Door
Michael J. Martin
Fall 2009
Fall 2009
I tried to flush my sister down the toilet. When I was nine and she was four. Who knows why. I just did it. But she was too big. Her arm fit to the elbow in the eye of the bowl and she grunt-whined, pulled against my precision-guided aiming. If I couldn’t flush her, she should’ve at least got stuck. Her awkward slaps with her opposite hand poked me in the nostril and I let her go. She ran up the short hall holding her soaked arm like it had just been ripped from a tightly wrapped suture, and the wound needed to be as far from her body as possible to heal, which wasn’t that far from some sort of truth. Except you can’t take out that middle-place between your gut and those coils below your heart or higher brain area, wherever pain is I guess. You can’t remove that and air it out. Not really.
She ran outside crying Mommy! Mom! Mom! to the cicadas and skunk-babies owning the night. The screen-door quietly eased back. Punched holes in the mesh framing her shoulder up, slight sigh of wind wiggling the tips of the ragged mesh-edge like it wanted to tickle her neckline.
Mom wouldn’t be home for hours. She’d run all the way to where mom tells us she works if she knew how to get there. At some point I’ll have to go find her, holding a flashlight, grinning, figuring if I had Sounder this’d go a whole lot nicer. Mom works three jobs. Two real, one imaginary. I could think about those movies I found in that one man’s briefcase and wonder if that’s what my mom did. I’ve never seen a stripclub, even when I was 21 and in Toronto with friends cheering me on. Someone said happy endings happen in the rear. When I got older I thought for years whether that was a double entendre.
My sister’s shouts and foot-stomps began fading into the music of the black country night-heat. The heat had presence. Another layer behind the light-absence... string theory for the rural I guess. I was already biting the dry skin off my lips as I routine’d myself down the road, following. I called out to her and felt stupid and certain she shouldn’t have any doubts about trusting me. Calling at her, I made up some lie about ice-cream, high as the ceiling fan, no topples. I promised her all the candy I had stashed and tried not remembering when I talked her into eating a bunch of Flintstones vitamins with me. Around our 20th Barney things didn’t seem right and we had to go get our stomachs pumped.
My sandals kept slipping and pebbles wedged under my sole-arches. I couldn’t hear her hurried stomp-steps anymore. She usually got tired of yelling, throat yelled out, in a zombie dragrace of limbs, going forward but wanting to die, her feet slapping the road echoing. Nothing. I worried. A distant lamp-light dopplegangered my own and I clicked mine off then on to see if anyone was sitting on the porch. The lamp-light twin’d and I jogged.
He was sitting on the second tier of porchsteps hidden by the railing, blue-crystal balls staring through wrinkly eye-flaps, face obscured and jail barred by the gap-slats. I knew even then he hadn’t smiled in a while. He stayed seated while we discussed something other than my sister at first. I can barely remember now. But I know it wasn’t the filterless cigarette he ashed into the wind. With his smoking hand he pointed further into the dark and birthed a set of stadium-bright white teeth behind corner crusted sun-spotted lips. I wouldn’t call it a smile. More a byproduct of knowing things I did not. Something intangible. Something beyond my frantic sister pushed me further away from this man. Maybe the way he expertly tapped his cigarette. Squinted when unnecessary. His perfect teeth. I don’t know. I wanted to throw a rock at him. The currents of being unnerved drifted me onto the road. And he became the darkness again. I twinkled my flashlight as I broke and shouted Lacey I’m sorry! Come’on back! for so long, until I was forcing myself to hear her responses in the tangles of my wants.
I remember relief when I found her sandal. I remember that clearly. I remember thinking how stupid a sister is. Especially that one. So everything I didn’t want in a sibling. So smart and cute and good souled. I laughed. Then I saw the other thing. And whimpered. Up til that time I hadn’t realized the disparity of a whimper. Dogs whimper; it’s sad. To us at least. Why? Your first whimper, first real whimper, thinking back on it in correlation to all the others experienced from the dossier of the living world, the others still don’t seem pained and wanting. Only yours.
I kneeled toward the blue underwear slightly dust covered and unthreaded. My stomach cramped. There are some things brothers and sisters don’t want to know about one another though proximity and incidental circumstance teaches. I know she liked to plant broccoli in potted soil and slide it beneath her bed to make it grow into a tree. Knew she liked to swallow mouthwash and not spit it out. Knew sometimes she could predict a coin-flip thirty times in a row. And we knew one anothers favorite underwear. I saw her name printed in Sharpee on the elastic border boxed by smiley faces. Where did everything go? I dropped the flashlight and absent-mindedly watched the egg-plant shaped lightcone illuminate a different angle of what I didn’t want to see. I dropped the flashlight and my brain returned. I whimpered again and went frantic like someone was trying to flush me down the toilet.
The man on the porch. His pearly smile. His young eyes spilling cold over me. Spilling a sickly fear into the walnut of my cerebellum. I held the flashlight backward, the beam giving me a tightly wound tail of excited photons, and walked to where he had been sitting. To where a newly dropped cigarette burned tobacco/paper toward company ink. I knocked on the door. I banged on the door. When my mom came home and asked where Lacey was, I was still banging on that door. For years I banged on that door. I gripped the knob to the left of the bone-pellets on my breastplate and opened the door of my chest to watch myself remove the half dozen potted broccolis from under her mattress. To watch the damage of my body evolve. It was always that door. Filling out the MP report, eating breakfast in a Chicago hotel room for an abduction news special; that door. Getting used to needles by donating blood; drinking stupor’d, licking lime residue off the rim-ridges, later my stomach being pumped. Door. Witnessing the stressed features of my mother’s self finally going soft, surrounded by machines–banging on that door. Knuckles blood-skinned. Even now, waiting for the heroin to cook down, [a moment ago rummaging through the ribcage of some guys cabinets], squinting at a cartoon’d vitamin bottle, I can see it. Everywhere.