Are You Listening?

She did not answer her husband. Instead, she shifted her weight in the chair and looked out past the kitchen window to the dark sludge flooding the blacktop. A few cars raced through that sludge, spraying it over their lawn. Her husband’s carefully trimmed bushes were draped in purple towels and stained bedsheets. He was still talking to her, trying to save their marriage.

She turned back to him and pulled the cork from the gin, tipping it to the lip of the glass. He grabbed the bottle from her and held it to his chest.

“Are you listening?” he said, his mouth open wide.

“Give it to me,” she said.

He poured her glass a quarter way and she mixed it with soda. He watched her as she drank and shifted in her chair again. She watched the cars outside cut through the water flooding the street.

“Go on,” she said.

“I don’t have anything else to say.” He stood from the table and grabbed a glass from the cabinet. He ran his finger inside the glass, put it in the sink, and grabbed another. She watched him pour milk into the glass and drink it and pour another.

“Did I ever tell you my mom tried to break my dad’s arm with a mallet?” she said, resting her chin in her hand. “She had him pinned behind the couch. I don’t remember why.”

He sat at the table and laced his fingers. “How old were you?”

She felt the vibrations from his shaking leg through the table, her gin rippled in the glass like microscopic tsunamis.

“Eight or nine, I think.” She swallowed a mouthful of gin and sat her glass back down. He knocked the table and spilled her drink.

“Stop, Jesus Christ.” She pushed away at his legs.

“Sorry,” he said and went into the kitchen. He handed her loose napkins and she wiped at the mess. The room sang an off-key refrigerator song.

“Finish your story,” he said as he bit at his fingernails.

She thumbed through her pockets for the cigarette pack and beat it against the bone of her palm.

“I remember my dad screaming, you bitch, over and over.” She pulled a cigarette and lit it. “My mom swung that mallet at him and he ducked deep behind the couch, and he kept on screaming.”

She looked outside again and pulled hard on the cigarette. She let the smoke fall slowly from her mouth and fall apart at the window pane.

“And my mom stepped up onto the couch and swung that mallet again. I’d never seen my dad so afraid.”

She sucked on the cigarette and blew smoke onto the table. He fanned the smoke out his face and mixed her another drink. Outside an evening redness melted through the clouds, streetlights flickered on, and inside it grew dark.

“They’re still married. Still in love,” he said.

“How do you know? How do you measure love with a mallet?” She pulled the cigarette from her teeth and sipped the gin again.

She tried to think of a reason she didn’t feel like herself, but none came. Through the window, she watched a street cat walk across the brick wall dividing the houses.

“So, where does that leave us?” He was crying now, wiping at his tears and rubbing snot on his thighs.

She was quiet for a long time. She imagined herself as a bonfire in their driveway and silhouettes dancing in the fire. She imagined regurgitated voices echoing and dancing naked through the streets and she watched the silhouettes as they collided with the bonfire, spewing tiny embers of light into the dark sky, briefly giving the neighborhood and herself life, but just as quickly as that light came, it was extinguished. And then there was nothing but the sound of cicadas crying.

“I want to dance,” she said and poured another drink.

 

The Sound A Dying Cat Makes

He was to give his father’s eulogy. They had not said a word to each other in over three years, maybe five, he wasn’t sure. When the phone rang and the nasal voice of a man spoke, he watched nothing but the way light from a window spiraled before collapsing in on itself. He agreed.

The week before the funeral, his emotions were high as he combed through The Arizona Republic’s obituaries, almost manic-like, dog-earring pages and trying to replicate something related to love on a page. He thought it strange how someone could carry a summary of a person’s life in their pocket and how holding it up to a skylight the words could bend a little and become something he didn’t recognize. He knew that Red hardly deserved the hollowed-out word’s obituaries carried. He had always felt that Red was someone you summed up over dark liquor and quickly forgot. He wrote eulogy at the top of the page and left it blank.

He did not recognize anyone at the funeral. In his head he had imagined men with bright floral Hawaiian shirts passing a silver flask around and telling slurred stories of some bar fight or one of the countless times they disappeared with Red for weeks. Those people were not there. He told himself they were probably at their own funeral, which made him feel better.

But there was something else in him that was angry they were missing it all, his father’s friends, something he couldn’t quite grasp. He wanted them there, wanted them to see what little he had left. As if he were a boy again, dreaming, and he beat those men to death for pushing Red further. Look at what I have left.

He had to remind himself that it wasn’t really their fault. Not really. Red spent most mornings unconscious over the toilet, spitting vomit into his hand and shaking as if he were bracing himself against the shock of waking up. His poor mother, pulling Red to his feet and washing his hair over the sink and tugging a green polo over his thick neck. That was only Red’s doing. Today, he felt differently about all of that. He got what was coming.

There was a sort of small television near the front of the funeral home that flashed pixelated screensavers— Massive waves slapping at the heels of the jaded gray rocks of a mountainside, like a mutt lapping water and saliva out of a silver water dish. It played this for a time and then cheaply transitioned to an aerial view of some city he didn’t know or care to know. He let his hand slip into his pocket and thumb at the dull edges of the eulogy. He worried, just for a moment, if he’d be able to read his handwriting.

There was quiet chatter in the room, some sniffles, a few times people told him how sorry they were. A pointless gesture, he knew, but thanked them anyway. Music hummed in the small room. A fat man with a patchy beard made his way to the podium and thanked them for coming. He held a pocket bible tight and talked for a time about God and salvation. He felt his mind wander, fingering the edges of the eulogy. It was his time to give the eulogy.

He pulled at the paper in his pocket and smoothed it out over the wooden podium facing the dozen or so people watching. The room fell into a silence like a trance, as if the room itself paid its respect. He cleared his throat into that empty expanse of people.

“I’ve been trying to think recently of good stories I have of Red. I keep coming back to the cat he brought home. I was fifteen I think.”

He leaned against the podium and felt the legs wobble. It rested on the pegs to the right and squeaked as if groaning. He straightened the paper again and stood up.

“I think he felt guilty. I mean, he had a lot to feel guilty about so it’s hard to say. He hated cats. Anytime he saw one, he’d go on about how he got scratched up by one when he was young and never liked them since.” A man he didn’t recognize put his arm around a woman and held her close as she tried to hold tears back.

“Anyway, he brought home this cat. Mom and I named her Dune because her fur looked like smooth sand.” He looked out at the room for a time and started again.

“I was so excited, I locked her in my room with me for days. I wanted her to like me so much, I cut my shoelaces off so I could play with her. I had to spend that summer with shoes that wouldn’t stay on my feet.” The room laughed for a few moments. He wondered if he should stop here. As if he could incinerate the truth, crush it into something digestible. A nice story at a nice funeral.

“I remember he came home one night. Drunk.” He paused, letting that sink in. “I heard him and Mom screaming about something. Dune was whining at my door, asking to be let out. I just ran that shoelace across the carpet hairs, trying to quiet her. But she wouldn’t. She just kept on whining and my parents kept on yelling and smashing things until it fell quiet and I heard crying. I heard his boots first, then his shadow as it peaked beneath that gap between the door and the carpet. I held Dune away from the door, she tried wriggling to get free but I felt if I let her go something was gonna happen. So, I didn’t.” He stopped; the room felt like it was holding onto its breath. Like it was the last they’d take. He wished now that things were different. Now Red will be nothing but what he already was.

“Red pushed the door wide. He looked so pink. Mom was still crying. He reached down to pull Dune away from me as she purred. I held her tighter and begged him to leave her alone. He told me not to move and took Dune from my arms. Mom was yelling now, telling him to stop. He put the cat down and stepped on her belly, she writhed under his massive boot.

He was fast. He beat Dune with his fist, and she screamed the way people do in car accidents and I watched. When he was done, he closed the door behind him. The house was quiet for the rest of the night.”

When he looked up, he knew that he had said too much. He felt like he had tattooed a word to the back of his throat. The fat man with the Bible watched him with his mouth open and a few people’s face contorted and scrunched themselves into a look he hadn’t seen before. The AC unit turned on and it blew moldy air into the room, someone stood and walked out the carpet squishing behind them. He folded the paper up and pocketed it. Somewhere in the seats, a woman quietly said, “I think you should leave.”

 

He hid inside the bar of his cheap motel. The place smelled as though the underpaid night janitor mopped the floors in dehydrated piss. The man next to him chewed with his mouth open, bits of peanuts passed from his tongue and fell into that small gap where his tightened collar met his double chin. The man asked why he was in town.

“A funeral.” He told him and gestured to the bartender.

“Yeah, that’ll do it.” He said and sucked a mouthful of peanuts before swearing at the television overhead, “I’ll tell you what, that boy couldn’t bat if a lady pitched to him.”

The bartender leaned over the bar to fill a young girl’s glass, whispers something and she laughs. A neon Budweiser sign flickers then holds still and the man slams his hand on the bar. He shakes his head and sips the foam from his beer.

“Was it anyone good?” The man says to the television, licking foam from his greying beard.

“What?”

“The funeral. Who died?”

“No one worth knowing.”

The man laughs to himself and finally turns, his face sags and digs into itself like trenches. His tan shirt is wrinkled and stained. He thinks of all the basements the man washed his clothes in.

“Jeremy” The man reaches his hand out.

“Mark,” he said, grabbing peanuts from the bar.

Jeremy looks at him like he does the television. As though he is waiting for some something exciting. Red had that same damn look when he— Anyway, Jeremy turns back to the television, sucks at his teeth, and sips his beer.

“You look pale.”

“Does it make any difference?” He waves at the barman again.

“It makes all the difference.”

Jeremy’s collar is loose, small black hairs from his chest reach through. He asks Jeremy what he does for work. Entrepreneur. He laughs at this. Of course, he is.

The bartender is still bent backwards over the bar giggling in rhythm with the young girl and touching her hand every few blinks. He wonders if she’s going to sleep with him.

“What business are you in?”

“I’m out of work.” He tells Jeremy.

“Tough business.” Jeremy turns back to the game and grabs another fistful of peanuts.

There is something exciting about filthy bars like this, bars you escape into during a funeral or go into before having an affair. Jeremy coughs into the space between the open liquor bottles and the crowded barstools, the Budweiser sign flickers again, and he catches it as it reflects off Jeremy’s balding head.

Past the pool table and the man soliciting sex from a cab driver, the booth in the back clutching the crowd of Marines by their nape, sucking down their seventh or eighth old-fashioned, hoo-hawing and banging on the walls of the bar, pulling smokey air from their electronic cigarettes and chanting some slurred and stuttered shanty song. The bartender set a napkin on the sweating bar in front of him and laid a drink. He thought of Red’s worthless little funeral and how that was all it’ll ever be.