Happy People Live Here

by C. Sean McGee

Happy People Live Here

  By

  C.SeanMcGee

  Happy People Live Here

  Copyright© Cian Sean McGee

  CSM Publishing

  ‘TheFreeArtCollection’

  Araraquara, Brazil 2014

  First Edition

  All rights reserved. This ebook may be copied, distributed, reposted, reprinted and shared, provided it appears in its entirety without alteration, the reader is not charged to access it and the downloader or sharer does not attempt to assume any part of the work as their own.

  All artwork and layout by c.seanmcgee

  Editing by AnnaVanti

  Support independent art before it cuts off its own ear

  For Keli, Nenagh and Tomás

  I love you.

  9B

  “You’re doing it all wrong, you know that don’t you?”

  Balancing on his teetering toes, The Father stretched himself to the farthest corner of the open window and as he did, reaching his right hand up towards a bending hook, his eyes caught sight of a light smudge on the wall beside his left knee. It looked like it had seen the passing of a child’s hand.

  “We should just get someone to do it before we mess it up,” The Mother said.

  She said ‘we’.

  But she really meant ‘you’.

  She did things like that.

  It wasn’t that The Father had willingly adopted silence. It was just that, whenever she spoke, and whenever he was moved to respond, nothing ever came out. There was, he was sure, something that he wanted to say. But when he spoke, there was nothing but the sound of sweat being blown from his upper lip by his heavy, musky breath.

  His mouth, though, it would open like mouths normally did. And his tongue, it would recede with the swirl of air that he took as if some great quaking fracture in his belly were about to unleash a swell upon his wife’s placid, differing shore.

  And from his mossy and jagged stonewall of indifference, he would lurch in his belly and cast his shoulders forward, but it would be as if his line were caught on some great weight, some thick and mangled weed, something from which he could not see, reach or untangle himself, for in the end, not a word would pass his lips.

  Not a word.

  And barely a sound.

  Just the passing of a spent breath, carrying a single bead of sweat.

  The Mother stood under the arch of the doorway, leaning as she always did with her left shoulder resting upon the frame and her feet so comfortably crossed; right over left. She watched The Father as the lines on his neck twisted and turned while his hands ripped and pulled the nylon netting over the unevenly placed hooks around the outside of the window.

  And as she stared, so hardened upon the afternoon light that drew upon her husband’s shoulders, her hands busied themselves, apparently on their own, tracing the outline of two brightly colored cotton wings and a soft button nose, one that flickered lightly under her picking fingernail, having already started to come apart from the fabric.

  And it wouldn’t be long now. It wouldn’t be long until that fine thread frayed. Until, neath her loitering stare, it all came undone. But still, she couldn’t help herself. It was just a thing. And things, well they could be tricky to get a handle on.

  “You’re supposed to put that other bit through and pull it tight. That’s what makes it tight and holds it to the window.”

  She was suggesting to a long piece of string that was curled by The Father’s feet. And he knew what she meant. He would have told her too, had he the use of his tongue. Instead, his mouth just opened and closed once more, like a dying fish, gasping, not for a breath of air, but for something to hook itself to, to drag it back under the waters, a hundred thousand leagues from where its attention was now being sported.

  “I don’t know why you’re even bothering,” she said.

  The Father turned and his eyes looked as heavy and as hollow as hers. His arms - just as heavy as his eyes - hanged still and departed by the sides of his body. Only in his left index finger was there the hint of a man being alive as it lightly twitched and tapped against the side of his leg as if his heart were executing its escape through his one good hand.

  They both stared at one another.

  At and through one another.

  “I spoke with her doctor,” said The Father. “He called this morning while you were sleeping.”

  It was The Mother now, who drew long breaths, and in doing so, shifted her sight, aside of The Father’s stillness to the smudge that had also taken hostage of his attention as he affixed the nylon netting to the white window frame. The Mother stared as heavy into the light smudge as The Father did, into her avoidance.

  “Her doctor, he said we should think about some kind of a party like I said… It’s her…”

  The Mother’s eyes were sewn to the odd smudge on the wall below the window frame. She heard what The Father said and she knew, what, at the end of his stutter, he was meaning to say, but just couldn’t. There were a lot of things it seemed that could not be put into words.

  “I think it’s a good idea. I mean, I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not. Her doctor thinks…”

  “So what, we celebrate? Put up streamers and balloons? You want me to dress like a clown? Is that it? Just act like nothing happened? I don’t care what her doctor thinks” said The Mother. “I’m not ready.”

  She closed her eyes and imagined everything dark and absent; everything except for the light smudge along the wall, beneath the white wooden window frame.

  “You know she has no idea what’s going on?” said The Father.

  “That doesn’t change anything.”

  “She’s only four.”

  The Mother picked at the button nose and did so in such torturous vigor, that the sound of her long nails flicking of the rounded edges swamped the virtue of her husband’s voice, echoing in her mind.

  “I know how old she is. She’s my daughter. And I know what’s right or wrong for and with my daughter. I just don’t care, ok” she shouted, digging her nail beneath the button nose, almost severing the loosely wound thread. “I don’t care. I know all of it. I just, I don’t care. And I don’t wanna see her. Not now. Not…” she said.

  “When? Not now? When then? When she’s five? Sixteen? When she’s someone different? When she’s not our little girl anymore?”

  “She’s not our little girl anymore” shouted The Mother.

  “She’s still our little girl” shouted The Father. “She’s four years old for fuck’s sake. She’s four years old. Four fucking yea…” he mumbled, his words shattering in his trembling mouth and melting into the flood of tears that rained down from his overcast eyes. “She’s still…”

  The Father pushed passed The Mother. He didn’t push her or lay a hand upon her. They had never come to violence. Not once. Even though, from a distance, it may have sounded like it, they had never once tempted with it. They vented, but they would never hurt one another, not physically anyway.

  Little surprise was it then that they had found themselves so foreign and without expression, in trying to deconstruct it, now that violence had found them.

  “It was an accident” shouted The Father. “She doesn’t know what happened.”

  The Mother continued picking at the button nose but this time, without a fervor swelling at the tips of her long and curling fingers. She did so, not in childlike play, but as in how a drunk might turn, as they wait upon their roiled thirst, a freshly laid coaster up on its pointed end. Or how a young girl might pick and pull, as her attention absconds from her dull and shouting parents, at the dried skin upon her upper lip.

  The Mother ran her nail against the last thread. She pulled the button nose high s
o that the thread wound tight, of which she strummed with her whetted nail. But before it could cut loose, a gentle turn of her finger brought the thread back so that the button nose balanced between her finger and the soft butterfly held in her two hands.

  “You didn’t do it right,” she said. “It’s uneven.”

  denial