Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

MY LIFE

“My life? Hell, you don’t want to hear about my life. Jesus, my throat is dry…

A drink? Well, since you’re buying, and it’s a hot day, sure. Why not. Just a little one.

Maybe a beer. And a whiskey chaser. It’s good to drink, on a hot day. Only

Problem with drinking is it makes me remember. And sometimes I don’t want

To remember. I mean, my mom: there was a woman. I never knew her as a woman

But I seen photographs of her, before the operation. She said I needed a father,

And seeing my own father had dumped her after he regained his eyesight (following

A blow on the head from a Burmese cat, which jumped from a penthouse apartment window and fell

Thirty stories, miraculously striking my father in exactly the right place to restore his sight,

And then landing uninjured on the sidewalk, proving it’s true what they say about

Cats always landing on their feet) claiming he had thought he was marrying her twin sister

Who looked completely different, but had, through a miracle of biology, exactly the same voice

Which was why the judge granted the divorce, closed his eyes and even he couldn’t tell them apart.

So my father walked out a free man, and on the way from the court he was struck on the head

By detritus falling from the sky; there was folks said it was lavatorial waste from a plane

Though chemical examination revealed traces of elements unknown to science, and it said

In the papers that the fecal matter contained alien proteins, but then it was hushed up.

They took my father’s body away for safekeeping. The government gave us a receipt

Though in a week it faded, I guess that it was something in the ink, but that’s another story.

So then my mom announced I needed a man around the house and it was going to be her,

And she worked a deal with that doctor so when the two of them won the Underwater Tango contest

He agreed to change her sex for nothing. Growing up I called her Dad, and knew none of this.

Nothing else interesting has ever happened to me. Another drink?

Well, just to keep you company maybe, another beer, and don’t forget the whiskey,

Hey, make it a double. It isn’t that I drink, but it’s a hot day, and even when you’re

Not a drinking man… You know,

It was just such a day as this my wife dissolved. I’d read about the people who blew up,

Spontaneous combustion, that’s the words. But Mary-Lou-that was my wife’s name,

We met the day she came out of her coma, seventy years asleep and hadn’t aged a day,

It’s scary what ball-lightning can do. And all the people on that submarine,

Like Mary-Lou, they all were froze in time, and after we were wed she’d visit them,

Sit by their bedsides, watch them while they slept. I drove a truck, back then.

And life was good. She coped well with the missing seven decades, and me, I like to think that if

The dishwasher had not been haunted-well, possessed, I guess, would be more accurate-

She’d still be here today. It preyed upon her mind, and the only exorcist that we could get

Turned out to be a midget from Utrecht and actually not a priest at all,

For all he had a candle, bell, and book. And by coincidence, the very day my wife,

All haunted by the washer, deliquesced-went liquid in our bed-my truck was stole.

That was when I left the States to travel round the world.

And life’s been dull as ditchwater since then. Except…but no, my mind is going blank.

My memory’s been swallowed by the heat. Another drink? Well, sure…”