Ch 11 part 1 – An Avalanche in Antarctica

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Chapter Eleven – An Avalanche in Antarctica part 1

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Ashley’s words hit my ears like Hiroshima.  I was not there.  Not in the direct ground-zero, but I was in that radius out.  Each syllable had a megaton-fueled wave that was undulating on the horizon.  Each letter was a scale on an approaching yellow and orange fire-snake leviathan burrowing under and out of the ground sucking in green lawns and buildings.   The Kraken’s appetite would only be satiated by the gross blue-whale-like capricious consumption of my entire body as a single slinking krill. 

My skin irradiated numb.  I was a chemically-changed organism evolved under a hybrid bastard-fuck-child of Darwin and God sitting on that pallid porch in the gilded-touch of those words.  I felt like a pigeon.  I looked Ashley straight in the eye for a triad of seconds to an arbitrary count netting in just how serious Ashley was before I turned my breast plate to the fence.  I saw the crow fly off, call out and wheel around in the air. 

I passed my tongue over the lead taste of the screw to my leftmost dental implant.  My tongue passed circling as if I could taste the metallic non-biological anomaly.  Ashley’s words came out like grenades exploding in mid-air bludgeoning my own.  The shrapnel seemed to be magnetized to my dental foreigners.  My tongue was stuck incapable of detaching and forming a sentence.  The oral organ was an anchor lodged under an orca carcass pasted in the depths not yet consumed by angelsharks and tubeworms.

My vocal cavity was incapacitated.  A tear welled and unhinged from the duct.  The drip passed like a second grader walking home from school under the same route every day without the teacher asking why.  Humans assumed an authority figure was waiting with applesauce and milk somewhere within a pace-able distance.  I looked back up at Ashley.  With the trickle of optical lubrication to oil the valve, I uttered a garbled low-toned spew of, “No, I don’t understand.  What happened? What do you mean?”  I knew.  From the first second of impact, I knew, there was nothing I could say. 

I knew from the very genetic and environmental construction of the woman that I married all counter weaponry to apply a counterpoint was moot.  For if there was a space for such a convincing polemic the aperture had closed in the blink of the camel’s eye innocuous and far-removed from this bleached porch-time.  Somewhere in Ashley’s contemplative conclusion to form and emit these words, out under the rug wherever they may have gone before now into this outer world of potential conjecture and consequence, Ashley had sealed the stone of the tomb.  There was no reprieve, dear Sisyphus.

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My words were met by Ashley with, “We should go inside.  The neighbors can hear us.”  I left my half-drunk beer on the shadowed green porch table.  I closed the French door behind me and slunk at its base in tears behind one of the sofas.  Ashley sat on the opposing sofa and did not say much.  I told Ashley, “I know you love me.  You love me.  I know you do.  Don’t do this.”  I balled up with my buttocks to the door and my head between my knees.

I stared up at Ashley with precipitation streaking on my mirrored lenses.  I looked at Ashley with an echoing why a thousand Marianas-meters deep.  Ashley could not stare into the crevasse anymore.  The feeling of Ashley’s reaction in that space was like Ashley taking the plate of reflective glass right off my face.  She broke it over her kneecap in a thrust of hands descending and patella rising while staring at the ceiling fan.  The glittering shards spread into a million pieces like an acid-rain of silver mackerel scales cast across our living room.  The fragments were like rancid confetti-rice at a funeral for a wedding day.  Ashley would never look at it again.

Ashley let out a singular, “I do not want to hurt you.  I am sorry. I know I am going to go hell for this.”  I told her, “We were supposed to grow old together.” I reached out my hand as if the geriatric-arthritic limitations of time had run dry and my bones could no longer stretch across a beeping room.  Penelope’s preschool artwork sat on the counter.  Ashley’s pittance of convalescent words punctured our hull wider. 

Ashley’s butter pat of Catholic kindness was served on a yellow-fever Indian picnic blanket paired with hemlock wine and donkey ham.  The meal pierced my stomach like a flock of armored toxic mosquitoes toting jagged-barbed blades hooked for the extraction landing in concert on the helipad of my abdomen.  The foul-chutney was a swarming sucker-punch.  The air was pummeled out of me.  The bugs severed my skin into a circled path unlocking my belly button to my entrails in a convex convulsion of flesh.  Heaving, twisting; the tug of war unfurling my guts out into our living room.

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Ashley’s sentences stunned my brain into numb shock.  My intestines were swashed around like sausage-links swirled like a garden-house around her ankles.  And out come her words like wolves from the den in scattered emotional ball-bearings rolling across the hard-wood flooring.  A pack of words uncoiled like sprung-traps of dizzy-days peppered in consequence exploding, some idle, some futile, some bitter. 

I hated myself for this oblivion.  This wretched coring burrowed like a plunger of nothingness.  It spiraled in pumping its pistons and extracting everything that I ever hoped for or had faith.  The syllables decorated the oak boards like an indoor rainstorm weather pattern beyond my choice.

This honey-oak floor was plastered in poke-a-dot hale stone crimson.  The normally placid surface serviced as a temporary landing space for miniature menageries, doctor kits, coloring contests and daddy-back rides.  Tonight it was for an exorcism of trust for the high-priestess in high-heels.  This was a no-anesthesia marital circumcision to chop the whole fucking organ. 

Ashley uttered her chants in as few syllables as possible to segregate any last molecule of concern from her body.  Ashley let the deed cascade down onto the floor boards to intermix and hide-out in the crowd of waste matter left of me.  I waited to be squished like grapes between her toes.  Pluck my eyeballs.  Unstitch my scrotum.  I was deformed dick-less. 

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Chaos and confusion battled for supremacy.  The mood was like trying to herd in renegade-sheep back to the fences.  Ashley kept pulling out her chainsaw to shred gaps in the gates.  The moon kept rising.  I kept searching for the luminous-lunar shadow to sketch a recollection of Ashley’s silhouette upon my memory to illuminate the corral.  I wanted one last keepsake for the road before my face heaved in purple solitude.

Quasimodo was raped.  A hunchback sat up in the tower ignorant and free waiting for the sunrise of her sweetness.  The memory of my rapist would grow to haunt my private times like a sadistic intruder.  I should have seen this coming.

Ashley’s dreams were like quests of testaments to our inverted priority-lists that I yearned to map out into golden-years.  Ashley’s other plans she stored in her parent’s basement mocked me like a high school prank to elect the nerd home-coming king.  Quasimodo always knew Esmeralda was only visiting.  One day the bell tower might ring, the congregation would exit.  A man would stand up straight.  Tonight the church was burning. 

The ramifications of Ashley parceled-penitent rap expunged her last morsel of remorse.  Her last drops of concern secreted from her veins like a twisted washcloth out into an open sink.  The red spiral swirled into an ethereal end.  It was no longer hers to contend with as a counterweight to its genesis on a taint to the blood flow of her preceding actions. 

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The separation was complete in a blink after a decade of soul-mates shipped-out and sailed-through the corporate thunder, the hurricane, and the rebuilding refrains. 

We were out into clear waters.  Mutiny was afoot as I hung my hammock.  Ashley ripped holes in the hanging canvas and set fire to the mast.  Ashley rowed my guts to shore not like a marauding victor, but as victim. 

For who can know what or how a husband and wife speak within their living room.  Back in her father’s house, this blood on her palms could transubstantiate into her own, smeared from her loins, and her belly bursting with my recalcitrant abominations of abuse as Lifetime-movie wife.

I told Ashley, “I do not know why you are doing this, but we are married.  I do not know what you want, but I will never get an annulment.”  I separated myself into the bedroom to try to collect myself.  I was crying like a jilted-girl impregnated on prom night.  I laid down on the oak boards parallel to the ground, four-feet up staring at a pickup truck’s approaching headlamps slicing through the front porch banister rails coming through the curve through the French door window glass of our bedroom.  I did not want a pillow, just a moment. 

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The night out there was drizzling.  I grabbed my Saints fleece and went for a walk.  The weather blended me in onyx ink.  My pace was concrete-sludge for a defunct machine-brain.  All I could hear was the sound of the Amtrak-train horn passing through Nottoway perpendicular to Main Street out in the darkness riding that edge-rail out of town.

I came back into the house.  Ashley was business-like discussing logistical instructions of what was going to happen.  Ashley wanted me to go to a hotel.  I was building frosty-men in the snow to divorce.  Cities melt in minutes. 

Ashley never used the word divorce.  The feelings of emotional disconnection made me oblivious to legal consequence.  We never talked about divorce before.  We never really even argued much. 

Like a medieval intruder who decapitates your horse with a broadsword on her way into your home, I was not dead yet, but my options for safe departure were limited.  Ashley wanted me gone.  No steed in the stable, just get the fuck out.  I was of indecent lineage for a Nottoway kingdom.

I told Ashley, “I am not leaving.  Stay here. This is our home. Let’s go to counseling to talk about this.”  Ashley was impervious, armored, said no to the counseling and left out the side Dutch door of the porch into her parent’s walled-asylum.  Penelope was with the Hingle’s.  I was in no state to see or speak or care for her.  I sat crying for an indeterminate hold, fetal and sheepish to assume any sort of declarative assessment or a hoof towards progression from this nadir.

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Surreal and numb abounded.  I called my mother Sara lying on the floor with my mane mashing my left ear staring at the back door.  My arms were useless to propel movement.  Sustenance and direction were null.  My mother was in shock, “Do you want me to come?  I want to come.”  I told her not to. 

There was nothing a parent could do here.  All my mother could do was offer sentiment of how sorry she was for me like a blanket-ghost of disbelief crowding the room.  I crawled into my side of the bed and tried to fall asleep.

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Christmas was still coming.  When I woke like Bukowski said “in the morning it was morning and I was still alive.”  The tree was erect. The ornaments hung.  The wreaths sat vigil on every banister encircling the house.  Rooms were empty, motionless, pensively beckoning, beguiled with cogitations of Santa. 

What now for these spaces created from air on a slab, pointed out to a daughter that this cube of sky would be her room?  Arrogantly assumed siblings leave ghost bed sheets un-tucked.  Curtains of blue or pink or punk-rock black and green, no need to segregate bathrooms by gender or assimilate divergent parental attention fonts.  None of that was destined for those rooms, at least not for my family. 

Every four-by-two bone of lumber bracing the frame reminded me of Ashley.  Every step planted upon the porch; refracted light-beam bouncing off a plank, her shed-hair-everywhere-diabetes-filled cat, inch of wall space that I had a plan for, every photograph left behind in a drawer were all decaying mementos.

The house was like living in the joint-corpse of my widow and this invading enemy.  A kidnapper came in a swoop, bound and gagged my wife, raped her in front of my eyes, hurled her into a trunk and drove off.  Ten minutes later an opalescent apple-faced woman returned nary a scratch or twinge-change in diction or accent.  The doppelganger entered the Dutch door of this house and challenged my very presence as criminal.  It was always her.

I had no Eric Draven Crow-powers.  I was to leave; to have police come and escort me in-cuffs.  I no longer had cohabitation rights.  This woman appeared identical, yet internally she was like going from Schwarzenegger in James Cameron’s “Terminator Two,” back to “Terminator” one and this Nottoway world calls me crazy for calling out the difference.

I had to go to work.  I had to pretend.  Henry, Derrick; there was no one worth telling now.  I dodged our Christmas party at the same seafood restaurant Huckabee has it at every year the Friday night that I left for Memphis.  My brain was impaired as an engine with no transmission, one gear and no reverse.  One day at a time life had begun.

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Day three Ashley answered her phone.  I left a message about counseling.  Ashley said she would go.  Day four I called the only names I could find over the internet.  The soonest Dr. Akins could see us was in a week.  Ashley refused to talk to me.  Email blanked.  I lived a septet of days in silence. 

On a Wednesday at eleven a.m. I left work.  I went to En Christo Counseling.  The office had no receptionist just one guy with stalls of empty rooms with piled up silverfish boxes.  Dr. Akins had one office and a cluttered waiting room with Highlights magazines, Jesus on the wall and Goodwill toys.  Ashley arrived late. 

Dr. Akins asked us our goals: to try to save our marriage versus help him get through this.  A coaxed Ashley proceeded to say that I was a bitter person.  I do not smile enough.  Nobody wants to be around me.  I am not positive enough.  I keep other people away from me. 

Those were Ashley’s reasons for ending our marriage in a compact, shrink-wrapped sanitary husbandly diuretic.  Ashley said she had tried to talk to me, but they were the core of who I was.  Ashley concluded that I would have to completely change as a human being for me to stay with her. 

I tried to relate to Ashley’s concerns, her basis to end our marriage.  This dearth of external exuberance cast a misanthropic man equating to cruelty.  The man she chose to marry still pulsed in my muted larynx.  I felt that Ashley was exploiting and exaggerating the weaker parts of my personality into rationalizations for her current choice.

Ashley was projecting her inability to communicate and blaming it on my introverted rather than extroverted nature.  Ashley and I had almost opposite roles inside our marriage than we did in public.  Ashley was bubbly with the outer world as her mother’s daughter and would shut me out in our inner dominion when emotional intimacy became uncomfortable.  Ashley reverted to her father’s daughter. 

I did not seek out random banter or hunger for small-talk as my father’s son.  My inner life was a facebook post to filtered friends as my mother’s son.   If you knew me, you knew.  What would happen if the parents of a couple were married to their spouse’s opposite gendered parent?  Sara with Hilton; Timothy with Lacey; seems a cluster-culture-communication catastrophe.  Either/or had become neither/nor.

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World, best friend, lover, the only reason I acquired a cell phone: Ashley was religion for teenage nights of dark-green dresses stitched silence; notebooks bursting with poetry had purpose. 

A mulato, an albino, a mosquito, my libido; my confidence reverted to a high-school bartered currency.  Poker table insecurity was a weapon; a switchblade to flip-out and taunt me to be that bitter butter-ball of man alone listening to Counting Crows songs and Metallica praying that something other than lonely was possible.  Except this time Ashley had all my chips.

I was in transition from the removal of my foundation; of my conduit to those avenues which effectively transported the labyrinths of my rabbit form, this warren of pockets and tunnels to the hare-hole to peek out into my environment.  That blowhole of air for this leopard seal was gone.  This winter was icing over.  I had no narwhal tusk.  The very perception that I may not be able to hold my breath the required duration to find an alternative access to this elixir of oxygen itself was becoming questionable by the hour.

I was a corporation that neglected to hedge his risk with proper derivative assurances based on of all misguided contractual-pricing arrangements as having faith in love.  My wife was blasting me for my lack of diversification in my friend-customer database; the quality of my suppliers.  I wrote financial statement footnotes on concentrations: vendors, products, regional, and commodities.  I should have known to list wife; and yet did and yet loved.

Ashley described a psychological malady in need of treatment.  I was an anti-social elephant-man.  My years of internal self-analysis must be a sign of deformity or cancer.  Ashley’s actions were intended aid for me to rectify a lymphoma-stricken body into a well-adjusted solitary man.  This world required changes my own introspective-Geiger counter was blind to detect. 

Ashley conveyed, because the essence of my humanity was functionally incapable of adapting to this Nottoway world or any of them in New Orleans, Dallas, or wherever, I would be equally doomed to be this ascetic troll-hermit of man.  How do you transform Charles Bukowski into Ed Sullivan? 

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Did I need to join Rotary or tell better jokes at parties?  Could Ashley not fathom that I could be comfortable enough in my own skin to not require daily showers of jovial discourse with a world frothing with oblivious people that never understood a damn thing I said?  Could Ashley comprehend that I could be happy with parceled meals; a self weight-watcher, content with vitamin-enriched bird food, not asking for Whoppers or Big Macs?

With some people all I see are sewer pipes emitting bullshit in replicated auditory samples.  I keep searching for someone willing to speak genuinely.  I see sloths on speed sucking down five-hour energy shots, on cell phones in fast-food drive-through lanes in ride-high fear and gas glutton S.U.V.’s, chucking carts full of plastic alien-consumables in a Wal-Mart checkout line, listening to Clear Channel playlists, watching romantic comedies devoid of what love is and action adventures devoid of honest heroism.

What does it take for Superman to be brave?  How much love is required for a supermodel and a professional athlete to fake-fuck on screen?  How do we even have a right to complain about the cost of healthcare with pig troughs on every corner for sodium-sugar-saturated hybrids and Big Pharma lab-rat pellets dispensed in roll-on-up baggies?  What is a parent worth who spends more time texting American Idol votes then helping her child with homework?  How can we complain about our government, our media, our health, our entertainment, when no one wants to pay for an honest script?

I see CNN, Fox News ALERTs BREAKING NEWS screen crawls barking out regurgitated bites like Dewey-newspaper victories for the pigeon populace.  Zombie gawkers drool at fructose-preservative news like traffic accidents of celebrity tripe, black-box recorded aghast outrage at twitter feeds, pimping 911 firemen like flagpole stripper-prostitutes for Americana-fetishes to maximize profits on erectile dysfunction ad-spots.  Moms and dads run carpools with Rhiana, Katy Perry fuck-me STD-training-kit music as boys and girls pile in Hummers with strap on sentimentalities in synthetic-porn humanity.  Africa starves.  Our crack-whore in-debt economy drowns salivating over iPhone aps and KFC.

Show me a woman juggling a real life, no make-up and stretch-marks proud of her soul glistening.  Show me a woman harboring an artistic passion within her panted breathes swirled in exhaled deposits upon the canvas of this existence that strives to crush each grain of originality between the millstones.  Show me a man that is emotionally expressive with his children, his wife; that is relentless on both ends of the spectrum to pause to say no to the be-all paycheck trophy-head for his wall. 

Turn down the F350-diesel hauling nothing but one set of balls, not counting the truck nuts.  Reject the my puppet-God knows best default.  Pass the brute-wrath punch to a fellow-face in reaction.  Never buy the my Christmas gift will be bigger than your Christmas gift dick-measurement Jesus-got nothing to do with it jizz-faced America. 

Show me humility with a passionate strength.  I will show you men and women I wish to converse.  They are everywhere.  I know it to be, stifled in silence behind the commotion of commercials for everything other than original.  My people are slamming poetry, investigating facts, occupying streets, and embracing human interconnection.  My people are numerator thinkers and denominator doers functioning in unison.

The other fuckers, maybe as Bukowski said, “I don't hate them.  I just feel better when they're not around.”  “I wasn’t a misanthrope and I wasn’t a misogynist, but I like being alone.”  

Maybe I could relate to that with many people, not most, but many.  Maybe I found most people boring.  Maybe I never discovered how to have faith, to give people a chance to befriend.  Maybe physical appearance was a taunting inefficient infantile rudimentary concession to dating that I found infinitely fraudulent to my labyrinth objectives founded behind an oral blockade.  Maybe that is why I was confounded and beguiled by courtship.

Maybe Bukowski was a God damn novelty act; chock full of shtick, profiteering off self-loathing.  Maybe Chinaski was another disposable Jesus.  Then again, you gotta love the cantankerous curmudgeon, Holden Caulfield’s geriatric destiny.  The dirty old fuck had pubes full of crabs and balls or at least my mouth felt like he had balls.  What the fuck did I know?  I was just another plagiarist pirate surfing synthetic patent-expired originality hoping for a moment of clarity without resorting to a needle, a highball or a shot of penicillin.

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Why does so much of this world stamp insanity in red ink on their forehead like shaving cream or lipstick in repetitive idiocracy?  Just get the fucking tattoo already and own up to what you believe in so I can avoid you.  Maybe I should get my own and be a suicide man.  Maybe I need to find a suicide girl.  Maybe there is a darkness on me that will never scrub off.  Sick the dogs on this tainted monster and tear this flesh with canine incisors as if it were graspable within a tangible sheath. 

I am not a country or a city mouse.  I am a sewer nutria vagabond, native to nowhere eschewed as a nuisance.  All I smell is shit exploding from innumerable orifices gallivanting sidewalks, deli counters and defunct video rental stores.  Extinction seems preferable than disappearing wetlands.  Soak me in the spill.  Claw me in the hurricane

I pledge no resistance.  My arms saddle in invisible holsters, my legs in invisible stirrups.  I bite the curb to clog this dumb mouth.  Scatter my remaining teeth like rose petals on a bedspread for the indulgence of your apathy towards my dismay.  I pray to remain like Mohandas in this shroud of who I can not help be inside this insulation of a neither-hell paradigm of inconsolable pantomime of social distortion clinging to my will to rationalize my stature. 

I love you anyway.  I turn this cheek.  Love me back? Ha!  I do not even grip the gall to request such indulgences.  Just know me.  See me.  Do not distort.  I have always been this man you married.  See my essence.  Know that we do not need to be the same to be capable of love.  Of all the oblivious people I avoided in this world, you were not one of them.  Now you are their ring leader.  I missed my wife, but I wanted my best friend more at the moment.

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How could everyone not see this damnation cloud that was falling out of me?  The powder-keg of what is right and wrong was exploding.  The thoughts of what I held dear must be jettisoned.  Maybe I was alone in pitch batting at my own shadow.  Maybe I knew nothing at all.  Maybe I was the fucking asshole.  Maybe I should not have let my mother-in-law select my employer or the upstairs toilet I shit and jerked off into for two years awaiting a reprieve from in-law purgatory.

Maybe I was happy with who I thought Ashley was.  Maybe Ashley claimed to have tried over and again and I never saw it because I was happy with a peanut and a pea and one mattress.  Maybe that was all I needed.  Maybe I should have adopted alcoholism to be more like her father?  I’d be purposeful and a lovely enough dog to save.

Maybe God made me this way to persevere the shit flush.  Maybe I was going insane.  Maybe forever is a relative concept.  Maybe I should funnel whiskey or start shooting heroin.  Maybe I was a vampire in an open air pit waiting for sunrise.  Maybe answers are simple.  Maybe some trains never come.

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I am a cactus of a man, proud and tall in my deprivation.  I suffer well. I did not need to like everyone or to like me. The cotton-mind fuckers with sham-deaths Bukowski saw could fuck off.  Eat, shit, masturbate, brush teeth, piss, sleep, work.  Complain about the thermostat, parking, sprawl traffic, and Applebee’s burgers.  Don’t spill the garbage cans of piss and vomit.

Maybe this thirst for acceptance was the greatest canyon between Ashley and me.  The Mojave valley of first-world problems between need and want expanded with these nights in Nottoway.  Months, years, seasons of drought can be endured simply by choosing to savor what I can control over what I can not.  Frankl knew.  I could not help but be this prickly pear, desert, city or delta.  I tried to grow as me with an un-severable dignity.  It could always be worse.

Proper masculine doctrine was followed; show no need, be self-sufficient, self-sustaining, show no weakness, provide, provide, provide.  I asked myself, “How did Ashley ever open her azalea to show a need for me?  How can a marriage survive when the only vulnerability emitted comes from a single man standing?”  I saw a desert rose.  Ashley saw me as a toxic pollinator.  This bee went extinct waiting for her petals to unfurl.

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Ashley instructed Dr. Akins, “Here are Ethan’s issues.  Muddle them.  No matter what Ethan says I am only here for Ethan to fix Ethan.  Not to talk about our marriage.”  I was caught trying to keep Ashley talking to possibly progress to some form of reconnection.  No matter how many blows, the isolation of the previous rattler-pit of coiled days was worse.  Ashley’s terms required another week to communicate again.  

I did not want to invalidate the few feelings Ashley was expressing.  Ashley seemed emotional, but in no way did I misconstrue her duct leaks as hope or remorse, rather rationalization.  I barely spoke.  No one said a word about Ashley’s issues.  The doctor asked me to list ways I could address Ashley’s concerns.  At the house, I made a detached catalogue in business-school robot response correlated with Ashley’s management focal-points.

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A week more of nothing, how do you write a paragraph about a measure of time that existed only in silence? 

The house was like its own Antarctica.  I sat isolated in icicle shame bartering next to an invisible vigilant drinking buddy in a snowed-in hotel.  I was too afraid to keep whiskey on the grounds.  The Shining’s Jack Torrance stared at me like a renegade-phantom enabler.  I asked, “Can I ever retire from this career of debate?  Is there a defined benefit plan for this?” 

Lloyd the bartender served us drinks that sat until evaporation.  Tell the hedge-maze animals to keep dancing outside.  I wanted to pretend I still had a family out there in the snow.  I was locked in the house with claustrophobic dreams.  I was not drinking with madmen, but idle with a head full of doubt in a purgatory Manresa. 

Our second meeting, Ashley had already welded the police tape.  Ashley’s boundary words were an informal psychological-therapy contract.  Ashley deemed the marriage-subject taboo in autocratic decree.  Dr. Akins sat down with us for half-an-hour one week ago and listened to Ashley talk about my core.  There is rarely time for CPR when a mom veers the wheel into an oncoming locomotive on the way home from little league. 

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I still saw Penelope on Tuesdays.  I picked Penelope up from Montessori school.  We went to the library for our stack of fairy tales and Dr. Seuss.  Ashley dictated when I saw Penelope.  I was a rookie to such war games. 

At first Ashley told Penelope she was having sleepovers at Oma’s house.  Lots of sleepovers at Oma’s turned into Penelope had occasional sleepovers at daddy’s house.  In a matter of weeks Penelope’s home was no longer the house I slept in.  Explanations were jellyfish; offering one would only sting.

Ashley conducted a heart-breaking extraction, with logic of what was “best”.  All I could do was love Penelope.  I let her know I yearned to be her father in actions to convey as least disruption form a norm as possible.

I gave Penelope hugs.  We read stories.  We ran around with toy ponies pretending the horses could fly in the backyard.  We played in Penelope’s princess castle with Cinderella and her stuffed animal regiments. 

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On Christmas Eve, Ashley brought Penelope to where I slept after a late-night party at Hilton’s sister’s house.  The exchange was not intended to be a gesture of kindness.  It was a mathematical computation of Penelope’s mother bartering the gullibility of Santa Claus arriving at an incorrect location.  Where was Penelope’s true bed?  Ten days ago; what about tonight? Penelope was allotted to my care for a window of hours to placate the ruse. 

Ashley insisted I call her upon Penelope’s wake.  I set out a talking fur-real android dog named Biscuit, some assorted toys, books and art supplies.  Penelope was excited and secluded under the fifteen-foot artificial tree.  Ashley came over before I could call her as if the house was under secret surveillance through the air conditioning vents.  Ashley gave me a cookbook.  I left the porch picture wrapped under the mock tree.  I gave Ashley her CPA certificate framed for her renovated office at the Winfield’s palace. 

Ashley blew up at me because I neglected to set out the Hanna Montana auto-tune karaoke machine correctly.  Ashley had ordered the Disney pink-contraption.  Apparently I was unaware of the things Ashley never told me. 

I was a neglectful father.  Ashley had a tirade of passive aggressive side-talk with Penelope to make things clear of who was responsible for this travesty of Christ’s birth converging with the wigged “achy breaky heart” progeny sing-along machine.  Ashley left with Penelope taking the toys.  The wedding canvas hung in the dinning room absent of comment.

I spent Christmas alone in the house.  I did not want to stare in fringe-relative’s eyes.  I was not permitted where my daughter would be.  Christmas ended at nine a.m.  

Continue to Chapter 11 part 2