pg 48

so i followed him in his 35 km/hr car. my legs at that point were tiny. i didn’t go fast but the town i grew up in looks like saskatchewan which is to say it was flat. poor saskatewan i say. i also say that because it was flat i could see his car turn into the church parking lot. i thought maybe he wanted to go pray at night. we always had to say prayers before bed. i routinely wished for a teenage mutant ninja turtles toy truck. it never came. how do you expect me to believe in you if you don’t scratch my back. selfish. but i still associate prayers with nighttime and prayers with church unlike now when i associate prayers with football. because of my neighbor who used to buy a new pigskin before every big game he had bet on and would take that new pigskin out into his backyard before the one o’clock game and beat it to death with a rake/fists/teeth/elbows. one day, over the fence i heard murder noises, self punishment noises, and couldn’t resist. i looked over the fence. he was at the elbow stage at this point. i was surprised, to see a grown man wrestling, assaulting, a football. i couldn’t say anything but what? he said sacrifice? i said why was that a question. he said i don’t know? i said why was that a question. he said, we could do this all day, there’s football on.

when i die you’re going to think about playing organ music while i walk down dungen steps into a dungen. the organ music will be eerie. not, i repeat, not joyous. even if something happened between us to make you feel joy by my death. even if i died at the hands of an organ. even if i was skydiving and my parachute didn’t open so i fell to earth and through a stained glass skylight of a church and impaled myself on an organ. even if you later in life walked in on me taking pictures of your parents while they were sleeping and i was wearing headphones and you got so mad you ripped them out of my ears and could softly hear organ sounds while you beat me to death. you have to think of an organ.

i think the reason my father left us alone, abandoned if you will (i don’t like that word though, makes it sound like he left us in a shack by the water and it was windy, he knowing full well how much we hated the wind and hated being left alone in spooky shacks), was because i never went with him to dust the organ. he never asked me to join and i never offered to come. but that was because he never asked me. he never even told me, or us (unless he told you, did he tell you?) he was going to dust organs. i had to follow him. i had to go into the garage and get my bike from out under your bike and then start after him in the car. thankfully he never drove above 35 km/hr. remember that? why he did that? every time we asked he had a different reason. sometimes when i’m lying awake at night i still wonder why. sometimes when i’m breaking the ice i ask that as a hypothetical. it’s not a regular question to ask. would you rather have sex with a donkey and have nobody find out or choose not to have sex with a donkey but everyone for the rest of your life will be 100% convinced you did? that kind of question. people wonder why i would ask about possible reasons to never drive above 35km/hr. so they ask me why i asked them that question. i then ask them to answer my question and in turn will answer theirs. this can be a good and bad mood. depending on the people of course. if it’s a woman and i ultimatum (feels like a verb this time huh) i smile and twinkle eyes and if they go back then let the flirting begin. if a dude, and they question it, it’s usually a bad conversation that follows. when they answer (someone’s answer was schizophenia, another weak feet) and it’s my turn i say oh i knew someone who did that but they wouldn’t tell me why. i never say it was my father.

started running. this morning. ran through the park, through the trees at the end of the park. stopped to catch breath. looked down. found a coin. the coin was new. it wasn’t a canadian coin, it wasn’t an american coin. it was a coin with grandma on it. or a woman who looked like grandma. which was strange. grandma used to like coins. actually come to think of it, coins killed grandma. not with a knife or anything like that. they lit her on fire instead. but the coin still looked a lot like grandma. whoops. the coin had a portrait and the woman in that portrait looked a lot like grandma. the portraits nose was different. it crooked to the right. grandma’s nose crooked to the left. when back home, put the coin up to the mirror. maybe it was grandma and the reflection was where grandma really was. she lived in the space between mirrors and coins. what would happen if grandma did live in the space between coins and mirrors. would a contraption have to be set up, something to hold the coin up all the time? and if that worked, would entertainment have to be put around the space between the mirror and the coin so that grandma would have something to do while she waited to stop being unstuck. but no, didn’t see grandma in the space between. grandma must really be dead in that case. didn’t know it until realized it but that was probably the last chance that grandma wasn’t actually murdered and still lived a life on earth. maybe she was in heaven. a heaven where  there were no coins, or a heaven where there were only coins. grandma never did have a very good memory. there was that time she forgot she was on the bus. she was sitting at the back of the bus. this was when didn’t want to be seen with her so sat in another part of the bus. grandma got up. looked around. checked her watch. started walking to the front of the bus and kept walking until she ran into the coin machine at the front. the bus driver said what the hell lady. grandma said don’t say hell. the busdriver felt bashful, looked back at the road. blushed. this put the bus driver’s question on hold. he forgot temporarily. then he remembered and rephrased. why did you do that? she said i forgot i was on the bus. the bus driver didn’t know what to say. got off the bus. it was the stop. getting off the bus right in front of church right before you walk into church makes church feel cheap. well at least church feels cheap for once instead of making to feel cheap. although that has more to do with mr devlar when he collects offereing. how do you know why i didn’t contribute? maybe all the money got spent buying brail bibles.

the hot chocolate she had wasn’t stolen, it was perfect. follow this hot tip: milk first, then powder, then water. follow these directions. why wasn’t it written on the side of the hot chocolate can then? did it taste better as a secret? did being told in passing, as the conclusion to a long, drawn out conversation by the water hose, make it better than a recipe to the can. this she wondered while bending down to scratch one of the many wasp stings currently riddled all over her legs. fuck. when those wasps get angry it’s a hatred more pure than nothing that came to amelia’s mind trying to find examples of pure emotion in her own life. they don’t let go. water is all that stops them. so then who to thank for the quasi erotic hose down doled out by one of the other temps when she came running across the back hill of the cemetery where they worked. there she stood, swatting til death, while being soaked through by the hose. in this time, another temp left his mower to come watch in the fun, all amelia hearing as she made sure they were all dead, was the slightest mumble of wet t-shirts. the sound of the chuckle rising in her emotion of the purest quality. pure to a pitchblack  perfect tune. pure enough to substitue the hatred of the mumble for her own smile. a connection with her wasp merceneries. oh at last. this day was bad to its core. charming in its attempts to hide the fact but nothing more than noticing a sting to her legs to realize its true face.

why would someone jab a stick into the hole at the base of a grave? amelia didn’t see the sense of it. obviously not decorative. it was a dead stick, in a hole that was only there because tombstones are heavy enough to drive the earth down, creating cracks and mysterious holes. she figured it’d been put there by one of the countless number of teenagers who drove through each day,  the perfect morbid setting for a stoned vacation from second period. so she ran over it. with her lawn mower. blades so powerful that the cut of a stick in the ground resonated down the hill, past the large black cemetery gates, continued up the street and into the high school parking lot. a learned cut, a reaching cut, a wise cut that could find the smoke filled cars and fleshy masochistic tires and really lay it home.

now she waited in the lunch room for the stinging to go down. she didn’t need to, it wasn’t like she hadn’t been stung before, but her boss insisted that 18 individual stings was enough to merrit a free half hour break. she knew she got it because of her positon. just last week when kyle fell out the back of the (slowly) moving truck and got the wind knocked out of him, all under the watch of a looming brooks, he got a not so gentle but gentle kick to the legs and told to get his ass back to work.