Happy People Live Here

by C. Sean McGee

9B

  The Mother sat her warm coffee easily within her reach with no reason at all as to why she hadn’t had a single sip. She had in her hands, a newspaper from last week and she was reading about an accident that had occurred the previous night, on a winding stretch of road, renowned for this kind of thing.

  Apparently, according to the article, which swore by the testimony of a late night jogger, one of the vehicles, a large truck carrying two trailers, swerved into the oncoming lane where the other vehicle, a small white sedan, was travelling with low lit lights and a young family, a husband, and wife and their three children, aged from six months through to four years.

  The jogger said he had never seen anything like it before in his life. There was no warning, no skid marks, no honking of horns. He said he was just jogging along, focusing on his breathing and trying to shift through his mp3 player to the next song because the one he was listening to, about half way through, the song started to slow right down and it was a really great effect for the song but not while you were running. It meant that his head and his heart and his legs, they all followed the half time and then the half time again and again until he almost looked like he was in flight on the lunar surface, throwing all of his stride into just a mere weightless bound.

  And it was near around the time it took him to unclip his player from his belt and focus his eyes on the colored screen that his attention was caught by swerving lights ahead. That was when he looked up and he swore to the journalists that his own gasp was just as loud as the bang from the truck hitting the front of the sedan and then driving on top of it and then the sound its wheels made, when they landed back on the road, unbroken and still driving.

  The article said that the family died instantly, that they wouldn’t have felt a thing, especially the children. The jogger, he swore the same thing and it seemed more comforting coming from him because he was there and he would know.

  The Mother closed her eyes and imagined herself opening them again and looking to her side at the man she loved and he looking back at her, the man who loved her as much as she, him. And behind them, kicking his feet away against the back of The Father’s seat was Callum, speaking in his own strange dialect, his mother and father smiling amorously, he cursing them, for having chosen his least favorite suit. And beside Callum, strapped into the other seat, Korine, she sleeping with her head tilted to the side and her mouth drawn wide, catching more air than her little nostrils ever could; looking just like her father.

  In her imagination, The Mother pressed her hand onto The Father’s leg and squeezed tight, feeling a shiver of completion running through her body and a sudden unquenchable urge to earth it somehow, by caressing the man she loved or by nibbling on the kicking feet of the boy, now in a fit of laughter in the back seat.

  This family was hers.

  And they were undivided.

  And then, when she turned back to the road, she saw the lights of the truck and it didn’t seem like there was much time for anything. And for anyone watching there probably wouldn’t have been, maybe enough time to flick a song or to pull a muscle or to shout something fitting like, “Oh shit.”

  In the car, though, looking into the lights, everything seemed to go really slow. And it might have been because they were about to die or it might have been because it was The Mother’s imagination, and she wanted this part to go on forever, just because after what had happened, after the accident, she kind of felt like this every waking second and when she did manage to fall asleep, she dreamt about strange Japanese restaurants and having an affair, with the crippled owner.

  The Mother cut around the article. She was ever so careful not to cut out of line or crooked in any way. And she kept a nice distance, between the edge of the paper and the column of words. When she was done, when she had that memory in her hands, of the young family, dying together and remaining undivided, not having to live another second, begging to a god they didn’t believe in, to give something back that he swore that in the first place, he never fucking took.

  The Mother looked around at all the windows in the apartment and out onto the balcony. They were all wired and meshed and they were made of such a strong material that even if someone were to try and cut it with a knife or with scissors, they wouldn’t be able to. So she wouldn’t be able to put herself with him. She wouldn’t be able to put herself under that warm gleaming light, no matter how hard she wished.

  She rested the article on the table, on the right side, next to the scissors and a stick of glue, the kind that schools give to children, that doesn’t make you sick and doesn’t make a giant mess. The Mother had liquid glue, but she didn’t like it. It was more for art projects, like sticking colored feathers onto butcher’s paper. If it was used on delicate things, though, like the article she cut out or a photo or something, it would get all gluggy and it would smear and wrinkly whatever was being glued and it would stick sure, but it would look like something a first grader had done, no matter how careful you were.

  The Mother stretched her arms out really far and she took carefully, like she would a crying baby, a diary that had been colored black with a big black marker and that had something scratched into the front cover, maybe her name, maybe not. It might have said “Private” or “Keep out.” It was hard to tell on account of the cover being all black and the fact that it wasn’t written with a pen at all. It had been scratched with someone’s nail.

  The Mother flicked through the pages slowly. Normally, when she was reading a newspaper or her favorite magazine, for example, she would lick her index finger and rub it against her thumb, so that it would grip the corners of the pages but not so wet that it would make them soggy or dog-eared. But normally wasn’t all the time. Normally was just what people did without having to think too much or break their stride. It wasn’t always, or without fail.

  Because sometimes, people did things, different things, things that people wouldn’t expect them to do; things that people would never imagine that they did and they’d be shocked to hear about it if anyone ever found out. These were just things that people did, things to help them put up with the endlessness of the ‘normally’ and the ‘most of the times’.

  The Mother turned each page slow, listening to the crinkling sound of every page, sounding like her cracking bones as she stretched in bed every morning. She didn’t lick her finger. She didn’t want to. Instead, she rested the length of her index finger against the edge each page, in the middle, so the pages wouldn’t bend or crumple. She looked at each picture briefly, in the same adoring light that she had looked at pictures of her younger self.

  She stayed on each page only long enough to hear Callum’s laugh but not long enough for it to echo in her thoughts. And she turned each page slowly with article after article of sadness and tragedy and it was only now, now that she was living in her own that she could see how much tragedy there was in the world. And she wondered how people could overlook it so easily, how they just assume the best and badger one another over politics or sport or worse yet, like her husband, jerking off to disgusting pornography every night, as if she wouldn’t be able to find out.

  When she was pregnant with Korine, before the intervention and before the surgery, The Mother was always amazed by how she started to see pregnant women everywhere she went. And she swore at first that it was some universal conspiracy, only weeks before, she swore there were no pregnant women in her building and then, after finding out for sure, it was like wherever she looked, she saw a pregnant woman.

  And it was the same when Korine was born. She saw young families like she and The Father, dotting over their first borns and promising to change everything, to be nothing like their own mothers and fathers and to be more human, to make up for what that fucking hospital had done.

  And then, she saw more women like her, women having been made victims by cold and calculable medicine, their bodies ripped and torn apart and their dignity, the worst to suffer, being shushed into woeful condescendence by nurses and mo
thers and fathers friends, who would become old and bitter just as soon because they had no fucking idea and they never would.

  And it seemed, at that time, that there was a great deal of violence in the world, aside from what was written about, that behind closed doors, under a veil of academia, there was a particular kind of cruelty that as still in fashion; a particular kind of violence against women and discord towards life. And it seemed that this violence – this violation, this rape - it was indeed quite ubiquitous and it was ne’er spoken of as much as it was shouted and rallied upon, deaf indifference.

  And then, when Callum was conceived, she too saw more women like herself and more families like own. And so different were not her ideals, but her thoughts and her feelings, that she would not have recognized the ‘herself’ from the day before, were they to cross tangents.

  And when Callum was born, in a pool by the end of her bed, she found once more, so many women like herself, loved by supporting men like The Father, understanding love and birth and humanity in a way that her mother and her father and her siblings and cousins and her friends too, the many she had left by the wayside, that had become invisible along this conscious acid trip of life, in a way that none of them could ever feel, see, imagine or conceive, let alone accept as being anything less than reckless or demented.

  And then, when Callum died, it seemed too that tragedy, her kind of tragedy, it was everywhere and it too had its own unique following. And it too was not looked upon or spoken about and it was hushed and swept into submitting silence with blank condoling stares. But everywhere The Mother looked, she found women like herself. She found their hurt. She found their sympathy.

  It was as if the universe were a lens that she wore and that her heart and soul were an ever changing filter that twisted and turned and showed her dimension after dimension that most, ‘happy people’, had no idea that in fact existed.

  Page after page in her black diary, The Mother turned and held a moment, remembering something about Callum each and every time. Always something that nobody else would have ever noticed - something that nobody else would ever assume to remember. These were the things that she remembered about her boy.

  The diary was filled with stories of accidents and drownings and kidnappings and vanishings and countless tales of the infinitely short bridge between life and death. And when she came to somewhere near the end of the book, The Mother took the clipping beside her and gently rolled the stick of glue along the back in long even and light strokes so as not to soil the article. Then she pressed it gently onto the next blank page and rested her palm over the words and the picture of the crumpled car, slowly bring her hand down the page as if she were closing her child’s dying eyes.

  And she took her coffee finally, and there were no more lines of steam rising in to the air. It was barely tepid, nearing on cold. And she cupped it with both hands as if it was anything but, blowing the imaginary steam from the lip of the cup – a normal thing that she did, even if it was a silly thing to do.

  And as The Mother sipped her tepid coffee, she stared at her diary.