Requiem
→ PUBLISHED IN ISSUE NO. 18: FALL/WINTER 2016
It is Tuesday, the wailing church has emptied, and the earth is packed hard over him. She pours a stout tumbler of boundaries and warnings, sips, then opens the heavy volume to page 67: How To Build An Altar. She reads the directions aloud.
“Begin with a spine of funked silver—pull it screeching from your body, staple the writhing thing to a board to keep it still. Add a necessary food—Pixy Stix, the inward workings of pig, a fistful of Lemonheads, slippery salt pork collards, a peppermint stick shoved into the core of a thick sour pickle. And damn, don’t you be ashamed of chicken—pebbled and spice, sluggish pink blood lovingly preserved in sinkside jars. Sprinkle everything with the stubborn rusted dust from some southern road.
“Decorate the walls of the altar with frescoes of thick-thighed mothers...”
She yearns to skip this part, but doesn’t.
“...mothers with hard insisting bellies, double negative mothers, rust-dusted mamas, mamas with no clue, mamas with no husbands or fresh food, mothers with their crowns oiled and pressed hard.
“Add something from the get-pretty room, but not the hot comb—how about the smell of burning and the sizzling suggestion of yourself growing smaller? How about that scar behind your ear, your neck, how about a precious clip from your napped edges?
“Find a place for your hips, a place large enough to hold them as they become engines. String the room with doubledutch clothesline and curled corner Polaroids of the wounds you still carry because of that rough and roundabout rhythm—abbreviated toes, whip songs on your calves, ankles huge with triple-time and the sidewalk stomp.
“Now ask God what you should do next.”
She doesn’t ask. She already has a cross, black velvet headshots of Him and him, a hymnal, a funeral home fan. She sips again. She keeps reading.
“Right about now, the devil, all come hither and cosmic slop, will claim his corner. He’ll flash his chest muscles and grunt your entire Christian name in a way you ain’t never heard before. Ignore him, but keep an eye trained in his direction.”
She locks gaze with the chuckling bogie until the page asks: “Chile, did you forget your daddy?”
No. She couldn’t.
“Spritz the altar with the Old Spice Lucky Strike sexed stench of him, the ritual repeating air of factory, the necessary milk of gin and tabasco, the smell of tobacco spittle and a open-mouthed blues groan.
“Did you forget your daddy? Fill a crystal cup with flakes of ash scraped from his forearms, with impossibly thick toenail clippings that drop and make music on hardwood floors. Finish with the sound of the way he said daughter—even if he screamed it. Even if he whispered it in his sleep.”
She closes the book. It is Tuesday, the church has emptied. She strains to hear her father’s voice. Nothing. The dirt is packed hard over him. Over his open mouth.
