7  

She still says they shouldn’t be allowed to have babies. The rare thing Norma's 98 year old brain still clings to. Has never changed its mind on. Remembers with perfect clarity whenever her grandson shows a picture of his half-brother. All the dwarves he now has clinging to his legs.  

“This is real hillbilly stuff, isn’t it”, she says. “They can’t be happy being born like that. It’s not fair. Maybe if your brother was smart enough to know better...”  

Sometimes her grandson points to the television to tell her that’s one of them. One of the kids she says should never have existed in the first place.  

“Where?” she asks, looking hard but her cataracts not letting her see anything very clearly.  

Her grandson does his best to clarify what’s happening on screen. “He's the one running around with the knife. That’s the oldest of his new batch. That’s Jacob, he’s very sweet”  

“A knife?”, she sighs. “Oh, this is really terrible, isn’t it”  

No one tells Norma about the financial solvency that can sometimes suddenly come to you when you’ve got more dwarves than you can possibly know what to do with. Seems they’ve got show business in their blood. Leads to so much money you can buy all sorts of things. Get a half pipe installed in your basement. A place to skateboard during the winter months, dodging all the cat shit on the floor so it doesn’t get on your thrashing wheels and all over your brand new half pipe.  

Good money in this that Norma knows nothing about.  

But not necessarily enough to stay on top of the water bills. Not the kind of thing a child gets excited about paying for. Prefers to make his daddy happy. Wants to have a place where he can sit and watch his father fall off his skateboard over and over. Land on his head. Sometimes getting cat shit on his shirt. All of them coming together as a family and laughing at how funny it all is when he hits the ground and makes that noise.  

“Auuuuuuuullll”  

High pitched laughter and his father rolling around on the floor telling them to stop it. He’s really hurt this time. It’s not funny.  

Norma knowing none of these good things. But continuing on like she knows what’s best for the whole world . 

“I don’t understand why no one ever asks me what needs to be done. I’ve always known what needs to happen if they only asked me”  

She looks to her grandson to see if he understands what she’s saying but can’t tell because of her cataracts. But even though he’s silent, assumes he must know what is for the best. He’s a smart boy. Not a stupid boy, like she once feared. Must know better than anyone how none of this will end well.   

Because, just look at them.  

Just look at them.  

How could it possibly? 

I haven't wanted to to talk about it, because I'm sick of grief, but we lost another cat last week. But it just didn't feel right that I haven't been saying anything about her, like she didn't matter, because of course she did.

RIP Lily. Nothing is fair.
 

Jinnistan wrote:

Damn, crumbs.  My instinct is to go for levity and a "what are feeding these things?" but that's probably not going help anything.

How old was Lily?
 

My instinct is to go there too. I'm beginning to wonder about the water in this house. Four cats and a dog have died over the course of three years. Which I'm sure bodes well for us too if there turns out to be a correlation between these two things.

Maybe my water is poison.

*rim shot*

She's my girlfriends cat, and as a great trapper of street cats, I don't think we can be sure of any exact age. But it seems vets think she was about 10. Which, even for a fat, exercise-adverse cat with Shane MacGowan teeth, seems a little young.
 

Jinnistan wrote:

I have a cousin who is a veterinarian, who has quite a menagerie of pets, and it's very instructive on not just the diversity of illnesses to contend with but the cost as well (not just emotional).  It takes Sisyphean mercy. 

Completely different note, I got pissed at PETA a couple of weeks ago because they're petitioning to remove any and all animal likenesses from carousels and similar amusements because they feel that this trains children to think of animals as subservient vessels or something.  It's the perversity that no one at PETA has likely ever really been around a horse before to understand that the horses may actually kinda like it when people ride them.  I'm all for not exploiting horses.  But PETA doesn't understand this interspecies love even between so-called 'beasts of burden'.

But whatever.  I'm very sorry to hear your loss of a lovely cat.  I know the impact of their presence.  I still feel my cat's presence after 7 years now.
 

PETA really aren't any great ally for animal welfare. I imagine when that organization started, it was with the best intentions, but they were polluted by stupid moral absolutists long before the rest of the world became held hostage by them. I fucking hate PETA which, of course, is a good enough reason for Bill Maher to align himself with them.

Maher can't even do animal rights correctly. Cunt.

At the point of sorting through all this junk, putting it an order and doing extensive rewrites when necessary. So, the posting here is going to be significantly less. Only going to bother adding things when I've written something completely new, or have done complete rewrites of chapters that didn't previously work. Like this one.

ACCUSATIONS OF A DIRTY HOUSE WERE PREMATURE AND NOT ENTIRELY TRUE  

Norma didn’t leave a mess. Kept the house clean. Everyone must have seen how she never sat down. How she was always moving from room to room. Putting things away in drawers. Sometimes drawers where they maybe didn’t belong, but that you would know had just been put there once she slammed them shut.   

A clean house where nothing could ever be found.  

“Of course I didn’t touch it”, she’d tell those looking for the book they were reading, or the cup they had just been drinking from, or the piece of loose-leaf paper they had scribbled some of their secrets onto. “Why would I know where that is? I didn’t have anything to do with it. It’s probably wherever you put it”  

Always moving. Up and down the stairs. Finding things laying around that hadn't been put back where they belonged. Picking them up, and when there wasn’t a drawer nearby to put them in, out to the garage she would go. In and out through the front door, all day long, tossing whatever she’d found into  the trash. Making a lot of noise with garbage cans and garage doors and stomping her feet as she came back inside.  

“I never throw anything out”, she would protest. “How dare you accuse me of that”  

Sometimes putting little price tags on these things she found as she tidied. Hiding them away in closets with little bits of masking tape she'd written 25¢ on. Waiting for the summer so she could have yard sales full of everyone else’s stuff.   

Keeping the house clean.   

Never leaving a mess.   

Telling everyone they were crazy if they thought what she was selling was theirs. Or how she kept all the money for herself and just kept getting angrier and angrier as they demanded to be paid. Making sure she pointed out how everyone was always just sitting around doing nothing and never helping out. How everyone was useless. If it wasn’t for her everyone would be buried in filth.   

And as she stormed away from her accusers, the money belt she had buckled tight around her waist jangled with quarters. You could hear her all through the house, new-rich with pocket change and slamming drawers. Disappearing whatever mess she was finding now. Angry and hating everybody’s stuff more than ever.  

No wonder she was always so exhausted.   

But definitely not sleeping in on those Saturday mornings where she was nowhere to be found as the kitchen and living area and family room needed her help. Not her that was responsible for the half-finished drinks of last night’s guests littering every tabletop. And certainly not Baby Bruce’s job to get up before everyone else on weekends, and come down the stairs to gobble up all that melted ice and lipstick flecked Scotch and all those warm, flat puddles of beer at the bottom of brown bottles. Put the glasses he cleaned-out in the sink for his father to wash when he finally came down the stairs.  

Bruce was only doing what seemed necessary. Cleaning diligently until it was time for breakfast and his father and sisters began rising from their beds. The mess no longer there by the time the rest of the family joined him, tipped over on the kitchen floor and giggling. No one needing to say anything to Norma about the state of the house on these mornings when she was the last to join them. Everyone stepping over the boy as he burbled something about cereal, unbothered by the fact no one was thanking him. How they all just started eating in silence as Norma watched for any crumbs they might spill onto the floor. That she would have to immediately mop up, because if it wasn’t for her, what a terrible state they would all be in. 
 

Jinnistan wrote:

crumbsroom wrote:

My reading went reasonably well. Didn't feel I was talking to a brick wall when I was up there. They reacted as I wanted them to. They didn't stuff wads of cash into my hands though, but I probably shouldn't have been expecting that in the first place.

Grats, crumbs. 

Soon you'll be up for crowd work.

When I couldn't find work at the end of the pandemic, it was definitely in the back of my head if I was destined to be a bum making no money, I would just start showing up at open mic nights and just read these kinds of things, but with the comedic elements pushed more to the forefront. I was convinced I could make it a borderline performance art kind of thing.

Yes, I probably would have just gone up there and read it off a piece of paper and annoyed at least three quarters of the audience, but I was past the give a fuck stage at that point.

But getting a job made me soft again. Got to safeguard my pension plan now.
 

THE OTHERWISE WONDERFUL JOE (SEND BRUCE AN ANGEL)  

1 

Bruce didn’t know the name of the girl whose birthday presents he was throwing up on, only that he hadn't been invited here. He wiggled back and forth on the carpet and could feel boxes buckling under his knees as he tried to get up. Could smell his vomit. Someone was crying. The sound of wrapping paper tearing open as he opened his eyes and saw them all staring at him.  

They were the same faces that had looked at him weird when they saw him coming into their party just an hour before. No one understanding what he was doing at the same place they were. That kid they sometimes saw at school. The kid no one talked to. The one they hadn’t even noticed hadn’t been to class for months. Now sitting on a couch across from them and talking to them. Who looked drunk and wasn’t making any sense. 

Bruce could still remember following Joe in here, before everything went black. Then he got to his feet and began to stumble through the party looking for him, but he was gone.  

Someone said he went home without him. Then someone else said he should get out too. Like right now. Then someone called him a fucking loser.  

Maybe was pushed, or just fell out onto the sidewalk. 

And Bruce still couldn’t find Joe anywhere. 

2 

Joe eats with his mouth open. His whole family eats with their mouth open and that’s good enough reason not to go over there for dinner anymore. Bruce has listened to the sound of spaghetti in their mouths long enough. It's time to move on. This is no kind of friendship. 

Joe doesn’t even like rock and roll. Weekend nights always down in his basement listening to what he thinks is rock and roll but isn’t. And when they’re not down there with all that bad music, always going to the kind of party’s Joe is invited to. Walking into these houses where no one wants Bruce there. Whole houses filled with other people like Joe. And Joe their hero. Arriving just in time to save the evening, coming in through the door with his collection of Blood Sweat and Tears records under his arm.  

They always look happy when they see what Joe has brought with him. His smile. His feathered hair. His music. But unfortunately, also Bruce coming in right behind him. The very worst thing about Joe. The thing they could all agree was the one thing they couldn’t stand about him. The otherwise wonderful Joe. This otherwise great addition to anyone’s party.   

3 

Out in the streets, cold and without the jacket he forgot at the party, Bruce didn't even know who he was looking for anymore. Must have been someone who had forgotten him too. Had left him somewhere he couldn’t remember being or how he got there or where it was. Could only see all those faces telling him to leave. How close up they had got. Not sure why they were so angry at him. Or who he was now looking for out in the streets. 

Bruce was all alone. The streets were dark and he ended up in a parking lot. 

Beneath a streetlamp he could see a metal dumpster. The only thing Bruce could see ahead of him as he stumbled forward. A dumpster he soon could hear had something scratching and thumping around inside of it. Then something beginning to stand up and lift its lid. A bald head beginning to poke out into the light. The only light Bruce could see. The only direction he could think to walk.  

“Enough room in there for me?” Bruce slurred, moving faster. “I’m coming, I’m coming. Just wait. Just wait” 

Just a rewrite of an old one

MORNINGS WITH BELLY BOY  

After an evening of ghosts, my mother would sleep in late. I would hover above her in bed, on my elbows, tangled and tied to her legs by a rope of twisted-up blankets. Try to wake her. Pinch her nose and drop cats on her head. Push her eyelids up with my fingers to find empty sockets. Listen for a heartbeat to make sure the ghosts didn’t take her with them. Then untangle myself towards breakfast, leaving her behind in a room gone ugly from a window that trapped in too much dust and let in too much daylight. 

By mornings the kitchen would no longer be haunted and I was free to move about our apartment. All the doors now open. Kitchen Gramma would be gone, her tiny shoes no longer sitting by the front door, replaced by a fat and round child sitting on our sneakers. Someone I hated. His skin the color of a walnut. Speaking gibberish. A spit-wet chin and small sharp teeth, wobbling back and forth in his loose-fitting diaper. Sometimes rolling over onto his back if he dared look over his shoulder to watch me come into the room. 

He was left here every morning for my mother to look after and I didn’t know his name. All I knew was to never feed him. His parents had already packed him something. Bulging paper sacks filled with an assortment of meats, boiled eggs and puddings I didn’t like the smell of. My mother always making sure I understood he could wait until she woke before he ate any of it. Until then, I’d do my best to ignore him and eat my cereal in front of the television, as he slowly began to crawl towards me. Pulling himself across the floor on his stomach. Growling and gnashing his teeth as if preparing to bite something. 

But sometimes I could only wait so long before I was forced to give in to his hunger. Realizing my mother was never getting up as Belly Boy started to pull at my legs. Trying to get me to the floor where he could dunk his face in my cereal bowl, or maybe eat the flesh from my shin bones if I dared to hold my breakfast above his head where he could no longer reach it.  

So I fed him, even though I knew what would happen. What always happened. His body refusing every serving of Cap’n Crunch I’d just put on the floor for him. Something terrible suddenly spilling out from the seams of his diapers as he sat on our hardwood. Something frothing and stinking. A substance that could quickly reach the furthest corners of our small apartment and force me to move for higher ground. Once again finding myself standing on a chair and waiting anxiously for my mother to wake. Waiting for the stink of what I’d allowed happen to get to her bedroom. A stink so bad it could shake even her from the deepest of sleeps and get her running towards us. Coming through the bedroom door fast, her hair in her face. Screaming that she was still so tired and how dare we wake her. Screaming that she was sick of having to mop the floor every day because I wouldn’t listen. Screaming that if I couldn’t stop being such a bad awful bad terrible boy, next time I would be going to my Nan’s to stay. That I wouldn’t be coming back.  

Or sometimes she’d take me out to the balcony, pulling me towards the ledge to show exactly where she could throw me. Tilting me over just a little so I could see how far down it was. The same place she had thrown the toy tractor I used to ride around and around and around the apartment. It’s plastic wheels making a racket on the hardwood. The same hardwood now covered in all this terrible stuff I was responsible for and that my mother now had to go inside and clean.  

And so, as she screamed and screamed and repeated herself and grabbed the mop and told me how she didn’t want me anymore, to me it all sounded like a promise. Something I should consider seriously. Possibly worth the risk next time I found Belly Boy on our sneakers in the morning, his mouth wide open, waiting for me to stuff him full of more cereal than would fit. This boy whose name I never knew but who was more than happy to help make sure next time I got the chance, I could wake my mother up fast, make her real mad, and get myself out of here.  

One way or another. 

Thank you, Belly Boy. 

PICTURE HANGING DAY

Ever since Norma came to take the boy away, Sandra’s apartment didn’t so much seem empty as it did quiet. She could now hear the television and everything the people were saying on it. There was no longer any need to ignore his requests for her to change the channel. And he wasn’t around to do the sort of things that got her having to get up and throw his noisiest toys off the balcony. His favorites always the ones that got so loud she couldn’t hear anything else.

And so she made her decision and he wasn’t here anymore. Norma had him for good and it was looking like Sandra could now keep herself comfortable on the couch. And hear the television. And not hide her Archie comics from his crayons. She could spit sunflower seeds into an ashtray until it overflowed and look across the room at the blank walls as long as she wanted. Long enough to see there was nothing there and wonder if maybe it was time to hang some pictures up. Maybe some photographs of her son. The kind of thing she may have never thought of if he was still here.

Things were good. Not too bad at all.

Not that she didn’t miss him. She’d often tell her sisters over the phone how much she did. Tell them how giving him up was the hardest thing she ever had to do. Talking and talking and talking until she realized her hand had begun to reach up to cover the receiver. For no reason other than habit, as if she were thinking it must be about time for him to start doing something bad. Needing her hand to keep all her swearing to herself before realizing she didn’t have anyone to yell at anymore. Could let her fingers sink back into a bag of sunflower seeds. Could continue talking to her sisters without interruption.

And as she talked all her sisters agreed, yes Sandy, yes Sandy, he was a good boy, but too much. Too much right from the start. And so she would start reminding them of the time he set fire to her kitchen. Or how he kept feeding that Indian kid until her burst. Or wouldn’t stop screaming about carrots and peas at the daycare that wouldn’t take him anymore. But mostly how he was always nearby asking her for something to eat. Needing her to get off the phone to take him out for rice pudding. Sometimes in the middle of the night. Sometimes even when it was raining.

“I know it was for the best”, she would tell Brenda or Gail or Sharon or whatever sister was on the other end of the line. “I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. And now he’s where he’s supposed to be. Especially since Norma was already calling him her son anyways...did I ever tell you that? Did I ever tell you the nerve of that woman. Her son? I don’t think so, lady”

Her hand began its inevitable rise back to cover her phone’s receiver.

“So if that’s the kind of thing she wants to say, well, she can have him for good, can’t she. See how she likes it. She can keep him and call him whatever she likes. Let her be the one who eventually throws him out a window”

But in quieter moments, when she wasn’t on the phone, and there wasn’t even the sound of neighbours coming through the walls, she would sometimes have to remind herself he wasn’t gone forever. When everything got too quiet, and she started to feel sad, she would tell herself he wasn’t too far away. And so whenever she really needed to hear the sound of the boy again, she only had to put on her shoes and go outside and walk twenty minutes down the road.

Norma lived no more than a few blocks away and, weather permitting, she could spend time with her son anytime the mood came upon her. Sometimes showing up unannounced. Sometimes interrupting a lunch Norma had prepared for the boy, and having to wait impatiently with the shoes in the hall for him to finish. Sitting on the stairs listening to the boy asking where he had to go with her. If he was going to be coming back and Norma always reassuring him: “Of course David. This is your home. This is where you belong. This is the house you will always come back to. It’s just as much your as it is mine”

And when Norma finally brought the boy out to her, sometimes she would ask where she was taking him. And Sandra wouldn’t answer because she didn’t know herself. Most times they would just end up walking around to nowhere in particular. Go down to the train tracks or look over bridges. Sometimes pass an old cemetary that David seemed to particularly like. A place that got him full of questions. But, unlike when he used to live with her, questions he now seemed to expect answers to.

“Who are all those people? Where are they now? Why do some of them have big tombstones and others hardly any at all”

Norma knew so much, and Sandra knew so little, but when he asked her this she did her best to answer as they turned around and started their walk back to his home. Told the boy something about how the bigger the tombstone, the older the person buried beneath it was. And she liked how her son seemed to be listening to every word she'd said. But as she continued to look at him, was unsure what he was thinking as he then turned to stare intently out at all the spaces where there were hardly any tombstones at all.  Just tiny bricks set in the ground. Sometimes not even a name engraved on them.

“I think I’m going to want the biggest tombstone of all”, he told her. “I don’t think graveyards are a very good place to live”

And Sandra agreed. Maybe even laughed. Then once she had deposited her son back in his grandmother’s front hall, began walking back to her home alone. Thinking about the blank walls waiting for her there. Still not sure what to do about any of it. Still unable to do anything that might help the situation. Just walking home since there was nowhere else for her to go.

FRIEND BROCHURE

The school gave us a pamphlet promising this was the place to find friends. Had photos of a swing set inside. Plus, the smiling faces of all sorts of kids having all sorts of good times. I looked through pages of them while my Nan talked to someone else in this office we’d walked to together. Sat there imagining how I’d meet every one of these kids down at the playground when I got here in September. How they would wonder where I’d been all their lives. Ask if I wanted to be their best friend. And then, when I said yes to all the good ones, I’d climb on those swings and swing higher than anyone else. Ask them if they want to see me go straight to the center of the sun. Then probably barf in the sand, because I always forgot how badly I got motion sickness.

But I would worry about that part later. When I had enough friends to help with the clean-up.

For now though, I was happy to trust what these photographs were telling me, even though there was already reason to doubt them. Couldn’t remember seeing any swings out there when we came in. And was just noticing how there were no kids inside here at all. Just grown-ups. All grown-ups. Mostly fat women in bad dresses at typewriters. Old men with salt and pepper hair wearing suits that smelled like cologne and cigarettes. Not the kind for me to play with. None of them even looking at me.

And they continued not to look even after my grandmother told them all about how I already knew how to read. How she had taught me. But they were hardly impressed and only kept mentioning how I’d be one of the younger ones this year, as if it were a cause for concern. That, other than my marvelous reading abilities she was claiming, and which they seemed to maybe not believe by how little their faces had changed when she told them, I would probably be behind the others in everything else.

“You see, most of these children can usually already tie their laces, and looking at your grandson’s shoes....”, the man speaking trailed off. They finally looked at me. All of them, down at my feet. A couple of the fat women shaking their heads, ever so slightly. “As I'm sure you can understand, it can sometimes turn out to be a struggle for some of the younger ones”

My grandmother thanked them for the talk, and as we walked home, she seemed angry and said they didn’t know what they were talking about. How they didn’t know anything.

"You’ll show them, won’t you”, she asked, walking too fast for me to keep up. Unconcerned my laces, which she had tied for me as we left that office, had come untied again. “You just watch, when you get to your first day of class, none of the others will be able to read a thing. And don’t you let them forget it”

And I agreed, even though I wasn’t sure about anything. Just kept walking next to her, doing my best to memorize the way back home, in case I needed to escape from here one day on my own. Looking for landmarks. Most especially, a swing set. Or at least one single child, somewhere. Anywhere.

“I think I’m going to have lots of friends”, I told her when a silence fell over us, even though I wasn’t sure of that either. And when she heard my voice, she reached down to touch my head. Said of course I would. Of course I would.

But there was a sound in her voice I didn’t like, so I began looking around to see if I could find something on a road sign to read aloud to her. Get her back to being happy like she’d been this morning. Started telling her all about how much you’d get fined if you littered. If you were caught loitering. If you didn’t pick up after your dog.

And this got her smiling the rest of the way home. But still, walking too fast for me to keep up.