Tenement

Prelude, to be read along with "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" by The Smiths

The broken music sounding the ears of her mother, who howled daily in some kind of martyr insanity. Her father had made a banal pilgrimage to Home Depot to look at the gardening section, where he asked many questions about seasonality, fertilizer, and placement in relation to the sun (If you put the plant to the Northeast, where light comes in the morning, but there is not a single window to the west, where the afternoon light comes streaming in, how do you think it would keep up? I don't mean live, if it will Survive, 'cause it will Survive, I just mean how will it keep up). Her brother was out stomping around the undeveloped fields, looking for plastic pipes to play seebee-seebee with. Therefore: she was alone.

As the light darkened, Catherine took another piece of chicken from the refrigerator. It was dry in her mouth, but still tasty, cilantro-laced as it was. She had changed the track that had been playing the broken music on her mother's CD player. She had considered leaving it be, knowing that her mother would not know the difference, but her conscience denied her this cruelty. To abuse an idiot with impunity was a basic privilege of being human and being sane, denied to Catherine, who took delight in that animal privilege instead - in eating a cold piece of chicken.

Working Heart, to be read along with "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out"

"Life hurts," someone said on the television. "Yea, it does," I replied. "What's there to be done about it?" The television continued to blabble, and changed into an image of tanks exploding. "Yes, that's where I'll never be."

My father walked in the house like some big bear - "Hey, kiddo. What're you doing?"

"Nothing"

"Oh, yeah?" and he walked to deposit his coat into the cardboard box near the staircase kept for the purpose.

"How was Home Depot?"

"Oh great youknow. Met a lot of people there. Got a couple of Hydrangeas. Nice, they're nice flowers."

"Cool, dad."

"Yeah, it was pretty cool. Haha. I think I like the stores in this place. Real friendly people, youknow."

"Yeah."

He was over at the refrigerator by now, opening it and taking out the chicken. No hesitation on his part.

"Do you think I can go on a date later tonight?"

Dad looked up from his meat, wide-eyed. "Oh, ah, yeah sure honey. Uh, is he going to come here?"

"No." (Heteronormative assumptions made by such a man as my father)

"Oh okay. Yeah sure. Yeah, uh, do you need any money?"

I sincerely did not know the answer to this question.

"Um, I have like 10 dollars."

"Yeah, well ah, here," and he walked over to the cardboard box by the door to get his wallet from his coat.

I waited upon the couch, like a bird. There's a certain providence in the fall of a sparrow... So said the Danish Prince, Hamlet, minutes before he died.

I stepped down from my perch when my dad returned and stood to meet him. He approached, holding out to me, printed on a green piece of paper, that otherwise loathsome face of President Jackson, the Indian queller.

"Thank you."

"Hey youknow as long as you have a good time, as long as you have fun."

We will be singing upon the bears that move up and down by a mechanism that comes alive for fifty seconds every time a quarter is dropped in the slot, indiscriminate as to whether the quarter was dropped by a bald fatso nearing fifty or a timid boy ladled along by a timid mother to try the thing that beckons him in a foreign tongue to ride ride hop aboard, those bears and horses and race cars that I cried once to look upon when I was eleven years old because they represented to me the greatest poverty, the pleasure not simple enough to be inoffensive, the intent and purpose so ambiguous as to cast shame on the parent who placates the child and gives him an excuse to be happy when no excuse was needed before the boredom of marching through horribly-fluorescent grocery store aisles shuddered him; we will sing upon the boars and elephants, learning to laugh, slowly so, but learning still.

I said nothing of this. I only trailed my eyes across his face and accepted the green paper into my hand where it crackled first and crackled again as it ventured into my pocket.