In the Quiet After Slaughter

excerpt

Momacted up in public she crossed one of these invisible demarcations.
We’d find her suicide notes magnetized to the fridge door
like shopping lists. Rough drafts, she called them. At the end of one
such letter, as though the deed had been accomplished, shewrote, I
was bored.
Asked what was stopping her from carrying out the threat, she
replied, Have you seen the price of natural gas lately?
The procedure was always the same: as soon as she began behaving
strangely, the cops were notified; an ambulance followed. A caring
social worker wrote a lengthy report.
We knew when it was time. Mom hid behind the curtains and
spied on passersby. School kids jeered. Eventually she would do
something deemed a danger to herself or others — the line. Cops
were alerted; an ambulance followed. A caring social worker wrote
a lengthy report.
Doctors began with pills. None worked. Electric shock therapy—
Edison medicine — did. A psychiatrist at the bughouse called us in
for a chat after the first session. He directed us to the patients’
lounge. We found Mom playing Scrabble.
– I haven’t felt this good in years! she beamed. She was unrecognizably
radiant. We gathered her things.
My father wanted to believe his wife had been cured; we all did.
The doctor did nothing to dissuade us. But the electrical charge had
the lasting power of a flashlight battery. My mother’s sanity waned
like the trailing notes of an orchestra. Follow-up drugs gave her the
shakes. She soon stopped taking them.
– I’m fine now, she declared. A-okay.
But she wasn’t A-okay. There was a look . . . that look. She slipped
away from us incrementally. In time, she was gone for good.
Exhausted from their shopping spree, Mr. and Mrs. Cameron turn in
early. Lenore stays up with us, bravely trading a tent shaking with
snores for the certain terror of being left alone with her brother.
Larry pelts his sister with marshmallows.
– Stop it! she cries.
– Make me, he challenges.
– I’m telling!
– You’ll die.

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/0980897971

In the Quiet After Slaughter

excerpt

– Gringos are sometimes kidnapped for sport, warned a Brit. With
that hair, you’d be hard not to notice.
The Canadian scoffed at the notion of danger— secretly yearned,
in fact, for adventure — and had only decided against thumbing to
the coast after witnessing an incident near the zocolo. Men identifying
themselves as police had beaten one of the Australians he’d been
drinking with, a rugby player built like a bulldozer.
Witherspoon woke late the following morning, his brain cells
jumbled by too much mescal. From the hotel balcony he’d watched
as the Cessna he was booked to be aboard struggled to clear the treetops.
The desk clerk who’d promised to rouse him early — who’d
accepted a gratuity to do so — feigned amnesia. The proprietor of
the airline refused him a refund.
– The next flight leaves in one week, señor. he said. Would you
like to purchase a ticket?
– I have a ticket!
– Correct, señor. But your ticket has today’s stamp.
Paco brakes hard, scattering a clutch of chickens. He rolls down the
window and calls to the hitchhiker.
– Dondeva?
With dictionaries open in their laps, they know just enough of the
other’s language to be understood. The Mexican says he’s a pharmaceutical
student soon to be wed. He’s heard of the Canadian on radio
broadcasts.
– You like to throw the beanball, no?
– I led the league.
Whenever a pretty girl is spotted, Paco toots his horn. She is
assigned a number from one to 10, which is then averaged out to much
laughter and swigs from a bottle the Mexican keeps under the seat.
Halfway to the coast, Paco stops for a siesta. Witherspoon opts for
a dip in the river running parallel to the road. Young housewives,
their laundry spread out to dry on its grassy banks, are intrigued by
the stranger’s tangerine hair and cornflake freckles. He strips and
dashes into the current. The giggling voyeurs float bars of soap
downstream inside empty juice cartons.
– Norteamericano, he hears them say. El hombre muy blanco.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562874

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0980897971

Small Change

excerpt

I watched in horror as her skirt darkened and one fat drop after another fell to the wood floor and trickled lazily into a pool between my desk and hers. I prayed to the Virgin Mary. Please don’t let anyone see. But I was not overly hopeful.
Sister Miranda enjoyed patrolling the aisles during our enforced siestas, and, before long, the toe of her high-topped black nun’s boot came smack down into the middle of the puddle and it splashed a little, and she recoiled as though she had stepped on a viper and just like that something clicked in her head and she smiled and began to talk in a voice that sounded a lot like Father Brackendorf would sound if he’d suddenly put on forty pounds. It was a long speech about growing up and self control and the rebellious nature of all flesh.
Rita kept hugging her arms and peeing softly through her clothes.
Blackie’s face got redder and redder. Then it relaxed into the face of a nasty child.
“Rita peed her pa-aants. Rita peed her pa-aants,” she chanted. Joey and Skinhead popped up from their desks. Then some of the less adventurous kids began to test the sleep and silence rule too. Soon the whole class picked up the beat, saying those words over and over, louder and louder, breaking into little bursts of nearly hysterical laughter. Sister Miranda conducted the uproar, waving the yardstick around and slashing it through the air like a machete on the word “paants.”
Rita was beside herself. She cried, then she screamed, and kicked at the desk, but the more tormented she became, the more everybody chanted and laughed.
That’s when I climbed up on the desk and pulled the yardstick out of Blackie’s pudgy fist and shouted right in her face, my useless glasses bobbling on my nose.
“Jesus will get you for this. He doesn’t want us to laugh at this poor girl. It’s all your fault, you fat waddle head. God made us have to pee and you have to let us.”
Well, Rita cried even harder, and Blackie Miranda laughed like someone had tickled her ribs, and the whole class roared, and pounded their desks, and started a new chant: “Georgie lo-oves Rita, Georgie lo-oves Rita,” and the voice with which I should have roared against their unchristian behaviour stuck in my throat because what they said was true, and my face burned and Sister Miranda wouldn’t let her go…

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763157