“Slow Time Chez Jimmy” by Stephen Whittaker (2022)
RISE AND MAKE YOUR BED by Will Mountain Cox
Early on Thanksgiving morning, 2018, Jean-Pierre Bely, forty-five, woke in shock to an ever-familiar stiffness, that kind of stiffness, the kind the youngest boys take for granted. It was the stiffness Jean-Pierre had on previous occasion prayed for, but a stiffness, nonetheless, he had not been blessed with—for reasons neither discussed nor explored with his wife, Anne-Marie Bely—on even a single morning for the last fifteen years. A decade and a half of the stiffness absent from his one, single, otherwise happy existence. An existence that did not need more questioning. Not by J.P. Bely. So it was a stiffness then, as such, that J.P. Bely had, during his morning countings of his blessings, convinced himself to be thankful for having nearly forgotten, nearly forgetting what had and had not been taken from him.
For the first few months, when the absence began, J.P. had passed many a night sleeplessly, inconsolable, unconsoled by his peacefully dormant Anne-Marie, a caring and beautiful wife, a wife who had not once in those fifteen years complained. If anything, she had seemed happier; she was instantly more at ease. At thirty, only a year into the absence, the curl in Anne-Marie’s hair had released and the color went corn-like in the vein of a contented retiree, a change that had taken place seemingly overnight, at least as J.P. remembered it. It felt to J.P. as if the absence had confirmed in Anne-Marie that the socially assumed width and length to which true love should take to over time, in monogamous relationships, had forever gone mismeasured. That this love, their love, their love alone and absent of unseemliness, was finally now correctly sized.
There were moments—of course there were moments—when a warm breeze would blow across the back of the couple’s collective neck while they as a team tended to their new back garden. A garden then used for hiding. For burying over such feelings. But a garden, nonetheless, in which passed moments when Anne-Marie would find herself on her knees, tending the spring pea shoots trained against the fresh pine fence, watching J.P., shirtless in his overalls, broad in his back muscles, hoeing out a new bed for Russets, while at the same time J.P. watched Anne-Marie in her jean-shorts, shorter than short when she bent over and put her naked knees in the dewy compost. Moments when each urged hard enough to set down their tools and, without doing anything foolish enough to upset their new found equilibrium, would take themselves to their respective places for cooling out: J.P. to the shed next to the corn bed for a beer from the cooler and Anne-Marie to the guest bedroom, which doubled as her studio for Bikram yoga, for a change into something less restrictive.
It was, simply put, that J.P. and Anne-Marie fought less after the absence. Her original threats of leaving him during the wooing phase two decades prior, which continued to crop up from time to time in the relationship’s adolescent-phase, finally disappeared for good. And the trying times of drinking and plate smashing, in the drawn out growing-pain, teenage-phase of their marriage seemed to finally fade away. This narrative of relief was, at least, how J.P. Bely consoled himself.
Without it, they were still very happy. That was a mantra J.P. could repeat. And, eventually, Anne-Marie’s clear and irrefutable happiness was how J.P. got himself back to sleeping. Fourteen and one third years a decent sleeper.
Awake now, again, alive, reminded, J.P almost couldn’t bring himself to look.
But of course he looked. J.P. pulled back the comforter and saw.
2003 was a long way off. That cold winter, J.P. had buried the little pieces of the Columbia that had fallen across his East Texas lawn just in case anyone came looking for them, or worse, in case they were tinged with the blood, or worse, the last dying tears of those unfortunate spacemen and spacewomen. He’d buried the pieces where they’d fallen, in the yard, next to the yet-locked-up shed, running in a relative line away from his poplars . And then, a few months later, he’d planted seven rows of Rainbow Corn over the top of the pieces, where the grass had grown back differently, one row for each of the astronauts, patriots as they were.
That Thanksgiving, 2003, J.P. had served said corn to his in-laws without telling them of the crop’s unique fertilizer. American heroes, in the American harvest, on the American holiday. There would be no wasting of such a symmetrical symbol. The fateful triangle was nearly Masonic in its Americana. J.P. had watched, in a state of grace, the American beauty of those Rainbow cobs chewed through by his in-laws’ American mouths, pieces of the lapis, sapphire, and peridot kernels getting stuck in their fluoridated American molars.
That night, all those years ago, after Anne-Marie’s family had left, J.P. and Anne-Marie had sat up in bed together, holding one another, taking turns drafting off all the things they were thankful for; a part of the Thanksgiving tradition Anne-Marie’s family refused to partake in. J.P. chose our home. Anne-Marie chose our life. J.P. chose our yard. Anne-Marie chose our bed. J.P. chose our life. Anne-Marie chose ditto. J.P. chose you. Anne-Marie chose it being us and us alone and no one else. Then Anne-Marie said, “you are mine, you, J.P. Bely.” And then the couple made love for a last, life-shattering time.
Out through the slightly tipped venetian blinds fractioning J.P.’s bedroom window, but in 2018 again, in an entirely unexpected future, a plane sailed across the morning sky. Its chemtrail was not unlike the Columbia’s tragic banner, the white line of it through the white slats making an endless string of tally marks against the morning blue, or rather, it drew the deck to some rickety suspension bridge in J.P.’s freshly woken, thoroughly confused soul, a span briefly allowing J.P.’s memories to cross back into the present.
J.P. dragged himself up against his plush Restoration Hardware headboard. He checked, touching it to confirm, since it could more logically have been a ghost.
Sadly, his hand did not pass through it.
“My damn thing,” J.P. screamed in his head so as not to wake his sleeping Anne-Marie. Leave it to Thanksgiving of all days, J.P. thought, to take unfair advantage of his memories.
There was a fine and ungraspable line between memories and remembering. A confusing, blurred line, like the trail of a late-autumn plane, a line a man might live in shame of or die of grief from on opposing sides. The line was just as thin and fizzled as that which divides a curse from a blessing, a mortal sin from a beatific risk. It had taken J.P. fifteen years to learn this wisdom, but he had learned it fully. He did not need the two-hundred level course. Not on Thanksgiving. Christmas maybe. But not on a day where he had so much to do. And not on a day he usually found so much happiness. And especially not on a day with so much thankfulness to convey to the woman he loved, and her alone.
J.P. stood, making sure to keep his back to Anne-Marie. He looked down out the window at the perfectly crisp sunny dawn laying down in his backyard, whose frost was just beginning to unwrinkle into the diamonds of a beautiful dew. Then J.P. looked down at himself. The smooth tent in his checkered Jockeys—it offended him. It offended the sunrise. He couldn’t believe it. He could have cried and he could have hit the damn thing if it wasn’t for his fear of waking his wife.
J.P. held the thing against himself in an awkward hug one might give their mother-in-law, all finger tips and leaning back. J.P. checked over his shoulder to make sure Anne-Marie was still asleep. On Thanksgivings, Anne-Marie slept in later than J.P because her chores were prepared the night before. The pecan and the pumpkin pies were made and in the fridge. The collard greens were pared, washed, and drained. Her potatoes just needed boiling, mashing and whipping together. Anne-Marie was meticulous in making sure Thanksgiving was a day off for her from her work. One where she slept in and caught up on sleep. Just to be safe, J.P. backed his way around the bed like it was the wall to a prison he was escaping from, which it was not, J.P. told himself, it really wasn’t.
J.P., his spine curling, crab-walked silently to the bathroom. In the better light, J.P. assessed it. It was more or less unchanged. If anything, it seemed a little bigger. J.P. exhaled as long as he could manage, as if he could breathe the inflation out of it. Though looking down, he was addressing God, working up a demand for explanations he didn’t feel the need to know. Instead, J.P. simply asked for the exact opposite of that which he’d prayed for fifteen years prior. Then he bent himself over at an angle, which embarrassed him further, nearly prostrate, to relieve himself without making a mess.
“A damn teenager,” J.P. scolded under his breath.
When J.P. was done, the thing faded like it always used to and so he crossed himself, washed, chalked it up to some autumn cross in his synapses, got dressed, and went down to get cooking.
Anne-Marie and J.P.’s kitchen filled J.P. with joy. It had been designed with zones and stations, all to bring a smooth and stable workflow to their cooking, a hobby the couple had thrown themselves into with such fervor and developed with such success that their dinner-party friends argued that calling them home-cooks was doing them a serious disservice.
J.P. breathed in the low light glowing off his marble counters. Memories invaded him of the previous kitchen, before the remodel, in which he and Anne-Marie would heat up the powdered mash potatoes and jiggle out the can-shaped cranberry sauce, bumping into one another, arguing about money or the mental load, sometimes arguing so hard they’d end up going to ground in passion, quickly, before the family arrived.
J.P. shuddered at the thought of who he used to be, a nearly un-American. Powdered mashed potatoes. Who was he fooling? He much preferred the production he was about to undertake. The meticulous planning required to endue raw meat with national tradition. Those were the sort of memories J.P. wanted, the collective, endowed kind. Clean, homemade memories he could share with the Pilgrims and the Pioneers and the rest of his subsequent countrymen. And women, or course.
Hot at the temples, J.P. opened the fridge and shivered as the cold belch of his Sub-Zero frigerator engulfed him. One of the shelves had been removed to allow for the turkey—a twenty-pounder—to rest in dry brine overnight. J.P. took the bird out and set it on the central kitchen island to let it come to temp, patted the condensation dry with paper towels, then checked his watch. Anne-Marie’s family would arrive in four hours, at noon, for dinner; a traditional use of the meal’s appellation that made J.P.’s heart flutter. Dinner. Nuncheon. The main meal, like his granddad might have called it.
Channeling his grandfather’s true-love, J.P. slipped on his grandmother’s frilly kitchen apron, pre-heated the oven, and set to work on the cornbread stuffing, which he did with his own homemade, thyme-infused sausages. At the baking station, J.P. first made the cakey batter, which he ladled into two nine-inch cake trays and set to bake. Then, at the sauté station, J.P. chopped the onions and the celery and set them over medium-high to sweat. J.P. thought he heard Anne-Marie’s footsteps through the sizzling, but when he really listened, he heard nothing. She was still asleep, thank God. She needed the rest, J.P. told himself, comforting something old in him.
When the aromatics had gone translucent, and the cornbread still needed ten minutes, J.P. found himself with nothing to do. First, he hummed Yankee Doodle Dandy. Then, uncontrollably, he began to contemplate where one’s unhappiness went when it died. J.P. wondered if there was a heaven for terrible thoughts, for insults, or for close-fisted slaps across the mouth. Or worse. As in, when you died, and were an angel, could these acts still be remembered? Did the soft clouds of heaven serve as a padded cell for the most sinister recollections? The dark feelings, in life, that were taken out back and self-actualized? These thoughts were not part of J.P.’s normal Thanksgiving to-do list. J.P. wanted nothing to do with them, so he got to work at the washing station, filling up a boiling pot to clean and peel his corn.
Shucking, the thoughts grew bigger. They became mature memories as frustrating as the silks tangled in his fingers: His wife’s face of an evening. Was it summer? What had she said? What had she demanded he do for her? Was that even possible? As a memory, Anne-Marie turned around so J.P. could not see her face and J.P. felt the point of his existence, God’s experiment with individual evolution, gone right the hell out of him. It left him limp. If Anne-Marie hadn’t been so forgiving as to have turned back around, if J.P hadn’t had the strength to change, the strength to do as she said, then he, J.P. Bely, was dead.
A dead man walking. Certainly not a man. An empty shell not worthy of being referred to as ‘ghost’ or even ‘poltergeist.’
There was a moment, a real moment in J.P.’s life, just after the change, that J.P existed as a predestined, sinful statistic with only one thing left for him on his to-do list. He felt the sensorius, the sensorial groan of that old feeling, what could have been, that had forever burned itself across all the walls of his sinuses. That quicklime smell of flameless char. The feeling ran from his ears to his nose to his eyes. It dripped down into his mouth. The charred smell of hellfire choked his nostrils and brought J.P. back to. He looked at his hands, which were shaking, and in them his corn, which this year had come out blood red, with kernels only of ruby, spinel, and carnelian. J.P. set the ear he was holding in the boiling pot and took the cornbread out from the oven. It was burnt on the top, but only slightly. It was salvageable. Proof of God’s forgiveness.
“You’re not done with the stuffing?!” Anne-Marie said, her voice arriving from behind, causing J.P. to jump.
J.P. could feel the time he knew the day so we’ll. He checked his watch to confirm it was 8:49. His wife was in the kitchen forty one minutes too early.
“Morning. Just about. Mixing everything up now,” J.P. said, smiling.
Time, when narrated by his wife’s voice, felt like a pressure along J.P.’s spine. Each minute was a unique combination of textures along his vertebrae, much like he was being played by God the saxophonist. He could feel the three hours and ten minutes until Anne-Marie’s parents, brother and sister-in-law, sister and brother-in-law, and their collective six nieces and nephews arrived loud and hungry; hearty, as J.P. was wont to describe them. That made for three hours to truss and tie the turkey, set it to deep-frying, boil the Rainbow corn, then make the hushpuppies while the turkey was left to rest. Plenty of time. In his lovely kitchen. With his lovely wife.
J.P. went back to shucking the corn.
“I don’t want us to eat late this year J.P.,” Anne-Marie said.
“Don’t worry darling,” J.P. whispered, “this won’t be a repeat of 2004.”
When the corn was husked, J.P. set the cobs to drip dry in the dish rack. Then he took a baking dish from beneath the oven and began mixing up the stuffing in it, crumbling the bread, folding in eggs and butter, sautéing sausages and mashing them into the mix. J.P. performed his tasks in silence, waiting. He looked over his shoulder no less than a hundred times, at Anne-Marie, as she got to work setting the table. J.P. waited for his wife to break the silence. He checked over his shoulder again. During this stage of the preparation, normally, Anne-Marie would sing. Turning back to his stuffing, J.P. wondered where her soundtrack had gone.
Behind him, Anne-Marie took out the cooled pies from the fridge and dropped them on the kitchen island, the tin trays snapping off two shots against the marble in the quiet, cake vapored kitchen. J.P. jumped again and nearly took the Lord’s name.
“Everything ok, Honey?” J.P. asked.
“Yes.”
“You sleep alright?”
“I slept fine.”
“You’re up early is all.”
“I always get up this early on Thanksgiving.”
J.P.’s eyes must have conveyed his disequilibrium.
“Of course,” J.P. said.
“I slept fine, J.P. Where’s my masher?,” Anne-Marie demanded, rustling through the drawers to the side of the oven, where it used to live before the remodel.
Silent in his confusion, J.P. pointed at the wall mounted hooks above the sauté station, to the masher, which had hung there now fifteen years in a row. J.P. looked again at Anne-Marie. Anne-Marie looked out the window, at the yard, towards the shed.
“Everything alri…,” J.P. cut himself off.
“What?!”
“Nothing, Honey,” J.P. whispered, trying to bring the volume back down in the kitchen.
J.P. loaded his ears of corn into a large stock pot beside the sink, took the turkey truss from the side cupboard and got to work stringing up the bird, then mixing up the slurry, and then forming the hushpuppies in his hands. The transubstantiations of national identity would not be delayed from their scheduled arrival, no matter the day’s abnormalities. Not if J.P. had anything to say about it.
Outside, in his backyard, with his turkey and his frying gear laid out on his collapsible plastic picnic table, J.P. got to setting up the deep-fat frying vat on the concrete slab he’d poured in the grass a decade ago, for just such occasions, same day he’d laid the new foundation for the shed, to make it more stable, to cover over the previous foundation that had be laid in a rush.
The morning was perfect, crisp even, in the sun. A breeze played Texas Jazz in the drying leaves of his poplar trees. Precisely measured indents shaped for the fryer’s feet were molded into the concrete slab. J.P. took it all in. The lawn, the sky, the birds circling above him. The slab, under his feet, leveled in self-leveling cement, at a decently safe distance from the house, not too close to the shed, not too close to the trees, not too close to the corn.
J.P. screwed the gas hose from the gas canister onto the vat’s element, then the vat’s element onto the footed foundation. Before pouring his canola oil into the vat pot, J.P. slipped on his outdoor apron, the front pocket preloaded with his yearly Cuban cigar, the single fumigatory indulgence he allowed himself each year, the treat smuggled home for him by his favorite co-worker, Desidero.
While the oil came to heat, J.P. looked on, smoking.
“Stogie,” J.P. said into the breeze.
The cigar tasted of barnyard, Angus beef. J.P. tried to hold on only to the indulgence, but his memories started up again. He remembered Anne-Marie as she had been, the popular waitress at the Chili-Pepper, the Tex-Mex place across the street from his office. He remembered how she’d slid over in her little lace bustier and how J.P. had felt embarrassed and lucky before he’d ever known her name, before he knew that hers, like his, contained a hyphen. J.P. remembered how Anne-Marie spilled one of those enormous, cactus gag-glasses of strawberry margaritas down his back, trying to serve the neighboring table. Anne-Marie was so ashamed and apologetic that J.P. had tipped her fifty bucks to free himself of her guilt, of which she returned thirty, along with her telephone number.
The feelings that followed, when they’d started together, had felt like nothing at all. The absence of feeling for the first time in J.P.’s life. The memories were so sweet they hurt J.P.’s teeth.
An oil bubble popped and hissed in the vat pot and it was time to fry. With the trussed turkey hanging from the hook on the rack, J.P. leveled the lid and got ready to drop. Before he did, he checked through the kitchen window and there was Anne-Marie watching, like she always did, her face sliced up by the open venetian blinds. There she was, to make sure he was being safe.
J.P. winked at her, though she was too far to make it out, and then J.P. bent to drop the turkey. As he did, he felt the stiffness rush back to him, the sensation causing him to almost pirouette in order that he turn himself away from the watching Anne-Marie. Luckily, thankfully, in an awkward jumble of crossing feet and desperate leaning, J.P. collected himself, steadied his hands, and for the first time in his life, dropped the level turkey into the oil from the east, and not the west, of the large frying vat pot. Winded, J.P. checked and triple-checked to make sure the vat pot lid was clipped on tight.
“What was that?” Annie-Marie called from the deck.
“What?”
“What the hell was that J.P.?”
“Nothing.” J.P. screeched, his back still turned to his wife.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just lost my balance.”
“Since when do you lose your balance?”
“I don’t know.”
“What?”
“I don’t know, Honey.”
“You have to be more careful. I’m always telling you to be more careful with that damn thing.”
J.P. untied the tie of his apron at his back and re-tied it at the front, flipping his thing up and synching it against him like a middle-schooler in elasticated gym-shorts. Then he turned around to face Anne-Marie.
“I will be. Sorry, Honey. I promise. From now on,” J.P. shouted, the sounds of the frying turkey making a white-noise around him.
When the turkey was finished frying, J.P. lifted it carefully. The stiffness had dissolved into the fall air, but he’d left the thing tied up in the apron straps just to be safe. J.P. let the turkey drain on a bed of paper towels, then he transferred the bird to the covered serving tray to rest. He dropped the hushpuppies in the fry oil, and when they were good and crispy, he fished them out and set them to cool on the towels. J.P. picked up the butt of his cigar, and re-lit it. It was time for everything to rest, in peace, he hoped. The turkey, the grease, everything. J.P. puffed the cigar back to life and glanced over at the shed, the lock on its door rusted shut.
When his cigar was down to a nub, J.P. snuffed it out against the heel of his boot and double checked the fryer flame was off, then brought his traditions inside with him. It was 11:40. J.P. had his regularly allotted twenty minutes to shower, step into his pleated slacks and put on his cranberry-red Thanksgiving button down, all of which J.P. did, but this year he did so with a fast-beating heart.
The doorbell rang as J.P. descended the stairs, perfectly timed to take the last three steps in stride and confidently swing wide open the front door with a smile. With the noon bell chiming, like clockwork, there they were, the lot of them. The half-score and two again. His inlaws.
Anne-Marie, née Peterson, counted in her retinue two parents, Andrew and Pam; a sister and her husband, Camilla and Tommy; a brother and his wife, Randy and Jan; and six children, three to each couple, between the ages of eleven and fifteen. Andrew and Pam each had round faces and sharp eyes they kept sharpened at all times. Camilla and Jan were women business partners and strode around J.P.’s house arm-in-arm like minor aristocracy. Randy and Tommy could have been twins, what with their matching blond, high-and-tight flat tops, striped golfing polos, and severe barrel chestedness. Tommy had even gone so far as to stitch a ‘Peterson’ onto his last name, Clark, with his own hyphen. The six children—Drew II, Katie, Stacy, Cassy, Rod and Brad—were referred to by J.P. and Anne-Marie as the ‘Children of the Corn’; a title bestowed on them by Anne-Marie, and not by J.P., though he endorsed it with his laughter. J.P. loved that his wife hated her family.
The fleet filed in, past him, the most affectionate among them only laying a few finger tips on J.P.’s shoulder as if dusting off a mantle.
In the kitchen, J.P. served the women their Chardonnay and the men their Miller Genuines, while in the dining room, Anne-Marie fussed with the table dressing. The Peterson’s feasted efficiently. By three o’clock, they would be fed, watered and out of J.P.’s life for another year. Armed with such a comforting thought, J.P. regaled the men with stories of his yearly fishing trip, which they listened to suspiciously, not believing a word he said. J.P. cooed over the women with compliments for their outfits, which they ignored, only holding out their glasses for Chardonnay refills. The kids J.P. let loose in the yard, only slightly sure the fry oil would have cooled completely in the late fall air. From time to time he checked in on them from the back deck to make sure they were not trodding on the freshly composted corn beds or trying to open the shed. But even if they made a mess, it didn’t matter, he would pressure-wash the concrete patch and them in turn. All the better, J.P. laughed. The day was, finally, beginning to wash over J.P. with its normality, in repetition, the sameness, the reliability of the good and bad, the pleasure and the pains of a good lived life. The relief tradition gives to one’s mistakes.
Annie-Marie called from the dining-room that dinner was served and J.P. called the kids in from the back. The family sat, they held hands, and Andrew Peterson began his annual grace against which J.P. no longer needed to steady himself. As it did every year since the first of his grandchildren were born, Andrew’s grace stuck its landing with appreciations, by name, for each of his second-generation progeny, the list of grandchildren spoken alongside not so subtle glances at J.P. and grunts of ‘Oorah’ from Tommy and Randy, though neither were Marines. When the grace was done, J.P. let out a smooth and honest amen and began to serve.
“Where’s the damn corn?” Andrew asked J.P., accusatory, at the head of the table, where J.P. knew Andrew felt he himself should be sitting instead.
“Hmm?” J.P. said, still luxuriating in his amen.
“Where’s the corn J.P.?” Anne-Marie asked, a tone in her voice that, like the tone in her earlier hunt for the potato masher, was one that had faded out of his wife’s repertoire of frustrated tones long ago.
J.P. looked at his wife in silence, trying to understand, then around at the table for the Rainbow Corn which was, it was true, notably absent.
“It must have slipped my mind,” he said, trying to stay calm.
“Slipped your mind?” Anne-Marie asked.
“Don’t worry, you all start and I’ll go boil them up.”
J.P. stood to leave for the kitchen but as he stood, found himself caught on the underside lip of the dining table. He looked down and, to J.P.’s horror, found the impediment was a bulge in his pleated slacks. J.P. sat right down.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, Honey. Do we really need the corn? We have so much food already.”
“Of course we need the corn, J.P.”
J.P. scanned the room. The entire family was watching him, silently. He looked back at Anne-Marie whose blond hair was so much like the rest of her family’s.
“It’s only that the crop came out odd this year.”
“Odd?” Andrew asked.
“Yeah, odd.”
“Jesus, J.P., I’ll do it then,” Ann-Marie said.
And Anne-Marie was up and out, into the kitchen.
“Odd how?” Andrew asked.
“The kernels came out red this year.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Pam asked, speaking for the first time all day.
“It’s just not normal. They’ve never looked like that before. I think it might be a mold” J.P. said, a slight whimper in his voice he was not used to and which he couldn’t seem to control.
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Tommy interjected.
“I’m sure it’s fine,” Randy added, “We love your corn. We’re always saying it’s the best part about you.”
“Randy!” Jan snorted.
“Cheers to that,” Drew II cut in with a coy smirk on his face and J.P.’s wine glass raised for a toast in his hand.
“Drop that wine glass buster,” Camilla added, laughing, without an ounce of menace in her voice.
Thanks to the boiling-water faucet J.P. had added over the sauté station, Anne-Marie was back with the boiled corn in less than ten minutes, though the look on her face aged her ten years, the corn-yellow of her hair appearing to J.P. clear white. The rest of the food was still warm. J.P. thanked God for the boiling-water faucet, but at that point the meal became a blur to him, the novelty of his forgetfulness jamming up his taste buds and clouding his eyes.
Through the blur he could see the blood-red corn sliding back and forth across his inlaw’s twelve bloodthirsty mouths, blood borne in the gaps of their red-stained gums, each picking at the drops caught in their teeth. J.P. tried to lift his cob and it weighed a thousand pounds. He left it untouched on his plate. He checked his lap. The blood had gone out of him. There was that to be thankful for too, at least. But no matter how hard J.P. squinted, he could only see his dining mates as they were fifteen years earlier, before the absence. The parents, just as cold but with sharper features. The siblings, spry twenty somethings, still mean but without their wrinkles. The children disappeared altogether, absent, cruel gametes yet to come together. A different time, with less about it, but a fuller time.
Then, a new fantasy: J.P. watched himself from above, standing up while the Petersons chatted amongst themselves. In his mind, J.P. watched as he himself—it was surely him, fifteen years younger and hard to recognize—walked out to the yard and turned the fry oil in the vat pot to high, smoking the butt of his stogie, which had miraculously regrown, the tobacco and the breeze cleaning out his cobwebs. J.P. set to work with his wife’s pea trowel digging up the pieces of the fated spaceship which, thanks to the roots of his democratic corn, had been woven back together into a fully functional, fully reassembled RCC wing-panel. A wing-panel that would not fail. A wing panel which J.P. Bely held, cackling, before heaving it skyward into the Nacogdoches night where it might fly, backwards in time, turning and turning, climbing higher and higher, through the troposphere and the stratosphere, the mesosphere and the thermosphere, affixing itself like an incredible receivers catch, fifteen years prior, to the Columbia’s damaged left wing as it began its reentry, high over the American sky. The sky full of Americans yet to be blown to pieces. Brave Americans saved. And in his celebration, fists raised and jumping, J.P. imagined himself not-so-accidentally tipping over the hot vat pot with his big old disgusting thing, west to east, in the direction of his house, a streak of oil running towards the house like some absolutely Looney cartoon, the fire jetting across the spill trail, the flames overtaking his house, burning his house full of in-laws to the ground, house full of his memories, claiming the lives of Andrew and Pam, Randy and Jan, Camilla and Tommy, and that damn Drew II, paying fate back for the seven astronaut lives he’d just saved, a debt J.P. owed to save himself. His wife could survive. And the rest of the children too. They were only half bad. A terrible accident, like so many a fried turkey failures. A Thanksgiving tragedy he could be thankful for.
“J.P.”
“J.P.!” Anne-Marie was nearly screaming when J.P. came to, “everyone’s leaving.”
“What?”
“Everyone’s taking off.”
J.P. checked his watch without having to. It was 2:55, he knew. J.P. looked up and the family were all zipping up their coats, waiving to J.P. without smiling. Suddenly he wanted them to stay. A desire whose source J.P. would never know was begging inside his brain for them to reminisce over their first Thanksgiving together, decades ago, before anything changed for the worse or better. J.P. wanted to bloviate. He wanted to myth-make like their first Thanksgiving had, in some alternate history, saved Anne-Marie’s family from starving.
“How what about we…” J.P. started, but the family’s chorus of “see ya, J.P.” drowned him out. They were out the door, and in their sudden absence, the holiday in J.P.’s heart expired right there in the foyer of his lovely home. He turned to see his wife, one hand on her hip, the other on her stress-crumpled brow.
“What the hell is up with you today?” Anne-Marie asked.
“What?”
“First the late start? Then the turkey? Then the corn?”
“You got up early yourself?”
“What has that got to do with it?”
“You weren’t yourself either.”
“J.P., I get up at that time every Thanksgiving. You know that.”
“No you don’t. You always wake up at 9:30.”
“8:30, J.P.”
“9:30.”
“Jesus Christ!”
J.P. withered.
“I’m going to bed,” Anne-Marie said, in a double note, the glottal sound of having won woven up with an octave of defeat.
J.P. looked at the dishes still laying on the table. Never in their life together had Anne-Marie gone to bed without clearing up.
“It’s only three.”
“And?!”
“What about the…,” J.P. called after her.
“What about the what, J.P.,” Anne-Marie responded, halfway up the stairs, slamming her fist against the wall.
“Nothing. Sorry, Honey. Nevermind.”
J.P. stacked up the dishes in the dining room and unstacked them in the kitchen, loading them into the Whirlpool. He took the table cloth up by the corners, shook it out over the side of the deck, then set it to wash in the laundry. He loaded the tupperwares with leftovers, which he named and dated on pieces of label tape and placed in the frigerator. Then J.P. scoured the pans and scrubbed the surfaces. Dried and put everything back in its place. He worked fast, a sweat breaking at his temples and down his back, a stain going grape in the middle of his cranberry shirt.
When the oven had been decrumbed and the backsplash tiles had been whipped of their grease, J.P. looked out over his perfect kitchen. He found himself very afraid. In his terror, J.P. went to the fridge, took out the leftovers and walked them out through the sliding doors to the back deck. The leftovers were still warm, so J.P. popped the lids to let them cool, the scent of them lightly filling the East Texas evening, arranging the tupperwares so they balanced on the deck’s banister, in conscious order, from left to right: turkey, potatoes, stuffing, gravy, corn, greens, cranberry and pie; the order which you would arrange the food on a plate, J.P determined. This would be a new tradition, J.P. decided, right then and there. And before he could begin to reminisce, J.P. rushed back inside, slammed the sliding door behind him, flicked off the lights and went upstairs.
Anne-Marie has twisted the blinds shut and gotten into bed without removing her gravy-stained blouse. For an afternoon, it is almost pitch black in the room. The black of the room is only diffused by the thirty-nine paper cuts of light slicing through the gaps in the forty, burnished oak blind slats. One cut for every year of Anne-Marie’s life. One blind for every mistake.
Anne-Marie tells herself that it will all be ok. That J.P. will do the cleaning and then he will sit down in his chair to watch the Detroit game on replay: same as every year. She has hours before her husband will climb the stairs. Yet still the fear invades her. And the shame. And the guilt.
In the darkness, Anne-Marie can not make out the two blood stains on the ceiling. Two redundant apostrophes. The eulogy to two mosquitos J.P. crushed the summer prior so that Anne-Marie could sleep, J.P. bouncing on their bed to get them. “Get ‘em, get ‘em,” Anne-Marie had cackled. One stain beside its partner stain. It had been a feat of agility, the jumping and the reaching and it had impressed her then. But the blood stains, which they could not seem to scrub away, now feel like fractals of an omen. And for who? Anne-Marie begins breathing faster.
Anne-Marie has seen J.P. get up this morning, feigning sleep like she has for years now. Through paper cut thin gaps in her eyelids, Anne-Marie has seen what J.P. is hiding. And now the terror of it is making her sweat. She can smell herself, the stress in her sweat. The scent she can’t stand. Her breathing is getting away from her. With each breath, the smell. With each smell, the reminder. Anne-Marie listens. J.P. is only just loading the dishwasher. She tries to calm. She has all the time in the world. She gets up.
In the bathroom, in the dark, Anne-Marie showers. She soaps and shampoos. She body scrubs and rose waters. The water pressure of the PowerPulse setting to her adjustable shower head feels stronger than usual. The strength is calming. She tells herself to luxuriate. Then Anne-Marie shaves, first her legs, then her armpits, then her arms. Then Anne-Marie takes up a clump of the frizzy, straw like hair on her head, the razor in her hand, but ultimately decides against it.
Out of the shower, Anne-Marie listens while she dries. She can hear J.P. fumbling with the tupperware. Dry, Anne-Marie steps back into her Thanksgiving clothes, gets back into her bed. The bed is California King. Her and J.P. sleep with a Pacific Ocean between them. And yet, now the divide seems the width of a razor. Anne-Marie’s breath, faster still, is again her conscious undoing.
Back in the shower, the water is hotter than before. The soap stings. Her skin has nothing left to shave. Anne-Marie steps out of the shower. Anne-Marie dries while J.P. clatters the pans. Anne-Marie puts on her clothes, so full of thanks, and promptly gets back into bed. This time she is calmer. Definitely. She breathes. Anne-Marie feels. There is something warm and stinging wet leaking across both her shins, spreading, stinging, against both her forearms. No matter. The sheets are cranberry red.
Annie-Marie runs her fingers against the Egyptian cotton and remembers how good it used to feel to argue. When they met, when J.P. didn’t eat breakfast. She used to scold him for it. She used to surprise him in bed with a couple of eggs. At first they fought about it. He said they made him sick and so the eggs would go wasted. And then, all of a sudden, he decided to hold his nose and make her feed him, laughing, as if the eggs were grapes. The fun had gone out of it for her, but she kept up the act. J.P. needed his strength.
The lines of light in the blinds are fading. Anne-Marie prepares herself to sleep or at least to convincingly fake it. She wants no memory of the previous fourteen years and three months invading her dreams or tingeing her obsessions. Fear exists only in comparisons. That is a mantra Anne-Marie can hold onto. That is a placebo she can take for a sleeping pill. Anne-Marie fades. A breeze passes through the house, lifting the blinds in the bedroom, tapping them clumsily against the glass. Anne-Marie is gone. Asleep for a comforting moment. She doesn’t notice. But when the muffled rub of carpeted steps break the silence, she jumps. Anne-Marie is awake but cannot move her arms or legs. Anne-Marie is paralyzed and J.P. is climbing the stairs.
J.P. is dark in the darkness, leaning over her. Anne-Marie controls her breathing. She listens as he takes off his clothes. She can hear that he is naked. Anne-Marie needs no light to recognize the sound of her husband’s unwrapped thighs. She waits, shaking. But J.P. does not approach her. He showers. He dries. He fishes around in the hamper for his pajamas.
When J.P. lies down, his weight doesn’t even make a ripple on Anne-Marie’s side of the bed.
“What?” he asks, concerned.
Anne-Marie realizes she is begging in her half-sleep. Begging like she’s snoring. She flushes. If there had been a light on to see with, Anne-Marie’s cheeks would have been in crimson blush. The begging does not stop, for it is a declaration in somniloquy. Nevertheless, Anne-Marie wants to see what J.P. will do.
“I love you,” J.P. finally says, resting his head on his pillow and quickly falling asleep.
The time is only five in the evening. And for that, Anne-Marie hates him. Him. The absolute him of him.
And where was I this entire time, you ask? But of course, I was with her in the shed. The entire Her of her. She, who should have been fifteen. And we could smell the democratic smell of the food but we could not taste it. We could taste the tradition, but couldn’t live it. And we could live the lost time, but we could not have it back. And to make it up to her, for that, I gave the girl her first cocktail. Not a Brandy Smash or a Whiskey Skin, but a mix of Locked-Up Emily and Meadow-Mouse Mary, my little daughter angels of being inside and outside, with poetry, simultaneous. And the cocktail sounded just like this:
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
With narrow, probing, eyes –
I wonder if It weighs like Mine –
Or has an Easier size.
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
I measure every Grief I meet
the long tapers
of cattails,
I wonder if it hurts to live –
no matter what its
name is
And if They have to try –
And whether – could They choose between –
It would not be – to die –
nameless now.
I wonder if when Years have piled –
Some Thousands – on the Harm –
That hurt them early – such a lapse
Could give them any Balm –
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
Death – is but one – and comes but once –
And only nails the eyes –
in my lifetime
Enlightened to a larger Pain –
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
To note the fashions – of the Cross –
And how they’re mostly worn –
Still fascinated to presume
That Some – are like my own –
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
A sort they call “Despair” –
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
The Grieved – are many – I am told –
There is the various Cause –
to hold it
against your bones knowing
And though I may not guess the kind –
Correctly – yet to me
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.
At length, renew their smile –
An imitation of a Light
That has so little Oil –
(9/19/24)
Will Mountain Cox is the author of the novel Roundabout (Relegation Books, 2023). His writing has appeared in Rose Books Hotline, Lit Hub, Spectra Poets, Forever Magazine, and was recently longlisted for the Desperate Literature Prize for Short Fiction. He is from Portland, Oregon and lives in Paris, France. “Rise and Make Your Bed” is from a new novel, in progress.