Use the S grip, curled fingers only, which requires strength in the knuckles to circle her body while it is hurting. Smell her and yourself, indistinguishable as two lit matches. Lift up as she straightens with hands and feet on the mat like a tent. Slap her arms till they welt, will them to release their grip before the timer runs out and you are named. Notice the size of the areolas through her uniform as you squeeze your forearms around her ribs. Feel the tiny soft ridges. Forget how to get hard. Forget your own name. Be flipped to the bottom position. Land hard on your right elbow.
Find yourself seized by the girl in a ball-and-socket grip, hand over fist, great for choke holds and not great for you. Because of the pain in her head she is not thinking about tomorrow, only this hour and your throat and how soft it is and how it yields so easily under her bones. At the whistle breathe again as the ref ends the match to spare you the act of surrendering and/or unconsciousness. Know your name again.
Easter Egg Surprise
While plopped on his training potty in the middle of the apartment den, my son, lil Benny, threatened to kill everyone in the room. While straining, he spoke in his preschool accent and jabbed a finger at each of his targets.
“I’ma kill you. And I’ma kill you!”
Those threatened included me and his grandpa, Ben Sr. Both of us laughed of course ’cause it was super cute like a baby penguin itching to wrestle. Grandpa Ben was now my primary babysitter for lil Benny. My mom had just passed. She was a junkie and a liar and owed me three hundred dollars, but she was good with my kid. Lil Benny’s mom was about as useful as his grandma if you ask me, though. I left my dad in the glow of the television to dispose of lil Benny’s kid shit. While flushing the toilet there was nothing funny left. I didn’t turn on the light, so everything was gray, cold, quiet, and smelled of bleach, mildew, and poop. I thought about the news and the funeral and the genetic transfer of fucked-up tendencies and wondered if there might be something wrong with my son.
There were garbled voices in my head for a while, flashes and whispers all saying violent video games are bad for kids. So I studied up, read the labels, and dropped lil Benny in front of a TV without screams of bloody murder and the pop pop pop of first-person-shooter digital gunfire. In his new game there were just tools and block men ready to build anything. Lil Benny loved it. After a week though I wasn’t so sure.
Benny stopped cussing and threatening to kill me, but he didn’t say much of anything, just oooohs and grunts and ahhhhhhhs like the block men in his game. He even started to copy the stiff swivel of their heads. I could tell his Grandpa had noticed.
“That shit gon’ turn him into a pussy.”
I let that slide since my dad still had a lot on his mind of course about the loss of my mom. Doctors guessed the years of dirty meth led to the cancer. Many of their friends still didn’t know she was dead. When they asked how the treatment was going, Dad had a phrase for it.
“Burned it up!” he’d say, and laugh like an ass.
A few were confused/horrified but most knew his ways and cringed when they realized he meant cremation. Lil Benny’s mom left our apartment to buy some mac ’n’ cheese one night and the bitch never came back, fourteen months ago. Benny still sees her online, posting pictures. She bought a motorcycle and dyed the top of her head purple then gray then back to black. Lil Benny used to love her hair changes when they video-chatted, never questioned when she would return. To him, it was normal that mothers left like that into the night or tiny containers.
Games were clearly not the answer, so I found a channel online. At first I was confused and tried to click away, but lil Benny stopped me with a grunt. There were no people on-screen, just a pair of white hands and a basket of plastic Easter eggs. The hands worked slowly to turn the egg around for the camera, creating suspense and shit. Lil Benny leaned in closer to the screen just as the egg broke to reveal its hidden gem: cars, animals, superheroes, popular cartoon figurines, and the one Russian nesting egg that lil Benny gasped over as each egg led to another inside, ending with a final micro race car at its core, which gave neither him nor me any satisfaction. Staring at the disembodied hands moving to break one egg at a time over and over made me feel like I was shrinking, like the oxygen left the room and all the toy trucks, robots, mice, candy, key chains, and stickers birthed into view with a tiny explosion of air from the egg were growing big and heavy as bricks piling around my feet, pressing down on my toes. The videos gave me fucking vertigo, but lil Benny couldn’t get enough. He became addicted to them, retreating into the screen whenever I had to deny him a piece of chocolate his grandpa brought over because sugar sent him into a hyper-tantrum, and I would have to restrain him through high-pitched screams of injustice. I had to find something better than those vids, though; there had to be something better to help my son than a strange man’s manicured hands popping open plastic eggs all day.
Lil Benny’s mom’s calls became more and more infrequent after he refused to talk to her that one time. She waited for him to notice the rainbow nest on her head, but he wasn’t impressed. He ended the call by touching the red button. The boy can’t read but can hang up on a grown-ass woman without thinking twice.
I gave in, gave up, went to the store, and bought a toy football. I figured the only solution was to take lil Benny outside. When I got home his grandpa was playing a video game on the couch and lil Benny was in his room. I could hear him laughing and talking to the screen. There were other voices too, a woman and a man and other kids, so I hurried in to see who the hell was in my apartment. Benny knelt at the TV, watching a family online, playing games together in their home. Lil Benny waved a hand at me and said, “Hello, Daddy,” without looking in my direction. He said every syllable, sharp as ice. I said, “Hey,” squeezed the foam ball, then left. The family in his video sat close. The room was warm, clean, with a rug, lamps, and pillows. Everyone laughed like they would always be that way in there together.
Inappropriate Gifts
1.
When he was four, Darrell wanted one of those plastic toy cars with motors that kids could actually sit in and drive around. He was already twice as big as other four-year-olds. His mother bought him a remote-control car for ages nine and up. He tried to sit on it, broke it, and cried. The laughter from his mother shaken out like dust surprised them both; they did not see any of that coming.
2.
Ten years later, Darrell’s mother chanted along to his music in the halls. Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch. Kill a bitch. Fuck that bitch. Slap a ho, his mother sang. Nineties rap was what it was, a place where women became caricatures, big-assed, big-titted ghetto sex mannequins, his mother claimed. They were sad songs to her, but she let him have them for the sake of his happiness.
Darrell opened his bedroom door, the beats from his stereo vibrating the house like a storm. In the bathroom he ran his palms down over his chest to press the flesh deeper inside as if the fat, the almost-breasts, were a wrinkle that could straighten with pressure. At the breakfast table, his mother smiled with a faint mustache she removed once a week using a white lotion from the grocery store. He could tell she skipped her treatment and felt a warmth toward her that he forgot was possible. It was pancake Saturday. Darrell dressed and went outside to the weight bench on the patio for a workout. He counted each push-up aloud like a poem. Coach let him play football because he was a boulder even though he couldn’t run. Bad knees. On Mondays, his coach bought him SlimFast shakes even though he didn’t ask for them. Chocolate.
3.
Darrell does not become a rapper or an NFL star, he gets a government job he hates but keeps it because of the medical benefits. He marries his daughters’ mother, divorces her a decade later, and begins running; it hurts. He loses seventy-seven pounds, becomes lighter than he ever was in high school, holds the leftover skin in his hands while looking in the mirror, and wonders what it was all for. His children are like surprise parties, full of wonder and dread and impossible to calculate. He and
his ex-wife agree on one last thing. Girls need to know the world—what love is, what violence is, what hate looks like, and how close to each other they all can be. That means boxing classes.
The girls sidestep around the ring nimble as deer, with serious faces often, peeking over the ropes to see what is outside. They are unhappy. They are getting bigger, prettier, and smarter, so this will help them lose a few, ward off male attention, and eventually know how necessary this kind of unhappiness is. He gains all the divorce weight back and a little more because everything is so peaceful until the girls want pop music. They want love songs about teenagers in parts of California he has never been to. He imagines his beautiful, chubby, hairy, dark girls wandering the lyrical sidewalks of those songs and is afraid. While they are walking home together from practice, the youngest sings aloud to a terrible bright sugary tune. Darrell loses his breath and has to stop for just a moment. His youngest tells him he’s out of shape.
4.
Soon Darrell will lose twenty years to parenthood, time being the only price it asks of anyone. For Christmas, his daughters will buy him cookbooks for dialysis patients and a smoothie machine that costs more than his car payment. Darrell will forget what he really asked for and remember instead when his mother broke her hip from a fall on the sidewalk, how the ground seemed to suck her into it, the way she stayed there unable to move as if all gravity found her bones irresistible, and he felt an urge to laugh and scream as if she suddenly weighed as much as every woman ever. He will see his daughters swell into their bodies like the seasons.
Lisa Bonet
Okay, so these are the things we have been told never to say in front of children or white people. When I was a kid my grandma used to sprinkle Ajax around the door to keep evil spirits away. It was some voodoo ramajama-type thing mixed in with Southern Baptist rituals. To this day, I got crazy germ phobias and have trouble kissing my wife. Grandma taught me there are horrors you can’t see and can’t talk about, but that shit is out there. That was the nineties.
Back then me and my wife both had a crush on Denise from The Cosby Show as kids. There was this episode where Denise sat on Bill Cosby’s lap and she was all eighties cool with rainbow cheeks and postapocalyptic clothes that made her look like a boy who just raided Boy George’s closet. She was cool as hell, but even then I thought she looked kinda old to be all on her dad’s lap.
I remember when they told us Martin Luther King Jr. was not a perfect man but led a perfect cause. I thought he was bad at math and not bad at fidelity or fatherhood. There were lives at stake so you know you stay quiet. The books back then made slavery look uncomfortable and irrational, something obviously temporary. They never showed us the tools, the funnels to force-feed slaves that tried to starve themselves to death, the spikes driven into the skulls of infants because Black children were thought to be more likely to survive. Why would anyone have to survive that? It took hundreds of dead babies to prove the theory wrong. My wife told me about the old laws that made it impossible to prosecute the rape of a slave because Black women were “lascivious” by nature and of course property. Even when I tell her that’s terrible she just looks at me like I don’t get it, like no matter how much empathy I can scrape together I’ll never know what it’s like to be the spectacle of female pain when that suffering is ordained as law, as theater.
Bill Cosby was always Bill Cosby, but eventually Denise became Lisa Bonet, the actress. She got crazy. Everybody thought she was crazy. They said she and Bill had a falling out. I thought then it was because she wanted to be paid more on the show, greedy Hollywood bitch, right? So later when Bill Cosby goes to court for drugging and raping bunches of women, we’re all …
Today, I want to kiss my wife as often as she’d like, which is too often. She is not strong or proud or wise or witty and is not a perfect best friend. She wakes up too early in the morning, can never find anything, but has good breath. She is not magical, never learned to swim, was severely abused as a child, and is absolutely beautiful like an egg sunny-side up. I am not that attractive I’ll admit, but she likes how I think and talk and complain, so we’re cool.
When she tries to smash her lips on mine I almost always wince. She tells me I’m traumatized and laughs, but she’s hurt, I can tell. It’s the bacteria, though. I’ve seen all the documentaries about good bacteria and bad bacteria and how we need some to live and would not survive as a species or planet without them, but in my head they are large as criminals with teeth like a barracuda’s, all invisible and gnawing away. She looks at me when I try to explain about the film on our tongues and I fail to explain and she wants to be patient and not resentful that her childhood looked the way it did and mine didn’t and we are so close to understanding each other but can’t quite and are left desperate for some impossible thing. I just want her to close her mouth, so I can love her …
Live Birth
Nell had three children before she had a say in the matter. Then she had six more. Because she was so good at childbirth and liked to walk between houses deep in the woods even when she had no business at all among the pines, the town made her a midwife. The women there weren’t allowed in the hospitals, so they gave birth over straw, standing up, in their own homes. Most of the births were fine, though not all, but every baby smelled fine once the odor of metal and salt was washed away. Nell didn’t remember the fine babies, only the others like the one born blind and quiet yet full alive, some stillborn or breech. Another came out backward and hairy as a cat.
One mother made it to the city and saw a film with a woman lying in a bed, giving birth to the devil. Nell too heard stories. There was supposedly a boy born with five hands and no face, his little cries locked up in his throat like bees. But that mother didn’t care about bees or the devil or hands piled onto a wrist like petals, just the bed. She didn’t want to stand up to deliver her child. Nell told her when fruit falls from a tree it falls down not sideways. Which is easier, dropping a sack of flour or throwing it across the room? The woman just blinked and let her mouth hang open, and Nell thought this must be how the baby happened to her too.
When there were no bellies to check on, Nell still took her walks. Her husband didn’t say much but sometimes seized her by the elbow and said, “There ain’t nothing in the trees for you.” She’d pull away and go on.
Her sons left town and came back. Her daughters got degrees and got fat. The hearts of two sons stopped for good a year apart. She walked between houses through winter and spring for as long as she could, then borrowed a horse until she bought her own.
One baby was born almost a boy and almost a girl, so like God she declared one over the other for the parents to believe forever. Often there were more fingers and toes than ten and twenty. She fixed it for five dollars, tied a string around the extra finger and pulled it tight until it separated from the rest of the hand like clay.
When they took her midwife’s license, the mothers in town went to the hospital and paid more money than they had to men who didn’t know their names, and sometimes died for all the trouble. Nell divorced her husband, gave her horse to one of their sons, and planted string beans, rutabagas, collards, and mustard greens too. Grandmothers brought their granddaughters to Nell, mostly for good luck. They wanted to know things would be okay. Nell only said, “My melons don’t grow in June like they used to, and the seasons never felt like this before.”
There was a birth a long time ago that Nell rarely mentioned but dreamed of often. The mother listened, obeyed Nell’s instructions for months, and did her part well on the critical day of labor. In two hours the child was free. When it arrived Nell couldn’t give the baby to the mother, just wrapped it up quick, hoping it made no sound, afraid of what that sound might be. When the mother saw Nell’s face in the fading light among the scent of sweat and blood and fig blossoms they both knew then how some things expected, longed for, hunted in our minds have been lost to us for a long time.
Thirteen Porcelain Schnauzers
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p; Partner #1 and partner #2 believed their real sexual dysfunction was because of the dogs: Duchess and Gnarls Barkley. Gnarls was almost ten and Duchess barely three. Four months had gone by since the couple had had sex or had a conversation that lasted more than twenty minutes without fighting or made dinner with both of their bodies in the kitchen at the same time or gone to the movies together or exchanged kinky pictures at work or planned a vacation or anything at all. Partner #1 was long-boned and somewhat feminine in voice and skin care regimens while partner #2 spoke with a husky patience that disarmed everyone and possessed refined abdominal and shoulder definition.
Duchess walked with the elegance of a librarian alone among her books but took to strangers and other dogs like a cockroach when the lights come on: panic. Gnarls Barkley, however, could not be more graceless, small, close to the ground, or indescribable in breed or disposition. He loved wildly, from his food to the beggars on the sidewalk. All were his, and he was theirs. Playtime between the two dogs was like watching a teenage girl spin an old man around in his wheelchair till he hollered please stop. Partner #1 and partner #2 loved their animals unconditionally.
How to Wrestle a Girl Page 3