By Ed Komenda.
SATURDAY MORNING, SUN SHINING
I jumped into the bed, tickled her neck, dug fingers into her stomach, jabbed her armpit. Mom pushed me off the edge, tired from the graveyard shift at Barney’s, where she worked as a waitress. I kept on her until she grabbed me with alligator hands covered with pink eczema patches. We laughed until we couldn’t breathe. Those were the mornings Dad made his famous breakfast. Bacon, eggs, fried potatoes, toast. We talked about The Wizard of Oz, Ninja Turtles, Looney Toons. I had many questions. Why can’t Wile E. Coyote catch the Roadrunner? Why is the Cowardly Lion, the king of the forest, afraid all the time? Can we put our next Obbie’s pizza in the blender? Mom and Dad tried explaining. You could see a lot of teeth on those mornings.
A FEW MONTHS LATER
I watched Mom pack. I wondered how she’d fit all her things in those black plastic garbage bags. She cried, stuffing her clothes and make-up deep. Downstairs, her new guy revved his Harley. From the picture window, I watched her drive away. I stood there a long time. I wondered if she’d ever come back.
SHE DIDN’T
So I moved to Grandma’s.
MAMA
The first breasts I ever saw were my cousin Marcy’s. She was twenty-two and living at Grandma’s while she went to nursing school. She knew her breasts were beautiful. I could tell by how she looked at them. After Mom split, I barely saw Dad. He worked as much overtime as he could. Grandma managed the Gas Center on 47th and Central and that left Marcy to take care of me. She took me everywhere. Like I was her kid. Cashiers and classmates and boyfriends all assumed I was hers, but she never corrected anybody. In the bathroom, I watched her put inside herself a fresh white cotton stick. I didn’t know what it was for and wondered why she left the string hanging there. In the fitting room, Marcy stood in front of the full-body mirror with her back to me. She unclasped her old nude-colored Sears catalog bra. Her breasts flowed out and hung there. She pulled a new black J.C. Penny bra from her basket and clasped it across her stomach. The cups of the bra pointed at me from the small of a back scratched with Banana Boat tan lines. Marcy’s breasts in the mirror made my mouth water.
THE STATIC OF CHANNEL 99
The new kid Herman had this proud smile of rotting teeth. We were in the second grade and my teeth were crooked. I was embarrassed to smile. Herman’s teeth were falling out of his head, but he didn’t care what anyone thought. The teacher sat Herman next to me and he soon passed me a copy of Mad. I spent the next week reading it to pieces. We laughed at his collection of Garbage Pail Kids cards. We became friends with few questions asked. We traded numbers and started calling each other at home. He called Grandma’s house and asked, “What’re you doing?” I rarely had an answer that interested him. “Do you have a TV?” he asked. The basement had a TV, Uncle Val’s old set. “Yeah,” I told Herman, “I got a TV.” “Okay,” he said, “now go turn it on.” I hopped up on the arm of the couch and hit the power button. “Okay,” I said, “it’s on.” He told me to go to channel 99. “Channel 99,” I said, “that’s gonna take forever.” The TV in the basement didn’t have a remote, so you had to smash buttons up or down. “Not if you go backwards,” Herman said. “Huh,” I said. “Yeah,” Herman said. “Hit the down button like you’re going to channel three, but keep going. My brother showed me this trick.” I smashed the down button as quickly as I could. The channels flitted by. When I got to channel two and hit the button again, there it was: channel 99. Like magic. But the channel was dead. Grandma didn’t pay for channel 99. It was all static, but there were figures moving in it like people dancing in a hard rain. “You get there yet?” Herman asked. “Yeah,” I said, “I’m there, but I can’t see anything.” “Turn up the volume, but not too loud,” he said, “and put your ear to the speaker.” I pressed the volume button, notching it up one bar at a time. I pressed my ear to the speaker and listened. A saxophone, women moaning. “You hear it?” Herman asked. “I hear it,” I said. He giggled. “What is it?” I asked. There was a pause and all was mysterious and forbidden. Herman said, “It’s sex.”
BREAKING STUFF WITH BILLY
I had this friend Billy, and Billy liked to read, but everyone told Billy he read too fast. Slow down!” Sister Rita, our first-grade teacher, told him. “You’re going too fast for the class!” Billy tried again, reading so slow he sounded like a robot. “Don’t be condescending, Billy,” Sister Rita said. None of us knew what condescending meant. Except for Billy. “Don’t be a bitch,” he told her. We cheered. Sister Rita grabbed Billy’s shirt collar and dragged him out of class. I started going to Billy’s house after school. He lived closer to downtown than anyone else I knew. The buildings in his neighborhood were dark brown and tan and crowded together, so tall the gangways were always in shadow, even on sunny days. Inside Billy’s house was dark, too. The only light leaked in a dull haze through the blinded windows. In the living room, Billy’s mother sat nested in crocheted blankets on the couch, knitting in the pale electric blue light of the television, which, for some reason, made me think of a fireplace. Every surface had something on it. Cluttered. Stacks of everything, everywhere. Yellowed newspapers, unopened mail, craft bins filled with yarn and construction paper and plastic roses. And there were books, too, most of them bearing public library labels along the spines. Books on space travel and Einstein, the Kennedy assassination, and one called Rich Dad, Poor Dad. In Billy’s room, next to the bunk bed he shared with his little sister, sat a box filled with Dr. Seuss books his mother got him every year for his birthday and Christmas. Billy read every one, sometimes two or three times, burning away the nights in that gloomy apartment. Billy’s dad was a carpenter and did odd jobs around the city. One time he took us to the backyard and turned a chair upside-down so the legs were sticking up toward the sky. “Sometimes I get pissed off,” he said, “and when I get pissed off I break things.” It suddenly dawned on me why there were no lamps in the house. With the tip of his worn, camel-colored work boots, Billy’s dad kicked as hard as he could into the legs of the chair. One by one they snapped and fell into the grass. “I just imagine I’m kicking the face of someone I hate,” he said. SNAP! “When I break stuff,” he said, “I don’t feel so angry anymore.” SNAP! “And I don’t have to yell.” SNAP! Billy asked if we could break stuff, too. “Are you angry?” Billy’s dad asked. “YES!” we yelled. “What are you angry about?” “Sister Rita!” “Oh,” Billy’s dad said, “she’s a real bitch, ain’t she?” We pantomimed: “Yes! She’s a real bitch!” “Okay,” Billy’s dad said, “let’s go downstairs.” Billy’s dad took us to a room in the basement. One of the walls had water damage. Black mold spread across the drywall like a grease stain on a paper bag. He handed us each a hammer. “Go on,” he said. “Break that bitch in half.” The hammers were heavy. We felt powerful. “Go on,” Billy’s dad said, “that wall ain’t gonna break itself.” We raised our hammers and attacked, planting their heads into the wall, poking small holes until the small holes blended into each other and formed bigger holes and pieces of the moldy drywall fell to the concrete floor. Our tiny mountains of destruction. Soon there was no wall. Only a pile. The room was bigger. We could feel wind blowing in from outside. The air felt cool on our sweaty faces. “Do you feel better?” Billy’s dad asked. “Yes!” we said. “We broke that bitch in half!” Billy’s dad took us out for pizza and French fries. The place had a train set built in the center, and freight cars carried plates past the tables. You had to be quick enough to snatch your food. Otherwise you had to wait until the train completed a full circle around the restaurant. This is where we learned to powder our ketchup mounds with black pepper. “I like when my food tastes angry,” Billy’s dad said, dunking a fry. “Angry like me.”
T-BONE
Dad walked into the house like nothing happened. He kicked off his greasy work boots before anyone noticed the spiderweb of red across his face. “What happened to you?” Grandma asked. One of Dad’s eyes was caked shut with blood. “I got in an accident,” he said. Grandma sat him down at the kitchen table and pulled out the big blue book. Aunt Marcy soaked wash rags in the sink and started wiping the blood off his face. How it happened was he tried to beat a red light and got T-boned. “Then I hit a parked car,” he said. His head bounced off the windshield and put a deep gash in his forehead. Grandma pressed a rag into the wound to stop the bleeding. She pulled gauze over the cut and secured it with white medical tape. All bandaged up, Dad asked Grandma, “Can I borrow your car this week?”
MEANWHILE, BOYS PLANNED THEIR ESCAPE
We had keypads and timers with knobby circular dials and spools of red and blue wires, pliers and screwdrivers and vices and everything we thought we needed to make a time machine. All these supplies and materials could be found in the stacks of filing cabinets Uncle Val lined along the walls of Grandma’s garage. He’d been driving around the city looking for broken appliances abandoned on curbs. These busted machines put dollar signs in Uncle Val’s eyes. He knew how to fix them. So he’d load washers and dryers and stoves and refrigerators into his blue van, the appliance ambulance. In the garage, he’d tear them up and salvage parts. If they didn’t have a place in a broken appliance, these pieces ended up in a filing cabinet. Each drawer had a label: ‘Wires,’ ‘Timers,’ ‘Circuits.’ One drawer was labeled ‘Manuals.’ Inside were stacks of greasy books with titles like Heating and Air Conditioning or Heating and Cooling. These manuals had diagrams of how each machine worked. How gears clicked together, how water pumped and drained. Uncle Val’s spell books. When he disappeared for weeks at a time with a pocket full of cash, we opened the drawers and pulled out what we needed to make our machine. We put the timers and keypads and wires on Grandma’s picnic table and started building. My next-door neighbor was a kid named Abel. He was named after one of Adam and Eve’s sons, the one Cain killed. We called him Buddha, because he was round and jolly. He lived with his Grandma too. His mom was a dispatcher, but he never met his dad. We connected in absence. We took turns being scientists in the lab. We each came up with a destination we’d visit in our time machine. I’d go back to World War II France to meet my machine gunner Grandpa. Abel wanted to go back to the day he was born so he could meet his father and tell him what a piece of shit he was. “Wanna help me beat his ass with a golf club?” he said. “Sure,” I said. “We just need to find a golf club,” he said.
THE END OF THE WORLD
We liked to hump in the boys’ bathroom. In the third grade we had this nun as a teacher. Her name was Sister Jennifer and she had the saddest eyes you ever saw. It didn’t take much to make her cry. Before all the humping started, I asked her, “What happens at the end of the world?” She jumped into this bit about the sky cracking open and angels throwing down lightning and flame and keeping the worthy few alive for an eternity of light while the rest would fall into a pit of fire. It was the most exciting story I ever heard, but Sister Jennifer got to the end and burst into tears and everyone was bummed the rest of the day. There was a kind in class named Charles, and Charles had something called ADHD. All that meant to the rest of us was he’d get this look in his eyes like he knew how the world would end and it was fine by him. I guess the humping started not long after Sister Jennifer’s tale of fire and brimstone. Us boys went to the bathroom for a group piss break and Charles went wild. He unbuckled his belt and threw down his pants and underwear in front of everybody. The stall closest to the door didn’t have a toilet inside. Instead there was a big tub the janitor used to wring out mops and dump buckets. With his pants and underwear down around his ankles, Charles slithered under the stall door like a lizard kid and climbed onto the tub with his junk hanging out. He waited until all the boys were in the bathroom to start his act. Charles jumped from the sink onto a metal crossbar between the stall walls and kicked the door open. He swung back and forth on the crossbeam so all we could see was his bare ass and pants balled around his black velcro school shoes coming in and out of frame like a pendulum. Some of the boys looked away in disgust and rushed out of the bathroom. The rest of us laughed the hardest we ever laughed. It was the greatest act in the world. Things took a turn when Charles jumped off the beam and Johnny bum-rushed him into the next stall and started dry-humping his leg like a dog. Charles humped back. We peeked in the stall, and the sight charged the room with something strange and new and soon everyone was humping in this half-naked ball of Catholic school boys who’d just learned about the end of the world. It was the first time many of us had ever touched another body that way. There was no fear, only the smell of bleach and ammonia and the dirty stink of our bodies. Sister Jennifer yelled into the bathroom, “TIME’S UP, BOYS!” We tucked our baby blue shirts into our pants and walked back to class with sweaty red faces no one else seemed to notice. Over the next couple weeks, we’d sneak into the boy’s bathroom to catch Charles’ act. But it all ended when Charles went to the bathroom one day and Sister Jennifer, acting on an anonymous tip, waited a minute before following him down the hallway. We knew what came next. “Get up!” Sister Jennifer yelled. “Get up!” Seconds later, we heard the sound of fast footsteps. Charles walked past the classroom door with his shirt untucked and his unbuttoned collar yanked to the side. He was on his way to the principal’s office. It was the last time we’d see Charles for a long time. That night, he loaded the oven with paper towel rolls and a plastic beach ball and turned the dial to four hundred degrees, the exact temperature of Hell, according to Sister Jennifer. Charles ended up in a children’s hospital for a month of monitoring. When he returned to school, he was different. He told us they wouldn’t let him play the Lion King video game because it was too violent. They gave him little yellow pills he had to take every morning that made him docile. He didn’t have the same look in his eyes anymore.
BUT THE END IS SOMETIMES A BEGINNING
Grandpa was back from the war and looking for a girl to marry. His kid sister went to school with Grandma and told her all about her big brother. It was 1946 and he was so handsome and she was so proud. Grandpa manned a mounted machine gun in Normandy and when he wasn’t shooting at Nazis he drove a truck. He told everyone stories about driving Rita Hayworth and Frank Sinatra to USO shows. But he didn’t tell anyone about the bodies. Piles of them. Before the celebrities arrived, Grandpa drove into battlefields. He collected the dead. So when he got home the town of Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, set up a dance for soldiers. All they needed were dates. That’s where the sisters came in. Grandpa’s sister asked Grandma to go with her big brother, but Grandma didn’t want to. But Grandpa’s sisters poked and poked and made Grandma feel bad about turning down a war hero. So Grandma got out the only dress she had, the one she wore for school pictures, and she put a pin in her hair and she waited for the soldier to pick her up. She was nervous waiting for him and her father and mother were nervous too. “A veteran of our greatest war,” her mother said. Her father said nothing and drank down warm buttermilk. When the knock came, everyone looked at the door and the shadows in the crack between the bottom of the door and the floor. Grandma’s mother opened the door and there stood a handsome soldier in uniform. Slicked black hair and dark movie star eyes that held secrets he’d never tell. He hugged Grandma’s mother. She could smell whiskey on his breath. She knew, before anyone else, the story that had started inside the young man. The soldier shook the old man’s hand and smiled like he just gave him a deal on a new car. The soldier looked at Grandma in her school day dress like she was naked. She looked at him like he was the Devil. At the dance, the soldiers drank from flasks and smoked cigarettes and told stories about their dates. “She’s Judge Flynn’s daughter,” one said. “She’s protestant,” said another. “I’m going to marry this girl,” Grandpa said. On the other side of the dance hall, Grandma stood around with the other girls drinking tiny bottles of Coca Cola. Grandma never had Coca Cola before, but she liked it. The soldiers drank and drank from their flasks, and the girls drank their Coca Cola. When the dancing started, big hands slid down tiny bodies. The music eventually fell quiet and everyone filed out of the dance hall. Grandpa got behind the wheel of his daddy’s pickup and Grandma climbed into the cab and they sat there a while. Grandma looked out the window, and Grandpa looked at Grandma looking out the window. She knew nothing of the world and he knew too much of it and if anyone could save him it was her. Grandpa grabbed her hand and she pulled back, but she could not break his grip. He pulled a string out of his pocket. He tied the string around her ring finger and she had no idea why. Grandpa pulled the loop off her finger and put the string into his pocket. The soldier was back from the war and Grandma would be his wife. He would take her away from Mount Pleasant and her mother and her father and everything she knew. They would move to Chicago and planes would rumble over the house and Grandpa would dive into the bedroom for cover.
BIG BOWL
Grandma pulled out a pot for chicken soup. She chopped celery and she chopped carrots and she burned leftover feathers off the meat with the stovetop. She boiled the chicken and she boiled the noodles and she let the soup simmer while she waited for the lottery. She tossed her losing tickets in the trash. “Damn,” she said. “The one time I don’t play three oh three.” She watched the news, all bad. At dinnertime, I poured chicken soup in my little bowl. “Sit down,” Grandma said. I sat where Grandma usually sat, the head of the table. Her back was bothering her, so she didn’t want to sit that night. I took a spoonful of soup and put it in my mouth. My throat and chest warmed, and I ate another spoonful. Halfway through the bowl, there was a knock. I looked at Grandma, and Grandma looked nowhere. She listened. The knock came again, a little louder this time, and Grandma leaned against the kitchen sink. Uncle Val leaned against the screen door and sniffled. “Please let me in,” he said, “I’m sorry, Ma.” “I told you not to come back,” Grandma said. “I’m sorry,” Uncle Val said. “Please let me in, Ma.” Grandma listened. “If I let you in,” she said, “you’re going to the basement to sleep.” “I’ll go to sleep,” Uncle Val said. “I’ll go to sleep, Ma.” Grandma turned the deadbolt and turned the lock on the doorknob and opened the door. Uncle Val spilled into the house. He leaned on the bannister and slowly walked onto the landing. “In the basement,” Grandma said. “I love you,” Uncle Val said. “I love you, Ma.” Uncle Val walked slowly down the basement stairs, each one creaking under his feet, and Grandma listened. She went to the cabinet and got out the big bowl. Grandma started filling it with soup. The stairs creaked again. Each creak got a little louder until all was quiet. In the quiet bloomed a voice. “Ma,” Uncle Val said. “I’m hungry, Ma.” Grandma kept her back to the door. She spooned a pile of noodles into the big bowl. “Ma,” Uncle Val said. “Can you hear me, Ma?” Grandma walked to the basement door. She waited a moment before opening it. Uncle Val stood in the darkness. He climbed out of the stairwell like a wounded animal. He used the walls for balance. “Sit down,” Grandma said. Uncle Val sat at the other end of the table. I don’t think he knew I was sitting across from him. His eyes were half-closed. He wasn’t in this world. Grandma gave him the big bowl. She put a spoon in his hand. He held the spoon like a screwdriver, the fat end of a pool cue, a bike handle. He spooned soup to his mouth. It dribbled down his chin and into his chest chair. Uncle Val’s face scrunched up and his forehead wrinkles flattened and tears flowed down his cheeks. He brought the spoon to his mouth, but he wept so hard the soup fell back into the big bowl. He put the spoon in his mouth anyhow. Snot ran from his nose. A string of it fell from one nostril, and I watched it fall. Bombs away. The snot fell lower and lower until it dangled into the big bowl and mixed with the chicken soup. Uncle Val put his spoon into the soup and scooped some to his mouth. He had no idea he was eating himself. Grandma ripped off a paper towel and reached around her son’s head. She wiped away the snot. Uncle Val would always be her son, and she would always be his mother. That’s how the story was supposed to go. But no one told them how it would hurt.
UNABLE TO WAKE FROM THE DREAM, SHE THOUGHT OF THE HOBO WITHOUT A NAME
Grandma had a curio cabinet filled with statues of this sad clown named Emmett Kelly. A hobo clown with a frown and holes in his dirty clothes and long hair falling out of a greasy hat. Each statue did something different. One Emmett Kelly laid in a bathtub and looked up at the invisible ceiling like he was thinking real hard about something. Another sat on a park bench next to a shaggy dog covered in newspaper. Another walked down the road with a bandana pouch tied to a stick and so on. Grandma’s love of hobos began when she was a little girl on the farm in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania. Every Sunday, her Grandma would get a visit from a man who had nothing but rags for clothes. His toes stuck out the ends of his shoes. He always took his hat off when her Grandma answered the door. The hobo had a name, but no one remembers it. All Grandma could remember was that her Grandma loved him and so she loved him too. Every Sunday, Grandma’s Grandma got out the bacon and eggs and sliced up the potatoes for hash browns and put on a fresh pot of coffee and waited for the knock. When the knock came, and Grandma’s Grandma answered the door, there stood the hobo. He hadn’t eaten for days by that point and in his hunger he had a hunch about him like a stiff wind could knock him over. He always looked up at Grandma’s Grandma with a tortured smile and sad eyes and he always said good morning and she always opened the door and welcomed him inside. All three of them sat at the kitchen table together. No one said a word. All you could hear in that country house was the sizzle of pork fat and the radio playing classical in another room and the wind blowing through the flowers outside the kitchen window and a knife smearing butter across toasted bread. The hobo without a name sat across from Grandma, always looking down at his plate, and Grandma always looked at him looking at his plate and couldn’t tell if he was sleeping or resting his eyes. He had a tired, drooping face. He was so skinny and weak you wouldn’t ask him to cut wood or anything tough like that. But none of that mattered. Grandma loved this man, because her Grandma loved this man. She wanted him to be okay. There was nothing better than watching her Grandma build a breakfast for the hobo and watching her set the plate in front of him with all that steam coming off the crispy bacon and fried potatoes and seeing the hobo open his eyes and smile and wait for Grandma to sit down at the table before he grabbed his fork and knife and all together they ate without saying a word. The hobo ate every piece of bacon and every shred of hash brown. He put his fried egg on his toast and soon Grandma started putting her eggs on her toast. The hobo washed it all down with black coffee and sugar. When they were done eating, Grandma got up and her Grandma got up and they took the plates off the table and put them in the sink. The hobo got up and looked at Grandma’s Grandma and got down on one knee and bowed his head to say Thank you for keeping me alive. And without saying it, Grandma’s Grandma said See you Sunday. That’s how it went every Sunday for months. The hobo sure was nice to have around. A man in the house who ate his breakfast and expected nothing and asked for nothing. But then one Sunday the hobo didn’t show up. Grandma and her Grandma waited and waited. An hour went by and another hour went by and there was no knock. They ate breakfast alone together, but they left a plate on the table in case the hobo showed up. Another hour passed and another hour passed, and the hobo never knocked. Grandma’s Grandma got really worried, and then she got sad and by the next morning she was a little mad. But then on the next Sunday, there was a knock at the door. Grandma’s Grandma answered the door and there stood the hobo looking hungry like he hadn’t eaten in days and in his hunger he had a hunch like he was about to fall over. “Where were you?” Grandma’s Grandma said. “I was worried something happened.” “I was really sick,” the hobo said. “I couldn’t walk over here, I was so sick.” Grandma’s Grandma didn’t say anything. She opened the door like she always did and welcomed him inside like she always did and made him breakfast like she always did. They ate at the table and ate together without saying a word like they always did. When he was all done, the hobo got down on one knee and took Grandma’s Grandma’s hand and held it for a long time and looked up at her. Without saying it he said Thank you for keeping me alive another week, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry like hell I worried you. And Grandma’s Grandma looked down at the hobo and without saying it she said I’ll see you Sunday.
SUNDAY MORNINGS
Grandma woke me every Sunday for six a.m. mass. I was ready to eat the body of Christ for the first time. She wanted me to be prepared for God. It was hard to wake at first—she called my name at five o’clock—but after a month I knew the rhythm. While Grandma dressed in her room, I stayed in bed another ten minutes. Her door popped open, I rolled out and bundled up. Long pants, long sleeves, scarf, jacket, gloves, hat. Chicago cold hit the bone. By 5:45, we were out the door and in the garage. We sat in Grandma’s Oldsmobile while the engine warmed. When exhaust floated in the rearview, it was time to go. What was great about six o’clock mass was there weren’t many people. It wasn’t like Christmas, when all the other Polish families packed into pews like perfumed sardines. On regular Sundays, it was mostly old folks like Grandma. The only other kids in church were altar boys, yawning and wobbling behind the altar with sleep in their eyes. We usually sat in a center pew. On most weekends the entire pew was ours. At first, I didn’t get the point of church. It was a place you went every week on the same day at the same time to listen to the same story from the same priest and sing the same songs from the same song book. But it sure made Grandma happy. More than anything, I think she liked having someone to go with. Before I started going with her, she went alone. Believing is easier when someone’s there to believe with you. Every mass was forty-five minutes. My favorite part was the homily, when the priest riffed on a passage from the gospels. The best priests were funny, but funny priests were rare. The funniest ones were only around a little while before they left for another congregation, and everyone was a little sad when they did. Father W. came from Poland with poor English. He struggled through his homilies, but people liked him. For a stocky white guy with a shiny bald head, he had a calming quality, unassuming and non-threatening. He’s who I told my first confession to. I felt guilty about not feeling guilty. I made up my sins. Years later, after he transferred to another church, Father W. stole donations to help pay for a woman’s divorce. He locked himself in a bathroom and stabbed himself more than thirty times. He bled out before anyone knew why. Grandma stopped going to church for a long time after a priest told her she’d go to Hell if she missed another Sunday mass. She was too busy working overtime at the gas station. The priest’s words hurt her deeply. She couldn’t understand how she could go to Hell after years of unshakable dedication. She stormed out of the confessional and never went back. She called all her daughters and told them. In the dark of her living room, she cried. Alone in my bedroom, I seethed. I imagined burning the church with that priest inside. How’s that for Hell, Father? After church, Grandma took me to Brandy’s for breakfast. I always ordered bacon, eggs over easy with toast, and a cup of coffee. She got an omelette with tomatoes and cheese or blintzes with coffee with cream and sugar.
YEARS GO BY
I peed on the seat watching my ants crawl on the dusty toilet tank. I can watch them for hours and forget about everything else. No, I won’t grab the Raid and blast them to hell. I won’t do it for the same reason you won’t toss the baby out the window when you’re jarred awake and annoyed. These ants, they’re my people. I love them. We share an apartment in Bridgeport. Yeah, I pay all the bills. So what? Let me ask you something. How many ants have you seen bagging groceries for dough? That’s what I thought. These ants, they need me. And I give them every reason to stay. I leave toast crumbs on the counter. There’s a pop pond. Jarritos, tamarindo. I sing them Elvis. My ants are safe and fed and entertained. We’re after the same things. They know how much of a sucker I am. It’s like they know about that one time I paid $17 for a copy of Pink Flamingos. It’s like they know about the doom that rises in me near the lake when I’m looking at the spiderwebs strung between the blades of grass. I fear one step will destroy the spider kingdom, and the ants will tell them where I live. I love these bugs, it’s true. I want them to live. This feeling is rare. The other day a former friend found a black widow in the corner of bricks beside the front door. “Black widow spider!” he yelled and crushed the poor thing with the tip of his boot. I didn’t say anything, but I felt angry and sad and later that night I held a proper funeral. I put her in a match box. I moved her to the windowsill for a four-hour open matchbox wake so the ants could say farewell. I buried her in the basil plant with a Jarritos bottlecap tombstone. The widow’s web stayed next to the door for days. When it rained, it looked like a stretched cotton ball. Each time I passed, I made the sign of the cross and blew a kiss to heaven, where she now lives with all the other insects kicked to death every day in this sad, sad world. Now it’s just me and my ants. There they are, eating the strays of a cereal binge. I don’t mind. When we run into each other, I acknowledge them with a nod. I imagine them doing the same with their creepy little heads. My ants were here before me, and they’ll be here after I’m gone. I’m going to enjoy the time we got to be roommates on this lonely, stinking rock.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ed Komenda is a writer based in the Pacific Northwest. He spent sixteen years as a newspaper reporter across the US. His stories have appeared in Schuylkill Valley Journal, Farewell Transmission, and BULL. His debut chapbook, Six Stories, is out now with Sand & Gravel Press.
