Jackson ("Throb," track 10) with my pale pink ballet stockings around my knees. Here I would write numerous notes to my parents in the event that I should unexpectedly die in the middle of the night. "I'm Sorry Mom, I'm Sorry Dad," they would read. Here I would pull a pillow down on my face until I came up for air choking. And here I would take out my self hate on a blue stuffed bear by punching him in the stomach repeatedly because he would never be as good as the pink stuffed bear. Never.

(The room has been torn down and joined in lavatory matrimony with the adjacent bathroom to create a larger space to shit, piss, whatever. My father’s new throne.)

When I turned thirteen, the last of my two brothers had moved out and I was given his bedroom on the second floor. Large and baby blue with nooks and spotlights, I decorated it with lyrics written in Sharpie marker on the wall. The black ink read, “Is it wrong to wish on space hardware? I wish, I wish, I wish you’d care,” or “My cunt is built like a wound that won’t heal.” There was an L-shaped desk with filing cabinets and a typewriter on the surface. In the corner lay a box spring and a mattress (I still only sleep on a mattress on the ground) covered in green sheets and a husband pillow while sheer tapestries of bright green and venetian red billowed from the ceiling above like lime cherry clouds floating over me while I dreamed. It was in this room I lost my virginity, a clumsy five minutes of figuring out the simultaneous motions of two bodies. It was here an ex-lover tried to kill himself with a pair of black fabric scissors, spitting and crying as I bear hugged him to the ground from behind. It was here I truly fell in love for the first time, seven years ago, and still haven’t completely fallen out of it. And now it is here that I dread. It's the one room that hasn't been renovated. The walls still have the lyrics, the desk still has the typewritten pages, but the room itself is now used for storage: boxes of faded photographs, a plastic Christmas tree, birthday cards and elementary school paintings, my father’s endless towers of coins. Some things will never, ever change.

* * *

Here is something: I visit with my father recently, absorbing the changes I dread and the changes I pray for. I don’t go upstairs; it’s only filled with terrible specters of the past looking to squat my brain. I piss in a spot where I once used to sleep and I move like a praying mantis through the unrecognizable. As I am about to leave, my father tells me a story (he’s good at that). There’s a young priest, an old friend of my brother, who has a twin brother, although I am unsure who is who. He probably feels the same way about me, although I am just one. The priest calls my brother, after not seeing him for a few years, and asks if my father is having construction done on the house. The priest had a dream, like we all do, except he remembers his: my mother, in all her ghostly lucidity, came to him and told him to tell my father she really likes the changes being done on her home.

MONOLOGUE OF A PROTAGONIST THAT ISN'T TOTALLY ME

I recently found out that the reason blue eyes are more sensitive to the sun than brown eyes is because the blue irises scatter and transmit more unwanted light into the retina than brown irises. Those first five minutes of walking into the sunlight are hard as hell. I shield my eyes, groan, and complain to my brown-eyed friends. They always respond with, “If only I could be so lucky…” and I think this is an interesting choice of words because good luck never looks my way.

I inherited blue eyes from my mother. Her eyes are currently sewn shut, dried out, and six feet under ground (are they even still blue?). Every morning when I wash my face and look in the mirror, I can’t tell if I’m looking at my eyes or hers. I brush my bangs out of eyes and say, “Oh, there you are. Good morning.” I then pull open the cabinet mirrors so that they are facing each other to create an infinite amount of mirrors that line a never ending hallway. Have you ever tried that? It’s like looking into another dimension. It’s terrifying. I like to do this and think about what is going to be at the end of the hallway: an open doorway spilling light, an alternate version of myself doing the exact same thing, my mother. But you can never see the end.

I also recently discovered that the blue pigment is created by means of Rayleigh scatter, which is the elastic scattering of light by tiny particles that are smaller than the wavelength of light. I hardly know what that means, but basically it’s the same optical phenomenon that makes the sky blue. With this information I think of my eyes as puddles, left behind after a harsh storm, rippling the blue skies above. Or the eyes above.

BETTER DAYS ABOUND, NO MATTER WHAT.