Two Pieces: One Fiction, The Other A Poem by Winifred Moore
Happy (An Excerpt)
Marlon –
After you died, I started chewing out the skin on the sides of my mouth. I couldn’t drink orange juice, it hurt so badly. It made me tired all the time and I could just hear you telling me to take my vitamins. I started taking one a day, but that didn’t stop the aching in the morning, when I had to get out of bed and go to work. You and I weren’t close. We just made plans because we had the same mother, and never said anything besides the big things that happened between family meetings.
I remember when you moved to Brooklyn, the first thing you loved were the cracked and uneven bluestone sections of the sidewalk. You told me the neighborhood had two faces. The half lined block to block with brownstone townhouses and front gardens that were professionally primed to fit the name of the neighborhood: Carroll Gardens – and the other half that was divided by the stinking Gowanus Canal – that was full of these old abandoned factories and vacant lots swamped in weeds and chemical waste. It wasn’t complete without that second half, you said. You’d take walks over the bridge of the Canal, even though it stunk, and you’d walk by those old factories even though there was always glass broken over the ground and graffiti all over these places that weren’t built for anybody anymore.
You always loved damaged things – you said the city had a voice all over and it wouldn’t quiet down for anyone. It was nothing without that second half. It was scrambled up and you couldn’t get enough of that.
Broken things used to upset me. I always got attached, or guilty, like when I dropped one of the white plates dad used for special occasions. It brought my shoulders all tight up to my ears and I just froze with my arms still up in the air. Dad’s house made me like that. All you said was: “Shhh, put your arms down.” You tuned the burner down to low, to save what you were cooking, and squatted to gather the white porcelain in your palm. You said I looked like I had seen a ghost or something.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said, finally loosening up. I joined you down on the floor to pick up the pieces quickly, trying not to cut my fingertips.
You glanced over your shoulder with a grin so big you couldn’t help laughing. “Relax. What can you do? Glue all these little pieces together?” You tossed the pieces quickly into the trash, and checked over your back for him each time; I could see you waiting for it just like I was. Dad didn’t come in, and he never said anything about the dish. He was two rooms over, probably watching game shows on the television in the dark.
You turned the burner back up. I set the table. You didn’t bother fixing the plate – when we broke things, dad just threw them across the room again as if breaking them up into smaller pieces would make them disappear. It wasn’t about fixing things. It was about making sure we knew what was bad and wouldn’t forget it.
I remember having to tell dad the news about your murder after the detectives reached me. I had to call twice because he didn’t answer the first time. “Yes?” He answered as if I had caught him during something more important.
“It’s Yati. I needed to tell you something about Marlon.”
“I don’t ever hear from Marlon.”
“Yeah, well, I got a call today about him.” I was more afraid of the lack of expression from dad than any sort of grief that would translate through the phone. “He’s dead – he was killed, and the detectives wanted me to tell you.”
He didn’t respond right away. He cleared his throat and replied in the most matter of fact way, “We have to stop by and get Marlon’s things from his apartment then.” Like we were running an errand.
“Yeah, well –”
“Let me speak.” He says this as if I had interrupted him or something. “Yati, this is what happens when you have no values. Good, Indian values. You understand?”
I replied with a tight-lipped: ”Yes.”
Dad was convinced it was a gay prostitute who killed you, or if it wasn’t it might as well have been. But really, it was a man named Lowell Maxham. It was such a strange name, like nothing I’d ever heard. The guys you would go out with were like those abandoned factories, lonely, just waiting to be knocked down and turned into something else. They wanted to be loved, just like you did, I guess. You never cared how dad felt, but it hurt you. The one time I visited your apartment, before what happened, I couldn’t help noticing a slip of lined paper on the counter with a few phone numbers on it. One was crossed out in these furious, wide pencil marks. I remember how the word “bad” was written next to it in capital letters like something wild you had to lock away. It’s what came with being lonely.
It’s what killed you, Marlon.
Dad had that effect on us. Growing up, we didn’t really talk to each other about sad days, or why we had them. I asked you once, when I was little, about why you weren’t talking. You were nine then and it was the first time you were ever that quiet in the morning. It was before anything happened to me, before I knew what it was like to wake up in the dark and feel dad weighing over me like a rock, thrusting his hand over my lips. You didn’t eat that morning, even though he told you to, you just kept your mouth shut. I used to have nightmares that you acted the same way the night that man killed you. For some reason, I just imagined dad standing over you and all that blood.
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Splinters
My grandpa was a mathematician. He ran on formulas. This one time, he removed a splinter from my foot on the back porch, like a surgeon with rubber hands, as he told me it was all about “angles” and wood, sometimes metal. I didn’t know anything about protractors. It was all acute or obtuse, nothing I understood. Something like Einstein, something like that picture with his clown hair and his tongue sticking out.
I wasn’t sad when he died, except that he was my grandpa and I was supposed to be. The ground was covered in pinecones and I’d never seen my mom cry like that. That’s the only thing that made the occasion sad.
We were told to write sad poems, back when I was eight. I wrote about grandpa, and my grandma read it out of my pink Barbie notebook. It wasn’t that great, the poem. But it sent her to the bathroom, crying. She ran on her emotions.
Winifred Hunter Moore is a senior Creative Writing major at SUNY Purchase. Most people know the Brooklyn native by the nickname Freddie. Currently, she works as a writing tutor for the learning center at Purchase. She is also the Co-President of Cheese-Club.
