Oh Honestly, Erin

Ernie was here. Louis heard him tapping lightly on the screen door. He had come to help Louis move out the house he shared with his fiance, the house he had called a home for the past six years.

Everything changed after the accident.

Louis and Veronica were madly in love. They were the sort of couple people either adored, envied or puked in your mouth at the mere sight of them. You could always find those two with a hand in each others back pocket, lovingly feeding each other tufts of bright blue cotton candy at the state fair, and even occasionally indulging in gold snifters brimming with each other’s thick red blood.

Everything changed after the accident.

It was a horrific scene that day on the freeway; it looked like a real life demolition derby had swept through, leaving a trail of smoking, twisted steel carnage in its wake. Louis was lucky to walk away from it. And when Veronica came to visit him in the hospital, he expected she would be just as thankful as he was. Except that, when she got a look at his teeth, all askance as a result of his face slamming into the dashboard, she backed away in horror.

Everything changed after the accident.

And now Louis was moving out of the love nest, seeing no reason to continue living in a house that whispered bittersweet memories of his love with every corner he turned. No, Veronica didn’t want to be with him anymore, stating that his mouth, all catawumpus and zigzagged from the trauma, was too much for her to bear. “You snag my lips when you kiss me now,” she cried, racing out of the house with nothing more than an overnight bag.

Six months, and she never came back.

“Louis, what box do you want me to pack your pornos in?” Ernie wondered. But Louis, with no explanation, slipped by him  with a somnambulant gait and walked out the front door.

Louis’ body was found a month later by the railroad tracks. Most of his flesh had been picked away at by hungry crows.

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Help me to not be so sad. Wah.

The blue ones were the easiest to blow up, so Owen saved them for last. When it was all over, he was winded, with floaters and sparkles undulating in his periphery. A few times, his oxygen-deficient brain had tried to convince him that an inside-out Liza Minelli was climbing backward down his dining room wall. Maybe I expelled too much breath, he thought, plopping down on the chaise.

Hallucinations and beestung lips aside, Owen stood back and basked in the beautiful array of birthday balloons ricocheting with static electricity and adding bursts of latex grandeur in otherwise naked corners of the room. It was worth the hours it took to blow them up on his own, even when a few naughty ones decided to pop in his face and leave welts that stung like souvenirs from a scorned lover.

Yes, Owen was very proud of his work and couldn’t wait for his mother to walk into her surprise party later that evening. Balloons reminded her of batting around blown-up condoms at summer music festivals so he was sure it would prove beguiling for her.

Owen found that he had devoted a little too much time to balloon bloating, and not enough to the soiree’s snacks.

Inviting his brother Pierre over an hour early to finish draping streamers from the rafters, Owen slipped into the kitchen to begin deviling eggs and stabbing cocktail wieners with colorful plastic swords.

When Owen re-entered the dining room, a tray of hors d’oeuvres balanced precariously on each skyward palm, he was stricken to see that Pierre had penetrated every last balloon with the metal file that Owen had sworn was confiscated after Pierre mutilated that biker gang by the river last fall.

For a few seconds, Owen stood motionless amongst the latex carnage, shock rendering him speechless. And then, in a mad fervor, Owen banished Pierre from the party, swearing that what Pierre had done was irreparable.

The next day, Pierre stood on Owen’s doorstep and, with a lopsided grin, presented him with a potted plant.

“You think you can patch the popped pearls of my party with your puny potted plant, Pierre?

” Owen wailed in anguish. Slamming the door in his face, Owen was unsure if he could ever forgive his brother.

But the one thing he was sure of was that the metal file had been usurped once and for all.

The day was sunny, with a breeze just strong enough to blow back long locks and whip skirts around knee caps.
Monty and his mother were out in the park, eating mustard and lemon curd sandwiches and flicking raisins to the stray children lingering near a see-saw.

Monty loved his mother.  He thought she was the epitome of femininity, with her tautly coiled pin-curls, high-heels that made her legs soar to the heavens like a pair of nylon’d beanstalks, and perfectly starched floral a-line dresses. He loved bringing home kids from school so they could see how much better his mother was, with well-placed smudges of flour layered delicately upon her rouge cheekbones,  reminding everyone that she was the state champion in zucchini bread-baking while the rest of the mommies could barely toast a slice of bread without exploding their crack den. Monty would  secretly smirk knowing those downtrodden kids would go home later to their river rat mommies who barked out obscenities in a smoker’s croak and left dime store lipstick prints on their chipped mugs of Sanka.

“Go get the frisbee from the car, Monty!” his mother sang out, smoothing out the back of her tulip’d skirt as she stood.

Just then, a vigorous gust of wind blew through the meadow, pummeling his mother’s skirt into her face.

The kids by the see-saw burst into a taunting orchestra as Monty learned that his mother was not quite a woman after all.

Ever since Merry was a small gal, she had a soul-arresting kinship for unicorns. Rather than go to school dances, she would spend hours on the window seat of her bedroom, sketching pages of the majestic animals.

Merry knew that, in her dream land, unicorns were the most regal creature one could aspire to be. Without that glistening spire, you were nothing better than a meager horse. Everyone knew that horses were left to haul plows in the fields while unicorns were fed candied apples by princesses and galloped across rainbows to other lands where slot machines hit the jackpot every time, growing marijuana was not illegal, and everyone sang like angels. (Just not Jessica Simpson. She will never sing like an angel. God, I hate her.)

After her 567th viewing of Legend, Merry could bear it no longer. Standing before her bedroom vanity, she punched straight through the mirror and watched numbly as the glass spiderwebbed. Oblivious to the blood dripping like sanguine jewels from her knuckles, she bent down and snatched up a piece of mirror that had landed softly at her feet. Honing the jagged shard into the shape of a perfect cone, and adrenaline pumping harder now than the time she watched her first porno, Merry struck the fat edge into her pate. It didn’t take at first, her flesh tougher to pierce than she imagined. Grounding herself into the carpet, she fought against the double vision, hauling off and bashing the glass into her head with all her might.

Her mother found her three hours later, dead on the bedroom floor and, with arms akimbo, she sighed,  “Well, Merry always did want to be a unicorn.”

———————————

This was inspired by my friend Merry, who I can totally picture doing something like this.

At first there was two birds on the wire above me. But let me start from the beginnin’ ya‘ll.

Ma forgot to pack my lunch that day, after a late night gettin’ sauced on rotgut, and I had to sit in the cafeteria and watch all them kids eat their crabapplesauce and chomp on maggot-laden hamslices and it was horrible,  just plain awful, ya’ll, to have to sit there and watch the whole school, the entire student body, chowing on their delicious hot lunches while I had nothing to my name. I had to sit there and pretend like I was too busy reading my finger-twirlin’ horoscope to spoon anything more than a packet of sweetener down my gullet.

I was starved, ya’ll, ready to eat my arm to my elbow, no salt, no Ketchup, just plain naked flesh melting in my mouth.

But I did not do that, ya’ll, no this boy abstained from auto-cannibalism. Instead, I played games with my watch, countin’ down the minutes til Gangly Georgette’d be on her knees in the cubby with Eddie Dandruff; then I’d be knewin’ it was time to do the old skedaddle and soon after that  I’d be jumping off the school bus and sliding
down the gorge to our cabin where I’d slurp down a can of jack mackerel like it was a moss-covered oyster, the likes of which we ain’t ever be affordin’, not with Pa blowing his paychecks on the poker machines and manicures.

When the bell blew, I ran outside to wait for the bus. My hunger was makin’ me feel like I was bein’ eatin’ from the inside out, ya’ll. This sickening, rolling pang washed over me like the time I spied on Ma and Pa intercoursin’ in the wash house, and I could no longer stand to go for one more second without some kind of vittle in my maw.

At first there was two birds on the wire above me. Now there’s bein’ only one, ya’ll.

When Milly came calling on Ethel one afternoon, she was a bit unnerved by the soft plopping sensation she kept feeling on her shoulders.

Milly tried not to look distracted while Ethel yammered on about the new compost pile her husband Jim-Bitch had engineered right there in the backyard, next to the rusted 1967 pick up truck and behind the pig sty. As more gentle plops landed upon her shoulders and gingham’d bosom, Milly tightened her grip on the mason jar of moonshine Ethel done served up. Trying her darndest to retain eye contact, she waited for Ethel to get up and whip her kids before flicking and swiping at the hardening lumps on her shoulders.

Twenty-eight minutes into her visit, Milly was taking a long slurp of ‘shine when something wet and mushy went splat-squish on her head. And then, a second later, a thick brook of warm goo glooped right on down her forehead, right on past the whisker-sprouting mole, before pooling into a moist inlet of fecal marsh at the bridge of her nose.

Looking up slowly, Milly was met with ruffled feathers and at least eight sets of beady eyes.

“Ya’ll gots some birds up in there,” she drawled to Ethel, pointing up at the rafters. And she took another long gulp of moonshine while Ethel went to town with a leather belt on the backside of her redheaded stepson for burying the neighbor in the brand new compost pile, goddammit.

Farfel and Toenail have known each other for nine years. They live on the same block and used to be friends, until the first annual Neighborhood Lights challenge was conceived. Now every year they vow to outdo the other in terms of hokiest Christmas display.

Farfel won this past year by having a real live baby pose as Jesus in his Nativity scene. He said it was his cousin, but really he found it in a Dumpster outside of a crack shack.

At block parties, it is not unusual for Toenail to purposely shoulder past Farfel, leaving his lapel smeared with a strata of spinach dip, mustard and Mudslide. And once, Toenail “accidentally” pushed him into a pool just as he was about to get Sharon Semenshower’s number, and then proceeded to go home with Farfel’s brother, Rufus, who was a gynecologist and kept a bag of shiny apparati in his trunk.

Farfel’s mama raised him to never lay a hand on a girl, but Toenail made him want to eschew his mama’s sage words.

Last summer, Farfel and his current girlfriend, FlyStrip, were having a picnic in his front yard. He fed her grapes and oysters while she giggled and made vapid attempts at conversation.

She said things in rapid and random succession, like: “There is a sale at Macy’s! I like toast with jam. Say, I wonder why the sky is blue? If your crotch itches, you should just scratch it. Oh, a birdie!” Farfel was always one to include intellect near the top of his list of standards, but the way FlyStrip’s gelatinous jugs bounced around like two buoys in a sea of spray-tanned flesh kept him distracted long enough to not care. It also didn’t hurt that she was wearing a bikini top.

Toenail was walking her dog when she spied the two of them, splayed out on a blanket, twirling delicate-stemmed glasses in their hands. She couldn’t explain it, but her heart began to race and she could feel the blood rolling to a boil beneath her cheeks.

Full of disgust, and some terribly uncomfortable feeling she’d never felt before — she hoped she wasn’t developing pockets in her colon — Toenail stormed over to the lounging couple and kicked mud in FlyStrip’s face. Clumps of sod and possibly some dog shit dripped down FlyStrip’s chin and coated her silicone accessories. Without her secret weapon, FlyStrip’s spell on Farfel was broken and he remembered that she was little more than a bleached blond beach bimbo who drove a Pinto and made bank by slopping under-spiced chili in a diner.

Rising from the blanket, he got real close to Toenail’s clenched jaw. He got so close he thought for sure that this would be the day that he broke mama’s rule and coldcocked that broad right upside her head. But instead, the two of them stood there, breathing all heavy, panting in anger, hands curled in taut fists at their sides.

And that’s when it occurred to Farfel that maybe they didn’t hate each other as much as they thought.

“Hey,” Farfel grabbed Toenail hard around the elbow, and she waited for him to cuss her out. But Farfel goes instead, “Let’s be in love.

“

And Toenail, her belly shook like a bowlful of chicken fat, that’s how hard she laughed. “Are you kidding me?” she gasped between peals of laughter. “I hate your guts!”

Maybe it just might take Toenail a little longer to figure it out.