Dakota
I carry my dead pit bull around the block in blankets of fur and tears. Nobody asks what’s inside the baby blankets. Not even my wife. Wendy fills the humongous bathtub with bubbles bursting merciless in the orbit of our ceiling fan. That’s her way of saying goodbye. Potheads suffer differently. Nobody knows how we’ll mourn ’til our dog dies. I walk around the block all night ’til blisters burst, my tennis socks heavy and soggy with a fusion of serum and sweat. Neighborhood pets trail me at dawn. I welcome a few by their names. A couple strays, shaggy coyotes, rabid racoons, an inquisitive skunk.
“Whatcha holding, Dick?”
My neighbor Nicolas is reclining on his dental chair smoking a Cuban on his rickety porch. He’s a drunkard dentist. Nicolas digs to the root of most rotten things fast and ruthless. Pit bulls are an affectionate breed. None of my pits attacked anybody before. Yesterday was a calamitous accident.
“You’ve been circling all morning,” Nicolas says. “This isn’t a drill?”
I hobble across his manicured lawn. The cigar clouds are inviting, like a light from heaven. Nicolas shivers and his porch trembles with the spasms of an anxious patient battling a botched root canal. His eyeballs bulge, brutal and bewildered.
“Jesus, Dick—what’s that smell? Is this a coyote?”
Mumbles linger inside my esophagus, a soul floating from a furry cadaver.
“What’s putrefying in your blankets, Dick?”
Nicholas hands me his slimy glass of bourbon and staggers backwards.
“My dog died.”
Nicholas nods.
“He bit somebody bad,” I say. “He killed somebody yesterday. Mauled a little girl to smithereens.”
“Jesus Christ, Dick.”
The bourbon burns but smells better than death decaying in splintered sunshine.
“Damnit, Dick.”
“I know.”
“Jesus, Dick—that’s not your dog—that’s your daughter.”
“A family member,” I say. “Best damned pit that ever lived.”
“That’s your little daughter, Dakota!”
Nicolas scrunches the baby blankets. Bubbles of saliva bounce from chapped lips. Nicolas’s screaming grows garbled. He sobs into an empty eye socket, his perfect teeth whiter than the exposed bones in his hands.
“Say something, Dick—”
“I’ve been walking all night. It’s difficult to say goodbye.”
Slumber Party Suicide Pact
I snort the heads, thoraxes, and abdomens of fire ants scorched by my magnifying glass. The slumber party suicide pact decimated the nerds of our cul-de-sac. Four tweens swallowed a cornucopia of uppers, downers, laughers, and screamers from Mrs. McKensie’s medicine cabinet. Mrs. McKensie found them in a mound of body pillows: eight bloodshot eyeballs. Souls catapulted the cul-de-sac, drizzled on rooftops, whittled the calcium from our uteruses. The pajamaed tweens entwined—their parents opted to cremate them even though the mortician promised she could separate the human octopus’s carcass their children morphed into.
I do my own algebra homework these days.
I’m the lowest common denominator, destined to become the most popular tween on the cul-de-sac. Algebra equations scald my esophagus and grow arduous. I carve cursive initials of dead pop stars with a razorblade in the cartilage between my toes, elliptical galaxies blistering like dappled shrapnel of stardust on a butterfly’s wings.
Slumber parties are satanic.
Nerds are nothing but cremains in the bellies of bottom feeders. I focus my attention on fire ants—impaling kaleidoscopic colonies with shish kebab skewers. Nerds are extinct on our cul-de-sac. No more singed into our memory than dinosaurs.
I carve a Brontosaurus with my razorblade beneath my left areola, sculpt a Tyrannosaurus rex into my groin. My soul is an asteroid on fire plummeting toward your grandmother. A cul-de-sac of shadows sweating into sidewalks where slumber parties never end.
NyQuil Chicken Lullaby
I burn NyQuil Chicken breasts on the rusty hot plate in my son’s wobbly treehouse. My fourteen-year-old daughter is throwing a rainbow party in our basement. Thirteen girls are wearing different colored lipstick to give blow jobs to eleven boys. I’m on hospice. If fellatio makes Molly cheerful—less likely to mutilate her wrists in the bathtub again—I condone it. I snort a Trojan BareSkin Raw condom and yank the latex from my chapped lips. Our basement refrigerator is humongous and oozes a weird funk—filled with cans of cold Coors Light and lukewarm Budweiser bottles. My pothead son is car surfing on the roof of his dilapidated Honda Civic around our cul-de-sac, fireflies bouncing against bloodshot eyeballs. The breeze is blowing in horizontal drizzles. Giggles escape reluctantly—like clipped-winged cockatiels freed from a cage—fluttering from the cracked egress window of our basement. A sticky carnival of sweat and raindrops rolling down my collarbone, the treehouse balloons with NyQuil smoke, soothing my soul. Molly is moaning and the moon is slowly shrinking, like a worldly magician wrestling a balloon animal into an elephantine cumulus cloud—and all I know is that my family is finally coming together.
