by Sam Pink
Preparing for death.
But then, the baby started making a comeback.
She stabilized.
‘She’s such a good baby, never cries, just so happy,’ Summer says, dropping a fork into a silverware holder.
I fight back tears, thinking, Goddamnit, little baby, fight.
Summer tells me about her daughters.
One is supposed to get married soon but her fiancé just went to jail for choking her.
I make a gun motion with thumb and forefinger and say, ‘You want me to, uh . . .’
Summer talks about her last husband.
How that marriage ended.
He started drinking.
They got into an argument one night and he raised his hand.
She says she left that night with just her clothes.
Says it was hard to do but she knew she couldn’t let her daughter see that happen and then do nothing.
Says her son was so scared, he walked barefoot across the street to where his grade-school principal lived, to get him for help.
Says the image of her son barefoot walking across the street in the middle of the night to get help is something she thinks about a lot.
Her reminder, she says.
A principal’s job is never done, I think.
We continue polishing.
I notice Summer is staring at me, smiling.
She’d asked me out via a drunk email a couple nights before, saying she liked looking at me at work.
But was I ready to be a grandpa?
Had anyone ever gone right to grandpa?
Things to consider.
I take a piece of her gum.
She brings up sex trafficking.
She always talked about sex trafficking.
‘You should walk me out to my car so I don’t get sex-trafficked. It’s big around here because we’re right by 94. They put you in a van and shoot you up with heroin so then you CAN’T leave,’ she says, grabbing my arm.
I had read about a sex trafficking situation that occurred in the dollar store parking lot by my apartment.
‘All right all right,’ I say.
She smiles and says, ‘I’m just saying,’ as she cocks her head, snaps her gum, and drops a handful of knives into a container.
We polish through an entire tub, groaning.
I laugh thinking about how important this day is for everyone out there in the hall, but not me/us; it’s just work.
A shift.
A free meal and some money.
A checklist.
Not the union of two people through a vow of lifelong love.
But a series of demands.
It’s the same for those attending the wedding though.
It’s an itemized list from my employer, signed, a contract.
Everything you want and can pay for.
In life too, I guess.
Same for everybody.
Just another checklist.
Your checklist.
The fucking checklist.
Checklist and the eternal audition.
‘All right that’s IT!’ I finally say, slamming down my rag.
I walk back toward the kitchen.
‘Where you going?’ Summer asks, laughing.
‘SICK of this!’ I say loudly.
My boss, putting on his coat in a closet nearby, says, ‘Hey if later, you’re not sick of it, would you maybe do trash?’
‘Of course, my boy, of course!’
I go into the kitchen and cut myself a huge piece of wedding cake.
Leaning against a stainless steel counter in the kitchen, I watch the last of a magnificent sunset and eat the cake.
The sky is orange and golden, with pink in it too.
Squirrels running away.
Crows in huge numbers.
One of the event managers comes into the kitchen, putting two thumbs up and smiling.
She asks me to help her stack chairs outside from yesterday’s ceremony.
Yesterday’s ceremony, today’s task.
‘After this,’ I say, holding out my cake.
She takes some of it with her fingers.
‘Oh that cake sucks,’ she says, grimacing.
But she’s hated every cake I can remember.
There are people who will always hate the cake.
Don’t listen to them.
Don’t listen to the people who always like the cake either.
We go outside and stack all the chairs as it gets dark.
Blue, then darker blue.
Dark and damp.
Slipping on the wet grass.
Michigan.
Beautiful Midwest Mother.
‘Don’t forget they’re doing that sparkler send-off thing,’ the manager says.
It’s where we light sparklers for the family and they stand on either side of a walkway for the newlyweds to walk through, with a limo waiting at the end to take them away.
‘Yay,’ I say.
We stack and carry chairs for another half hour.
Whackin it.
*
Back inside, the effort carries on, though increasingly subdued.
Alcohol.
Powered by, then fading from.
Exhaustion.
Arguments.
Conversations.
Plans for tomorrow/rest of weekend.
Nothing left to do.
Dancing.
Desserts.
Coffee.
Water.
Phones babysit bored kids.
The sugar is gone.
Thrill of dress up has become the irritability of being in uncomfortable clothes.
The flower girl sleeps in her mom’s arms, jacketed.
Conversational pairs around the bar, corners of the room.
The audition nears its inevitable end.
The DJ does his best.
A committed number continue dancing.
Broken glasses.
A groomsman sleeps facedown in the corner of the room on one hand.
A drunk bridesmaid sits in a chair with her bare feet up on another chair as someone rubs her neck.
A woman in a beautiful dress cries near the bathroom, consoled by another.
The bathrooms are a mess.
I take a clean length of paper towel in the bathroom and pick up wet paper towels off the ground.
I sweep up broken glass.
I bus with the other servers for a while, carrying out a few last trays of cake slices.
But the dessert table is abandoned slowly, like all else.
Check-marked.
Tried, photographed.
Eventually, the DJ announces the last shuttle, calls last call for the bar, and plays the last song.
We herd most of the people outside for the send-off.
The event coordinator and I pass out sparklers in the darkness.
We assist with long lighters.
A bridesmaid has trouble holding her sparkler in my flame.
‘Keep it together now,’ I say smiling.
‘Stopppp I’m tryingggggg,’ she says.
Then it finally erupts.
Others follow.
White/gold flames sparkle out in the night.
‘I’m gonna shove five of these up my nephew’s ass,’ says the father of the bride.
‘Thang you for this, Don,’ says another bridesmaid, red-eyed and tired, a man’s coat over her shoulders.
‘You were lovely, Krissy,’ says the father of the bride, eyeing his sparklers’ spray, taking his place in the procession.
The limo’s brake lights glow in the distance.
Moon high and full and bright.
I look up to a lit window of the reception hall, watching a coworker’s head move around.
It’s all very good.
My heart is full.
‘There they are, woooo!’ yells someone as the bride and groom exit the building.
Everyone starts to yell, holding up their sparklers.
> Loud cheering.
Waving.
Sparkling.
Kisses.
The couple walks down the sparkling path, smiling, hand in hand.
Faces kissed, shoulders patted, smiles returned.
Down the path into the limo, waving goodbye.
Everyone will talk soon.
Thank you for coming.
Attendees dump their sparklers into buckets of water, or onto the grass.
Family hugs.
‘I love you man,’ a man says after a hug. ‘One more.’
They hug again.
Dad walks Grandma arm in arm back toward the building.
She says it was a lovely party.
She’s glad she wore sensible shoes.
Someone will take her to the hotel.
When I get back inside, a few stragglers still claim the reception hall.
Decorations and bottles in hand.
Tieless.
Women shoeless.
Confused about the remainder of the mission.
‘Did we miss the uh sparkler thing?’
Who’s going where.
How do you get there.
Did you find my phone.
I think Colin has it.
A bridesmaid sways, holding her purse in both arms.
Her eyes are unfocused, accusing.
‘What are we doing?’ she says.
Sandy whispers, ‘You’re getting the fuck out of here, bitch.’
We laugh, too loud.
We follow the group out of the room, glassware in our arms.
When I pass the staircase, I hear this terrible slapping/pounding sound.
And I look down the stairs.
It’s a bridesmaid backward-somersaulting down the stairs.
She tumbles down the stairs with terrible thumps, landing at the bottom.
As her head hits the concrete floor, it makes the sound of shattering glass.
Green-tinted pieces where her head once was.
Red wine spreads across the ground.
People rush to help as the red wine spreads through the pieces.
‘I’m a nurse, back up back up,’ says someone, handing off a sleeping child.
It’s okay she’s okay just everybody back up.
A couple people help the bridesmaid up and carry her out to the shuttle and everything goes back to normal.
Shane sweeps up the broken glass into a dustpan.
Sandy asks me if she died.
‘Your mom died when I came inside her.’
She laughs hard.
She wipes her eye and says she just wants to get the fuck out of there.
Yeah.
Summer says she just wants to take off her shoes.
Says that’s all she thinks about.
Not food, booze, drugs, sex, none of that, just taking her shoes off.
Yeah.
We stack chairs, wipe tables, carry and rearrange tables, sweep, mop, collect decorations.
Everyone puts leftover flowers in their hair or buttonholes of their shirts.
We throw out name cards.
Plastic cups.
Goodbye, flowers.
Goodbye, garland.
Goodbye, candles.
Armload after armload.
Into the black plastic bags.
Yesterday’s ceremony is today’s task.
The flowers are in the trash.
The cake is gone.
All the songs over.
Sweeping the entire hall.
Electronic candles, plastic forks, some Polaroids, a few streamers, broken glass, flower parts, all swept.
Scraping wax off tables with our drivers’ licenses.
Spraying and wiping the tables.
Ears ringing from the music.
Eating leftover desserts off the dessert table.
A sinfully delectable moment.
A rotten luxury.
‘I swear I told myself if I didn’t get some of that dessert somebody had to die,’ says a coworker, staring.
Others agree.
We stand around for a second, eating dessert.
Vultures.
‘Everybody have fun tonight?’ I say.
We finish moving tables.
Stacking and unstacking chairs.
Setting up rows for tomorrow’s ceremony.
Tomorrow’s ceremony is tonight’s work.
My coworkers begin leaving one by one.
Bye.
Don’t get sex-trafficked.
I stay behind to finish mopping the staircase.
Dragging the mop side to side.
The reception hall has become cold.
Not enough bodies.
Sky outside, black, with the faint fog of some streetlight.
Town quiet.
Everyone asleep.
Shit is perfect.
AAAAAooOOOOOoooOoo.
‘Quit whackin it,’ Sandy says, coming down the staircase.
She holds out a small dessert thing she says she was saving for her girlfriend but.
‘Your mom’s my girlfriend,’ I say.
See you tomorrow.
Yeah, see you tomorrow.
*
When I get off, I go out the back exit and through the parking lot.
It’s dark and quiet.
I can see my breath.
There’s no one else out.
Just cold, wet, leaf-plastered sidewalk.
I put my hood on.
The moments between getting off work and getting home.
There’s none more powerful than I at that moment.
You can take anything that’s mine except this.
A trophy—albeit invisible—that I hold up high, on top of an infinite mountain, smiling.
End of the audition.
Freedom.
Defined by its opposite on either end.
All homes quiet for me, stars sparkling for me, the air blowing around just to touch me.
My heart welling up, eyes glowing, hair standing on end.
I turn into bats and fly away.
I become a deer and flee.
Exiting my own body as my breath and disappearing.
Reappearing as a star.
Whackin it.
I walk down the main drag of town, with its one bar, a couple antique places, and a butcher.
A couple people from the wedding smoke cigarettes in front of the bar.
Oh lord.
I pass the sole gas station, with the whoevers from wherever going wherever buying whatever for whatever.
The four-way intersection, red lights blinking at this point in the night.
Down the blocks.
What’s going on, everyone.
Halloween decorations in windows, bikes on lawns, trucks, a dead raccoon in the gutter, the night sky, black with stars.
Smell of burning leaves.
Another winter on its way.
Comforting, deep within me.
Yes.
Part of a process.
Bigger than me.
More power in the grain of one second of one of the millions and billions of days yet to happen than in a million of my lifetimes.
There is more.
There is always more than this.
I imagine Summer’s premature grandchild at the center of the earth, hooked up to a machine, making a tiny fist.
No longer dying, only just now beginning to live.
A mind, tiny lungs, a beating heart.
I shiver.
Sniff.
Think about how the coat I’m wearing was my grandpa’s.
My grandma gave it to me after he died.
I want someone to have it after I die.
I imagine snapping my fingers and the coat shrinks to very small and I put it on Summer’s premature baby and it immediately becomes very strong, flexing her way off of various machines and IVs.
My block is very quiet.
The wind blows some leaves down the street.
When I get to my apartment complex, I look at it, and it looks back.
Some units lit by TV but mostly dim or completely dark.
Yes, hello friend.
I go to put my key in the front door.
But no.
Not yet.
I can’t.
For some reason, I just can’t.
So instead, I walk around to the back of the building.
Through the field of dying lavender, lit by cobwebby moonlight.
Wind blowing.
End-of-the-world shit.
I walk toward the woods with crunching steps.
Bugs chirping and murmuring.
A red light blinking atop a powerline many miles away says yes, keep going.
It says I’ll see you there.
It says, I’m already with you.
When I get to the woods, it’s so dark I can barely see, except for one of the entrances, which is even darker.
So I walk in, stumbling a few times over roots and fallen branches.
I’m dizzy.
All kinds of things scurrying and making noise in the darkness.
But then, the moonlight adjusts, outlining branches and fallen limbs.
And I walk without direction.
Enjoying the clean, cold air.
Until I get to a clearing.
It’s a clearing I didn’t know about.
The moon above—huge, low, and bone white.
And there, in the middle of the clearing, a great stag.
Tall and proud, beautiful and strong.
With huge, sharp antlers.
Big black eyes, dewed with moon-glow.
Breathing steam.
It sees me right away, but doesn’t move, just stands there breathing.
So beautiful.
You’re so beautiful.
Just stares back, turning its head sideways to get a good look.
Yes.
I sniff.
It lowers its head, steam blowing out of its nostrils.
Snorting.
The stag begins to kick the ground a little with its front hoof.
Huffing.
But I just stand there.
Steam our only exchange.
Tension.
My ears ring in the cold dark.
Eyes watering, nose numb.
I feel enormous.
Totally enormous and free.
More than alive.
Each blood cell, a lit sparkler.
There is more than this.
And I matter absolutely, until I don’t.
One lung collapses and the other expands to help.
The wheels come off the track on a sharp turn, but we’re gonna get it right.
We’re gonna be all right.
‘Boo!’ I say.
And the stag kicks the ground one more time before running.
It runs right at me.
Sprinting, head down.
But I stand my ground.
And the horns go into my chest.