I appreciate you, Rock, and both of you, for sticking around as well.

Another new one I've just got to throw here, because I just keep fucking with it and have totally lost sight of what I'm doing

MOTHERS AFTER MIDNIGHT

I try to keep it top secret but I visit my mother every two or three weeks. Go there for weekends and never tell my friends why they won't be seeing me around for the next few days. Don't say where I'm going since they don't believe in a mother like mine anyways. Not since they found out how much younger she is than their mothers. Tell me I don't know what I'm talking about when I say these kinds of things about her. That they can't believe no one has ever told me before how mothers have got to be older than that. Can't be around the same age as sisters sometimes are.

"But not as old as your grandma, either"

It seems my friends are hard to please when it comes to mothers. They like to explain to me how old they are supposed to be. Always must be some undetermined in-between age, and shouldn't be trusted to be who they say they are if they are ever as young as I was claiming. Everyone acting concerned like there were all sorts of other things about mothers I could never possibly know either. So why bother telling them anything about this place I sometimes go to when they aren't looking. Let them wonder all weekend long how I could have just vanished into thin air like that.

Maybe will tell them I had gone into outer space if anyone asks once I get back.

Anything but what really  happens on weekends when you've got a mother like this. They'd never believe how late they let you stay up, nearly until midnight, when it becomes that special hour for mothers to start going wild. How that's when you learn this will be when they finally get off the couch, and stop telling the children to shush, and start making up all sorts of games for all of us to play that don't make any sense. Never explaining any of their rules before advising everyone to start running. You and your cousins and whoever else was staying over that night, scattering in different directions, and only a few of us by now having learned exactly where you had to go when mothers start getting like this.

Putting pillow cases on their heads, turning out all the lights and chasing whoever was still awake all over the place.

And so me and only those cousins I had chosen to warn, straight into the bathtub we go. Getting ourselves quick to the one place we would never be found, huddling together behind the shower curtain and trying not to laugh as we heard my mother tripping over the furniture out there. Imagining her arms blindly reaching out into the darkness, her hands snatching open and closed for whatever boys and girls she could find. Only those who had not yet learned where to hide like us.  Who had only just discovered this is what happens to mothers after midnight. Always the ones with mothers that were in-between ages who didn't know what was happening. Who would get themselves dragged to the ground, tickled nearly half to death.

All of it important to know. Not that anyone would have listened to me anyways.

And so I don't say anything about this secret knowledge. Tell them I went to Mars instead and let them learn these sort of things on their own. Let them continue to be put to bed early and live a life never knowing  anything about the way mothers really are while they sleep. 

Let them continue to be the ones who will be caught off guard. The ones we can laugh at as we stand in the bathtub, victorious.

Never tell them anything about how young mothers are the best.

THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL

Teachers were scum and Bruce didn't speak to them. Even on those occasions they caught him off guard not paying attention at the back of the classroom, he never said a word. Never gave them anything, just those mean eyes like a German Sheppherd answering back if any of their questions ever came his way. 

None of them knowing a single thing about him other than the fact he was doomed.

Not one of them knowing so much the sound of his voice, and yet every teacher crowded into this tiny room claiming to have seen his future. Visions of this young man's ignoble end coming to each of them clear as a bell, even those who were slow to recall his name. Even to Mr. Yaverbaum who would only come to realize he'd been thinking about a completely different student than the one they'd been talking about once Bruce finally arrived. Once he could see that he wasn't nearly tall enough, hadn't grown nearly a proper enough moustache to be the one he had initially thought deserving of this intervention. Yet there was somehow still enough in the pitiful posture of this boy as he came skulking into the room that got Yaverbaum immediately convinced of this badness everyone was talking about. Found no reason to change anything he'd said about him all that time he'd been thinking he was someone else entirely.

It was the kind of posture that let you know exactly where he was heading long before he got there.

"When you watch him move like that, his zero in gym glass is hardly a surprise"

Walking straight to the gutter. Straight into the arms of that horrible family, which was by now what all of his teacher had heard.  Was the only thing they really knew about him. Calling him here to get some answers to the rumors surrounding the kind of company he was now keeping.

"These are bottom of the barrel people, Bruce. Barely hanging onto the lowest rung on the ladder. And the only reason you've chosen them as your friends is because that's how you see yourself. You think that's where you belong, with losers like them"

They had brought him into the office of the school's principal thinking this might get him finally talking. But instead of speaking what they said stopped him dead in his tracks from explaining anything. Had come here with some perfectly understandable reason for the bad grades he had thought he was here to defend, but now they had put him right back to having nothing to say.

Couldn't blame his lack of gym shorts for this one.

Jinnistan wrote:

I hope you haven’t taken my erratic presence as a lack of interest or appreciation. Enjoying the updates!

I actually appreciate the ability to post things and not have to endure a constant feedback loop that feels forced. I only want comments when comments are worth commenting on. I mostly haven't posted because a number of them recently just seem very pointless without the context of surrounding stories, or I don't like them, or a few were just too personal so I kept them to myself.

I'm also mostly just editing and moving things around. Think I've got it about 75 percent done for a proper second draft. The first was an ungodly mess. I think it's substantially better now, the way I have it.

IF YOU'VE GOT NOTHING BETTER TO SAY, SQUEAK

I didn't have anything against the guy, just didn't have anything to say to him. Hardly a word for about ten years. Would get pushed forward into that room where he was always watching horseracing to say hello to when I arrived. Then pushed into the same room after a weekend of losing, then winning back, then losing all of his money, to say goodbye. And both times, he would just raise his hand and make that weird squeaking noise with his nose. A sound like his sinuses were being twisted like a wet balloon. Of sausage casings being filled with minced meat.

"Hello Randy"

*squeak*

"Goodbye Randy"

*squeak*

For a decade, this was enough. My stepfather sitting in this room with the carpet pulled up. With the dog turds. With the sliding patio door he'd smashed with a beer bottle and that had somehow kept itself clung together. Thousands of shattered bits of glass refusing to crumble to the ground, rising up behind him like some glittering, spiderwebbed monolith. Hovering there impossibly for years, as if time had frozen in the middle of some old, unseen tantrum thrown by this man who hardly seemed to move or speak.

Nothing to say to Randy, but sometimes would let my mother know I could help get rid of all this broken glass if she wanted. Clean it out of there before it fell on someone. Maybe some new kid that my brother had recently made, and who was learning to walk around this terrible house, fingering its way around the walls, leaning against whatever he thought might support it.

Everytime I came to visit, that shower of broken glass haunting me.

Just waiting to rain down upon the next person to venture out into the weedy outgrowth of their backyard. Where there was no reason to go, and so everyone so far had been safe. Nothing but an old bench Randy had bought as a memento from a demolished racetrack and that you could by now hardly see out there. That to sit on would make you seem to sink into the earth. Leave you  vulnerable to the groundhogs. To the ticks that studded blade of every grass. This busted glass that just kept hanging in, refusing to fall, but no one to fall on quite yet.

"No, let the goof clean up his own mess", would always be her answer to my offer of help. "Can you believe I married such a slob?"

Unworthy Randy, who didn't even bathe, and yet according to her had somehow turned the inside of their bathtub black.

That she only married because she didn't want my father to think she couldn't find someone too, just like he'd found Jane. She wouldn't let him find the satisfaction that no one could possibly stay with her after all. Over twenty years now of proving her point. 

It had been a long time since Randy had been nothing but some footsteps upstairs. Something me and my mother and sometimes my cousin Cheryl could hear through the floorboards when I came to visit her in that dingy basement. Randy not a stepfather back then, just her landlord. This skinny guy who'd sometimes come down to collect the rent. Spend time with us and change the channel from what we were watching before he'd come down. Sitting there with the same haircut he'd always had. Still making that squeaking noise with his nose. Forcing me and my cousin to share many knowing glances every time we heard it.

"What a dork", it said, without us actually  having to say it.

And now more than twenty years into their marriage, the longest that family had ever seen, but for a long time I just couldn't bring myself to talk to him. Not until I got older and started to drink, and then sometimes began to find myself out on the porch with him at the same time, smoking, needing to say something.

"You know, I really had it going on when I was young", he would sometimes brag in regards to his younger years. Those years he had that house my mother had moved into the basement of. "Making enough money to drink a few beers on the weekend. Had my own place, with a Firebird in the driveway. Then, a few years later, a girl in the basement"

He smoked his cigarette in a way that seemed to suggest he was thinking of the good old days.

"And then this goddamnned kid showed up one day"

He gave me a long look and a wink and then, finishing his cigarette with a final squeak of his nose, went back inside to his chair. To his horseracing. To his dog turds and that shivering mess of broken glass he called a backyard door. Left me by myself on the front porch. Got me laughing at the thought of how I might have ruined his life.

"I'll always love your father", my mother will be sure to tell me later. Looking, as always, like she's going to cry. "What have I done. This one doesn't even use soap"