Parallel Paths: Pathos, Politics, and Poetry: Chapter Two

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Chapter Two – Spiders and Turtles

Sara’s mother, JoAnne, had a bouffant hairdo with a self-tailored blouse. JoAnne was industrious in the sense of needing something to occupy her time, but not mandated to garner a wage sufficient to supply meat or milk for the daily substance of her household.

JoAnne’s facade was ironed despite the day’s events. JoAnne spent the hours of Sara’s labor hovering about the delivery landing-strip perimeter tweeting out copious amounts of unrequested advice. JoAnne was a veteran, successfully birthing three out of four children. She was determined to raise her genetic transference grade from a D.

JoAnne was an immigrant in the Christian sense. Her mother Francella was born in Belgium around 1910. Francella met an American soldier on leave who could not pronounce her original name proficiently, but could afford the luxury of erasing such formalities with vodka and a pregnancy. With the convergence of American body parts, Francella became Fritzy.

A few weeks of motorcycle rides, more local breweries than any country on the globe, and the ultimate realization that her beau, Sergeant Wilber Grange’s service term was set to expire converged with a doctor’s visit that stumped other decision trees. Sergeant Grange perfunctorily proposed absent a proper ring after a stern conversation with the to-be bride’s parents in a loose sense of English and Dutch or French. Some combination of man-words led these parents and newly-ordained parents to believe that matters would be taken care of in manner befitting the situation.

Wilber sailed back to Kansas on a military vessel. Fritzy arranged an ocean liner, a suitcase of historic collected trinkets and crumpled sundresses and set to steam-sail the Atlantic after a window of time to garner the required unexpected funds from honest men in her life.

The former Francella, bid adieu to her three brothers, her parents, her art school classmates, a schnauzer named Mortimer, and the local cheese monger she had enjoyed the previous summer with and let her attention to the boat and her blossoming responsibilities.

The water-drifting vessel was cramped, balanced in the non-hydraulic sense of the late 1930’s. Francella’s stateroom was a lounge area of a baker’s dozen of female bodies. Francella was grateful for only needing a single ticket. Between Arthur’s contribution and her father, the financing was a one-way trip that was questionable to the timeframe of any repayment plan. Surely some amortization table could be set up, but computers to navigate such computations were long from invention. The room was not restrictive of smoking or snoring or the petulance and rebuke of one generation interacting with another.

At least there was no water on the floor. The timepiece of an elder fellow traveler was operational. Francella kept time in sways of her foot, undulating with the waves like a grandmother-clock pendulum. She forecasted nausea bouts and repressed them with the bottleneck of “at sea” bathroom facilities. Plumbing was something one could ill-afford to pack.

Francella kept to herself. Her belly was showing. Her naked fingers became a growing embarrassment. Francella took to wearing gloves despite the summer season. They were white and dainty and conveyed a traditional sense of European stature befitting an heir above a generic trunk in transit carrying cargo destined for tariffs. The gloves were less awkward at dinning times of dispensed potatoes and loosely-salted legumes when the older ladies would take to staring. The men did not seem to notice or preoccupy with such fashion statements.

The men tended to keep to the language of business, politics and matters of construction. One man took to constant complaint over the state of desperate affairs in America. The rabble ballyhooed financial and military grumblings.

Calvin Coolidge apparently had flaws. Lots of nods and coughing breaks scattered between the scotch sips and politico-pipe puffing. The women did not comment much, but one was almost incapable of preventing overhearing warnings of impending dangers by secondhand-soak in the enclosed space.

Francella was magnificently plump. At least Mary had a donkey and a surrogate father to coincide her voyage to whatever rudimentary rural enclave that awaited her inevitable purging of luggage. JoAnne conversed in English in a democratic sense. Since the majority of the newfound population preferred the tongue, Francella acquiesced to the participles and jargon even if her vote seemed irrelevant in the matter.

Francella became friends with Concetta. Concetta was a belligerent machinegun of Italian, an elderly-spitfire. She would slow her tones and syllables when conversing with Francella in a commonly-compacted value-meal form of English.

Concetta was from Gavorrano on the western coast, in her late sixties and traveling with her husband Sergio. Concetta was a devout Catholic gripping her rosary beads when the seas were rough. Concetta closed her eyes and imagined her Christ sitting there as calm as could be in the bough conversing with her about matters of routine: baking cookies and harvesting tomatoes from the wooden pole outside her hillside home in Tuscany.

Concetta told stories of her cows and cheeses and seemed to go on endlessly about her neighbor’s son who pilfered from her garden when she did not keep watch. Concetta meticulously kept tally of her vegetables and fruits.

In times of discrepancy Concetta raged mini-revolutions of protest against the boy’s father Abraham by pounding on his door. However, the man according to Concetta was equally as duplicitous as his progeny being Sicilians by birth.

Concetta and Francella grew an affinity. Concetta was an expert in the matters of birthing children, coming to term with seven out of nine of her own. She knew the ins and outs of uterine factory productions. Although the official terminology and translation was somewhat lost in the educational sessions. But speaking on a technical level and a practical level are entirely different animals, with the later often being the better dog in the fight.

Concetta drew from her quiver of experience to bulls-eye the beauty of the pain of childbirth. Over the iterations Concetta became a master of her own body in a way a man could never understand. Others would complain about the suffering, the magnitude of the quake within. The first and the second she tended to concur in her naivety. Past her sophomore year of baby production and after participating in her first failed attempt of the series, Concetta questioned the value of complaining.

Concetta said, “What can you do, this complain? You don’t like it, change it. If you can not change it, change the way you think about it, but this whining, this complain, phfff. Embrace this gift you give your new one. He repay you.”

Along the way Concetta knitted Francella a blanket for Francella’s child to swaddle inside. Concetta worked on the blanket while they conversed. Francella gave Concetta her ear for Concetta’s yarn. The sound of Concetta’s thoughts were preferable to her own or the waves.

Francella was reluctantly optimistic that her life was in transition to becoming Fritzy. Upon their departure into New York harbor, a gray blanket was packed in Francella’s luggage. An anonymous porter offered Francella directions to immigration facilities.

Francella had papers with signatures and stamped insignias arranged in a correlated pattern that permitted her passage through the mousetrap workings of the introduction to her own America. Francella marveled. People scurried like ants in the lines each carrying green-leaf suitcases or egg-white purses, organized and seemingly purposeful. The turnstile management was a grand meal of potluck proportions with Hungarian potatoes, Polish encased meats, and Spanish fruits.

The ringing of desk bells churned the cogs. Language was muddled in mixed dialects resembling impersonations of English. Verbal salvos sporadically defaulted to frustrated hurried spurts in native tongues. A man in a blue cap with a handlebar mustache gave Francella’s documents a final perusing. Fritzy was let loose like a sperm into the general direction of a train station.

The train being mammoth and Fritzy’s known day of arrival being indeterminable, Francella did not have a pre-purchased ticket to Kansas. Francella did have a promise from her Wilber that he would be waiting. If not, a letter would be in his stead at the local post. To resolve transportation unrest, Fritzy made her way to the staging area when she fantastically spotted Wilber’s familiar balding head like a lighthouse beacon amongst the crowd.

Wilber was dressed in his army-issued uniform, with simple-colored adornments denoting nothing of particular importance other than his successful navigation of the paperwork to enter military service and die for his country. Wilber had a penchant for allowing others to select his fashion.

Wilber’s path through the military, followed by a stint in unionized labor, preempted any need for self-expression through such fantastical displays as plaid. Wilber was content, wearing an identical iteration of the pervious day’s attire repetitively. It truncated the time required to begin a day’s more productive pursuits. However the expected uniformity of dress combined with the glare from Wilber’s prematurely-depleting dome seemed to be the most useful service weapon in attracting JoAnne’s attention.

Wilber embraced Fritzy in a sideways comingling of limbs. Fritzy smiled coyly and feigned a worried acknowledgement of the lack of a firmly envisioned nest for her ticking egg. Wilber asked if she was ready to take the rock island line and a litany of junctions to get to their would-be-home in burgeoning Wichita.

Wilber made a passing inquiry into the events of Fritzy’s trip, but other than the turbulence of the waves, not much was said other than, “It was pleasant and the rodents were not too obese.” Fritzy almost mentioned Concetta and the manners of dispensing her extricated stomach contents in morning constitutionals. Fritzy thought it better not to bring up what must have seemed exclusively woman-speak. Surely Wilber had more pertinent matters of a productive nature to attend.

Wilber had been in New York for three days getting a general window of arrival by post from the liner company. Being a military man, matters of punctuality were of particular importance. Wilber passed time in the landing square outside of the immigration warehouse of multiplying humanity by counting the hats, then the scarves and occasionally the finches and oriels in the nearby conifers.

Wilber kept to himself to pass the hours and did not make a particular point of speaking to anyone. The lone exception was the same local food vendor on each day when consuming a ration of bread and spread-flavoring that resembled apple jam. Wilber nodded, passed the coins and consumed the confection in an expedited mathematical manner. Wilber was good at keeping quiet and completing a sequence of functional steps without complaint.

Wilber grew up at the end of a road that would later bare the name of the wealthier family that resided in a four-walled shack with more than one room at the front of the street. His parent’s home consisted of a single cell.

Wilber occupied his childhood time hunting in a grove. Wilber would sit still in hopes of a passing deer. Wilber rounded the trees like a Carolina mountain cur in hopes of locating and stirring a squirrel from the sequestered rafters of oaks. Wilber learned from his father, but completed the majority of such activities in his adolescence alone in his Peter and the Wolf playground.

For extra money for the family in the spring Wilber captured turtles from the acre-size pond down the road for a penny a piece. Wilber sold them to the owner of the local grocer who lived in the multi-room abode.

Wilber was responsible for the secure return of the complete funds to his father upon the consummation of the transaction each month. The boy was allotted ten percent of the bounty. However, after realizing that he could exceed the quota his father had come to expect and retain the remainder in full, the capitalist in young Wilber emerged. This was until the federal government’s intervention interrupted his endeavors with a postal delivery.

A package from Sears Roebuck came while Wilber was gallivanting in the birch trees. Wilber’s father, Joseph Grange opened the contents and retrieved a rifle. This mysterious violation of later-to-be-made gun laws and Columbine Colorado not yet being properly mapped, drew consternation from Mr. Grange, but not from a legal sense, rather an economic one. Where did the funds come from to purchase such an item? What mistaken businessman would have shipped such a treasure to his yeomen home?

The gun was ordered by Wilber for fifteen dollars or fifteen-hundred surplus turtles or fifteen-thousand legitimate ones. However the exact equation to permeate such a work load to acquire the rifle could not be computed with the tools of the time. Wilber persuaded the grocer to accept his pennies in return for the transfer of the fifteen dollar fee to young Wilber due to his entrusted service in light of the guise that Mr. Grange had wished to consummate the transaction. Therefore a rifle deplete of ammunition sat idle in the single living room in Mr. Grange’s arms awaiting Wilber’s return.

When coming home, Wilber knew the ruse was up and divulged the course of events that led to the gun’s entry into his family’s only room. Wilber was unfamiliar with the subterfuge of later generations to check the daily mail when poorly graded report cards would be sent home to parents. Wilber was subjected to the inevitable wrath of his father.

In return for Joseph’s revelations, Wilber was branded twenty times with the family switch and resigned to his corner of the room without supper. After a night of deliberation from Joseph, Wilber was allowed to utilize the gun as long as he could productively provide meat for the family in his endeavors. After all being productive was the essence of becoming a man. Mr. Grange was determined that Wilber would become one, as he and his father and his father had been commissioned to do.

Secretly Mr. Grange was proud of his son for his gallant economic entrepreneurship and amazed at the total fertility of the local aquatic reptilian population. He and his wife were scoring only three of five in birthing attempts and Wilber being the brightest of the set, yet apparently the most trouble seemed to be a conundrum of evolutionary proportions.

Wilber found surrogate employment from turtle harvesting by making deliveries for a local apothecary, which apparently had no reservations over a minor of Wilber’s maturation transporting and dispensing drugs about the populace. Mr. Grange continued to garnish the wages of a maturing Wilber, however at a lower percentage and without much communication. Wilber had to lay a tithe on his father’s dresser on every day he was paid or Wilber would be given the switch.

The balance of this imbalance led to Wilber’s predictable escape into enrolling in the United States armed forces. In the army no reptile-barter was required for the acquisition of bullet-propulsion devices, merely a willingness to risk the inevitable similar fate of the turtle. Wilber was quite the adroit savant at picking off counterpart opposing runaways of international descent and on occasion hunting the random herbivore to bring meat for his unit. He could even squeeze the entrails out of a hare with a single hand.

Wilber and Fritzy boarded the locomotive with Wilber stowing their baggage into a compact and efficient allocation of available space including the final parcel on his lap. Wilber’s upper thighs supported a satchel as Fritzy’s belly exceeded the piece in height, width and thickness.

From the carryon, Wilber revealed a small golden circle, which glinted on the sun’s blade as it sliced through the train’s window ricocheting off his lips. Wilber spoke, “Francella, would you do me the honor of becoming my wife?” Wilber felt proper and manly producing a token of considerable productive value that due to the expedited nature of their original engagement was unable to be acquired with available funds to conduct a proper proposal.

Fritzy grinned at the gilded curve of the single-jeweled replacement for her glove. With a tear Fritzy whispered, “Yes.” Wilber reconfigured his torso with a serpentine-like dexterity to embrace his sweetheart with a garden kiss.

The trip to Kansas descended through the Ohio valley, Iowa and parceled out bumps into the tumble-land of Wilber’s western youth. Days after her arrival Fritzy and Wilber were married and Fritzy gave birth to JoAnne in the family living room with the assistance of a town doctor.

European home births were pragmatic and assumed. The local hospital was bending into the pattern of emerging American humanity, but due to the timeframe the logic of familial traditions seemed to trump emerging sage medical advice. JoAnne was born with an unrecorded weight unaware of the distance to arrive at her true dream of Wichita home in 1930.

JoAnne seemed to accept herself as an American. All that was apparent was a golden delicious apple-pie-oriented normality. JoAnne’s mother engulfed the life of the plains and attempted to shed the taint of her accent.

Wilber and Fritzy lived peacefully and fruitfully. In 1940, the family moved into a brick home complete with plumbing in an exorbitant four-room domicile. JoAnne was paired with two subsequent siblings. Over time JoAnne witnessed the polarization of her parents between her brother Oliver and her sister Dorothy. Mr. Grange favored the ruby-slipper-shoed daughter. Mrs. Grange dotted over the pudgier Oliver.

JoAnne imagined the grandeur of an orphan’s life. She saw the luxuries of her parents devoting a greater measure of attention to her sibling’s educational pursuits. JoAnne thought it best to marry young and bear children to set an anchor-hold on her individual economic freedoms.

In 1948, at the age of eighteen JoAnne found Arthur Barnes, a chapel and a delivery room and gave birth to Sara Cecelia Barnes in the winter of 1949.

Arthur was eight years older a man of meager means, but retained his own home. Arthur was in need of fulfilling the expected division of American engineering to provide a two-parent two-child quotient as quickly as possible. Outside of work, Arthur was a hunter by hobby and by nature an omnivore. Arthur took an extending liking to spending expansive time dwelling in trees pondering the death of mammals.

Sara was a temperate child, obedient and contemplative. Sara mouthed sounds she heard on the radio with an affinity for Hank Williams.

JoAnne began an obsession with the new American kitchen provided for her through Arthur’s employment at the grain mill. JoAnne could order catalog gadgets to slice, bake, prepare and measure customary units. Mrs. JoAnne Barnes developed into an exact woman taking pleasure to the granule in her iced tea and sugar tarts.

Sara dominated JoAnne’s time during her preschool years. A sibling Audrey came along in the fourth like a rotund-beach-ball. Audrey’s sheer girth put the cross Atlantic package JoAnne’s mother lugged to Wichita seem quite the petite carryon. The timing of insemination and leave was predictable. The conception was a religious miracle in the way, a lack of available birth control is the religious will of God.

Mr. Barnes suffered a disability through a broken ankle and a back injury at work and was home resting for a string of months. This interim before he could reacquire his manhood in a paycheck allowed for more natural family planning and busted his fantasies of ascending oaks.

Sara’s father was a quiet man, reticent, loving, but frugal of tongue for all subjects withstanding the mating and feeding habits of deer and other resident herbivores. Sara was not as fleet of hoof, or particularly capable of growing antlers. Sara sought to capture Arthur’s attention in other disciplines. Sara seemed to milk drips rather than quarts from her father’s masculine chest. Sara was afraid to red-raw her dad’s nipples by transforming inquiry into pestering. Sara chose her moments. Sara collected two indelible moments of childhood.

The first was a dance recital where Sara came to the utter realization that dexterity and coordination were fonts of grace that God had seemed to allocate in limited portions to her compared to the other fairies in her prancing glen. This brought Sara into a water well of tears.

On the night of this occurrence Sara’s mother JoAnne attempted to swindle her with a flood of indemnifying excuses as to the roots of Sara’s failure to complete the number. JoAnne seemed to invent a mysterious flying shoe from a maniacal terrorist eight-year-old in the rear line and a musical anomaly of tones that deviated from the expected pattern. Clearly Sara could not be accountable for the auditory exception.

Sara’s father on the other chromosome, saw Sara’s whimpering face, sat her on his knee and embraced her. Arthur held Sara for ten minutes that fell into eternity. The solace in the tortoise shell of that man cradled her.

In his slow way Arthur said, “When I was a kid I wanted to be a cowboy. I wanted a horse and rope, but horses and rope were expensive. We had neither. I tried. I pretended. I don’t know how good of a cowboy I ever could have been, but in my mind I could yank down any tree in the forest. We can not all be cowboys. Some of us are dancers. Some of us fall down. How we see ourselves, can be with fantastic imagination and enjoyment, but it also has to be a little bit real. Did you have fun tonight?”

Sara replied, “No, not really. It was all stuffy and you just do what everybody else is doing.” “Well, you know if it is not fun, you don’t have to dance on stage. You can just dance for your daddy.” With that Sara smiled, lifted off her assemble down to her leotard sans tutu and did a twirl for her father. Arthur held his daughter’s hands and walked a little box-step. Sara kind of gave up formal dance after that, but still likes to foxtrot in kitchens.

The second moment came as a teenager. Sara’s father was still on disability from the work accident, but managed to change careers to work at a local shoe factory doing less intensive manual work. Enriched as a unionized cobbler and prudent collection of elven reward, the family acquired a 1966 Chevrolet Belair. The Belair was built like a smaller tank than earlier iterations and imbued a sense of steel dominance on the American road that Mr. Barnes longed to rekindle from his more dexterous days.

No part of Mr. Barnes’ life was other than exceptionally American-ordinary. Arthur had a new vehicle with a driveway, a well-watered lawn accompanying a wife. Arthur and JoAnne also had produced their third successful child Adam.

After a few years Adam took the scholastic world by storm. Adam came in their eighth year of marriage, planned by the Elizabethan miracle of the Lord after the couple swore Audrey would be the last to balance Mr. Barnes original equation. Adam was a suitable replacement for the child who the couple assumed was masculine by gender in fair rotational basis who was lost in between Sara and Audrey.

Audrey was more vacuum than girl. Things around Audrey seemed to go in, but rarely out. Words of discontinuance to terminate consumption of chocolate-fingers and marshmallow-indulgences were only truncated by promises of legged-carcass muscle on bone. Audrey loved to bite to the marrow. Audrey could imagine the animal offering her gratitude rather than writhing in pain at the clench. Mr. Barnes never commented much except for the occasional request for second helpings from his wife, only to be informed that the expected remnants had been previously consumed by an unnamed curly-Q haired connoisseur.

Adam, the couple’s fourth, but third successful child was obnoxiously bright, destined for the fields of mathematics and properly spelled renditions of the word restaurant. Adam was the perfect example of what determined sperm and egg could generate. The quintessential fifth-grader was prodigious in his accumulation of Alpha-labeled test results and collected the trove in a shoebox below his bed. His primary hobby external to the web of the classroom was the torment of arachnids and their dinner guests.

Adam scoured the bushes, nooks and suburban house-corner catacombs for silky panels of freshly-stuck flies and mosquitoes. Once found, Adam took on the role of primary-school pyromaniac pilfering matches from the kitchen drawer. Adam’s parents never inquired or even contemplated the thought given the ten-year-old’s impeccable resume. The irrelevant consequence of purloined store-bought depleted wooden flints was also an immaterial inventory adjustment to the family’s supplies.

Once a suitable crematorium was arranged the glow of six and eight legged bodies mirrored in Adam’s eyes. Silent and still the pyrotechnics show took place in seconds. The pragmatist in the boy, learned to tote a glass of water or arrange hose options at times. Adam developed a sense of stealth and veiled an undertone of guilt that he did not learn to process very well. His parents rarely, if ever reprimanded the prodigy. Adam did not know how to approach the subject of squelching such feelings of inadequacy or contemplation on how to rectify wrong doing.

The spiders did not offer much advice, but as far as entertainment they were a laugh riot. Adam often made up voices in a choir of insects to imagine what they might be discussing down in their game of consumption. In mortician Adam’s assessment the spiders grew comfortable with the humor and vibrant joys of death.

Constructing and deconstructing such arenas of lure comprised a challenge to the spider’s daily pursuits. Adam thought it was appropriate that the arachnids should be rewarded for their productive value by taking part in a feast for their efforts.

On a Monday in May 1966, the spring air was crisp. School had ended for the day. At seventeen, Sara had recently acquired a driver’s license learning to navigate the suburban streets in the Belair. Outside of one encounter with a bumper in a grocer’s lot which was handled with the amicable exchange of repair services by the local father’s association, Sara was shaping up to be a proficient driver, capable of maneuvering the meandering turns of the sprawling metropolis of Wichita.

Audrey was at home in front of the family’s television munching on some combination of doodle or snicker-smacker concoction engrossed in the Howdy Doody program. JoAnne was in the bedroom folding fresh-scented laundered linens in from the wire. JoAnne marveled at their immaculate complexion as if something brought into this world novel and mysterious. The predictability of traditional garment exit and re-entry processes into a household was in all ways miraculous.

Adam was three houses down, burying his face under a local willow tree. The vine strands of leaves provided a veil of secrecy. In the undercarriage Adam was free to roam uninterrupted in his quests assuming the owner of the home, Ms. Marshall, was preoccupied or away from her dining room window at the approximate angle to observe the second bush from the left.

Adam spotted a recluse and slightly salivated at its brown-backed markings. The venomous vixen had independently managed to ensnare a white-grape shaped moth. Adam hunkered down and readied the match. The flame softly wavered over the wooden hilt. In Adam’s focus on the yellow inside the orange, Adam failed to notice a bumble bee drone zooming onto his nostril scouting for its hive. The sting was prudent and not enumerated in mass by collection of the bee’s siblings joining in a gang-bang of the elementary schooler. However the timing was keenly placed in a moment of rare unprofessionalism as the shock made the boy waver in his balance.

Adam flopped the flaming stick on top of an ant hill adjacent to his right pant leg. Mr. Marshall aside from being a first-rate dermatologist shared a similar passion to the young Barnes child. That very afternoon on Mr. Marshall’s lunch break, he had freshly applied his traditional fire ant removal system to the mound, kerosene like napalm on the Viet Cong. After all, ants working in commune could conquer even the most profitable yards into a bevy of non-invoiced construction.

Adam’s sock caught the blaze. As a sensible boy of rational action Adam proceeded to scream like hell. Mrs. Marshall failed to attend to the siren wail or the tempest of singe occurring amongst her petunias. Sara was approaching the curve to turn onto the street passing the lawn of the Marshall house and honed in on the flailing boy, rolling amongst the centipede lawn.

Sara recognized Adam’s school uniform, which always made things easier in times of emergency management situations to be able to efficiently identify who warranted saving, blasting, or ignoring. Sara rode the curb and bungled into the drive. Sara slammed the emergency brake as the car lodged in a cock-eyed position.

Adam panted with his right arm pink and charcoal colored in a splurge of artistic expression, sort of like a Jackson Pollock painting. Sara only heard the screaming. Surely there were questions being asked, but no answers being retorted from the typically cracker-jack kid. Adam rolled like a Dachshund across the lawn. Sara swept Adam into the backseat, over looked buckling herself and careened towards her parent’s house, while grinding on the horn like a locomotive engineer.

JoAnne could hear the horn beckon from the rear of the dwelling. Like most attentive housewives JoAnne wanted to get her nose in on the bustling events of the big neighborhood event of the day by peering through the front window. In doing so JoAnne encountered the commotion, with much fervor as she saw her family’s very own Belair barreling the drive.

Sara erupted from the driver’s seat barking out instructions as JoAnne grew numb. Sara’s arms were like an airport runway operator with orange-glowing poles directing her mother towards the Chevrolet. JoAnne rounded the rear door and kept screaming, “His skin is gone. His skin is gone.” Sara lunged at her mother’s wrist and plastered JoAnne into the passenger seat. The triad of unbalanced heights made a b line for the local emergency room.

The car approached the waiting sentry of the American healthcare system. Adam was sucked away like a deposit into a banking vacuum tube on a professional gurney. Orders were made. Drugs and surrogate skin was being planned at the ready, stabilization was key to identify the ailment.

One of the uniformed-experts inquired, “How did this happen?” JoAnne stammered out an “Uh Uh Uh Um, he was attacked.” Sara was an obedient and respectful child and all together not sure herself, but the concept of a flame throwing assassin near the Marshall house was highly suspect.

Mrs. Barnes was asked to come into the back labyrinth of the repair facility to join Adam. JoAnne conveyed her approval for procedures and conscriptions for the war at hand. JoAnne was not entirely aware of what she was signing. Like most political leaders or figureheads of state, JoAnne assumed the overall verbiage and underlying details had been previously reviewed by the people-in-the-know. Things would be better for her prompt executive decision.

However default or inevitable the outcome may have been to begin with, the illusion of consequential intervention remained intact. In the backdrop of JoAnne’s valiant consternation, Sara saw fit to tip a desk nurse to adeptly contact her father Arthur at the shoe factory.

Arthur arrived within a quarter of an hour having to rearrange driving patterns and compose the stern sense of a veteran traversing combat zones. Sara met Arthur at the sliding doors and conveyed her understanding of the series of events. Mr. Barnes asked Sara to take the car to be with Audrey, who for all practicality was raiding the pantry or hypnotized by Howdy Doody. Audrey could be wandering the neighborhood in fits of tears unaware of why she was left alone at the age of fourteen. Sara without complaint rounded up the Chevrolet like a good cowgirl and turned tail for her baby sister.

Upon opening the door of the Grange household, Audrey was planted with a peanut butter jar, a spoon and a tan-lipped grin ensconced. Sara sat Audrey down and told her about the accident. Audrey started crying and whacking herself on her shoulders like a mini King Kong. Sara gave Audrey a hug and told her she was scared too. They knelt down together and stared at the erect crucifix above the entry door, focusing on Jesus’ ceramic skin and his red dye blood piercings.

At the hospital the doctors were repairing what could be repaired. The flames wrapped up the young boy’s leg, his genitalia, to his lower abdomen, crisping his hair with a smelted aroma and left his ear more Florentine coin than reception disk. The haze of the heat’s path cloaked an expanse of skin on Adam’s shoulder and arm. The clothing over each area left Adam looking like two people forged in a Siamese-manner across his sternum, crotch and to the right of his eyeball. One person appeared to be a joyous commercial of health. The other appeared to be a French fry gone wrong.

Arthur located JoAnne without use of compass or map and set productive question to spouse. JoAnne said, “Someone burned him. You have to find whoever did this. Get your gun. Get your gun.” “Calm down, how is he?” Arthur replied. “Is he in surgery? Are the doctors working on him?” JoAnne muzzled her warmongering in a muffled babble of disjointed syllables that resembled chunks of words, but did not convey anything of consequence.

It was like Arthur was stuck in an elevator with a stranger waiting for the floor to ding and the button to relight. Choosing to respond to JoAnne’s question would be blatantly rude and perfunctorily socially awkward given the respondent’s available alternative options. Nonetheless JoAnne’s stammer was about as cogent a debate available in such a rushed legislative session.

Arthur set his palms down on JoAnne’s shoulder like two weights on a scale, making sure not to push too hard. Arthur kissed JoAnne on the forehead and pirouetted towards the nursing station. JoAnne stood still staring at the center of where Arthur’s second button down had been. In Arthur’s twist the sphere of air was now the rear of Arthur’s workman’s uniform.

Arthur sought pragmatic progress. Mr. Barnes conveyed his relationship to the sought after patient, providing identification in the form of a convincing-sober grin and sewn-on nametag from the factory to locate his ten-year-old heir. However Arthur was asked to wait.

The doctors were working on Adam. Feeling emasculated like soupy-vanilla ice cream, Mr. Barnes wanted to vomit. The thought of eviscerating the entire contents of his abdomen onto the walking space of a place of business either through his mouth or by ripping open his gut sack with his bare hands on the spot would probably cause traffic problems. So Arthur thought it better to desist, gather his wife and burrow ground in a prairie of flaccid chairs.

There was a generic black-handed clock with a red-fingered secondhand lumbering at the center of the paneled area where the family was stationed. Upon sitting down Arthur grazed his eyes over the assembled crowd. The unit included two women: one in her forties and a veteran of such infirmaries into her seventies. A boy bounced in his chair with the quadragenarian who did not appear to be his mother, maybe more of an aunt or an older sister, requesting that the boy be still.

The agitated babysitter’s bark emitted dissatisfaction with her own inability to partake in such indulgencies. Arthur imagined that this dwarf-sprite-fairy admonisher wished to gallivant, fidget or explore. She appeared jealous of the boy’s non-consideration of the serious undertones of the boy’s greater surroundings. Maybe the boy was Russian, instead of American processing the tragedy of the day. The watcher-woman had to languish in her adulthood with self-resentment repressing a need to dwell.

The surrogate aunt repeated this cycle. She recycled it in a discourse in slalom with the ticking of the clock. Maybe if given enough time, Mr. Barnes could have computed the algebra in the air and yelled out, “Ah Hah” or “No, you stop,” or maybe resorted to some strangling or chair hurling through windows, but Arthur simply made note of the synchronicities in the displayed discord.

There was a single man about Arthur’s age with his son. The man looked at the blatant distress peppering Arthur’s façade and asked if Arthur was ok. Arthur being unaccustomed to inquires concerning his own wellbeing, was not sure how to respond. Was he supposed to automatically dispense a lie purporting strength? Was an “I’m fine” acceptable? Would a point of politically-polite gratitude for the measure of concern demonstrate an aura of femininity? Did the man really want honesty?

In the debate of his wife, his son, his two daughters, and his employer that surely was in the process of docking his pay, Arthur relinquished a, “No.” The benevolent man bequeathed him a, “Tell me, if you want.” “My son Adam got burned. He’s back there”, Arthur gushed in a plethora of masculine detail. “I’ll be praying for him. Name’s Marvin Sullivan. My wife Delores is back there too. Some sort of woman thing,” the stranger replied.

When entering the hospital Adam was capable of speaking, but absent from bearing interest in such formalities. The spider-boy was studying deep-swelling agonizing pain with prayers for a sweet release. Far from the bravery of such heroics of a Tunisian fruit salesman, Adam endured two surgeries and a sort of partial mummification. This took time.

Adam was being processed like a car through an automated washing system in a medical-Texaco station. Preparations and orders were carried out. Grafted skin was adjusted. A dermatome was used.

The degreed doctors contemplated sepsis, kidney dysfunction and shock, but inhalation damage appeared to be minimal as the greatest of smoking objects may have been the boy himself. This reassembly project warranted an invoice or at least a consultation as to the extent of the repairs that were unfortunately not able to be discussed beforehand with the purchaser.

This year’s model would have to be utilized as a substitute for the original ear and leg and other available coverings. Maybe if Burke’s artificial skin or a suitable cadaver could have been located to merge with the boy, things could have been done to a more pristine cosmetic result, but for the tornado alley of Wichita, you got what you got.

The doctors applied the Egyptian cotton gauze and avoided making full eye contact. Repairs were done. The clock rotated an internment of hours befitting of Dachau for the parental unit. The not knowing, the atrocities behind the walls, being imagined, envisioned like at any moment certain words could be said, life-altering words; words with punctuations that do not leave space for rebuttals or additional interrogatives.

Adam was wheeled to a room where he was told to wait for his parents. Adam was chilling in the gage of his core temperature, covered and uncovered, being addressed by blue-mouth-guarded staff. Adam was unsure of exactly where he was or how he had gotten there. Adam had passed out during the initial transfer after he was suctioned into the hospital.

Adam was drugged during the surgical remedies, but with the drugs available at the time, not the highly-researched wonders of Big Pharma of today’s medical utopia. His head was not exactly his. The blur of the yellow lighting on the ceiling twinkled foreign.

Adam’s parents were summoned. “Barnes.” Arthur shot to his feet like the ears of a doe, perking with the quick-twitch of a modern NFL defensive back rare for a Caucasian according to sports-talk junkies. He went immediately to task. JoAnne was still in a subtle state of unrest.

The couple received the Eucharist of the nurse’s words, “Your son is in recovery. The doctor will talk to you later, but I will take you to the boy now.” The nurse handed the couple a pair of blue breathing-masks.

Adam was not dead. There was a boy to interview to hunt potential arsonists. Apparently repair work was conducted; despite premature considerations the doctors could be bilking the family’s collectively-bargained health-benefit program.

Upon entering the room, there was a burst of energy from JoAnne, a sparkling Pavlovian-maternal-plastic urge to shroud true emotion. Maybe JoAnne had learned it from her mother like a European heirloom. Maybe the guise was emotionally considerate, but JoAnne was determined to put on a big smiling face, even if Adam could not see it. The facade was a parental version of the kind kids get around Christmas when Santa visits are on the line and mommy tells you to eat your Brussels sprouts. Adam would know a smile was under JoAnne’s blue-breathing barrier.

Half of Adam’s face was bandaged with the shield centered in the area of his right ear. The motions of his jaw were restricted. Adam’s remaining hair was disheveled. The evacuees were fertilizer for Mr. Marshall’s lawn. Adam’s eyes were still blue. His teeth were still intact. The monitors made Adam feel strange, because he could not quite understand why they were still necessary.

Adam’s right leg was held up in a trapeze-carriage of cloth, breathing, but insulated in this strange paradox of feeling nothing and everything in the absence. The leg was too young to have pubescent hairs curled or meshed into a field of reminiscent caveman-like shelter for the nude biped to search for sustenance. The leg was naked under applied medical training, except for the pieces, the grafts from his other territories of dermis to compensate. Raggedy Adam was crumpled and patch-worked. When Adam saw the two of them, all he could say was, “Mom.”

The word squirted across the room like lighter fluid tracing the floor tiles to ignite the inertia into motion of his mother’s footsteps only to be halted by the frost of, “Where can I touch him?” The question streamed like a flashing warning across a television screen.

JoAnne bit her lip and made her hand into a flag wave across her mouth as a duplicate shield for her words. The hand descended and brushed in an angelic flutter to touch in the softest of soft on the opposite shoulder of the damage. Adam burst out, “I’m Ok, really. There is nothing to worry about.”

Adam, not having seen a mirror and inflated on the novelty of morphine, was awash in confidence. The reality was Adam probably was not going to be able to wipe his own asshole for a while. Adam’s sense of balance would be suspect to further evaluation due to the injuries to his ear and while quick healers; fifth-graders are not exactly lizards.

Arthur stared in Adam’s direction while the boy and his mother conversed. Arthur was worried and seeking solutions, results, “What happened?” The question hung like a wreath on a door. The wreath could be for all kinds of seasons: Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving or Halloween. Adam looked at Arthur realizing his dad did not know. All the matches, the webs, the man had not really noticed, nobody did.

Maybe the remaining spiders or the local population of winged six-legged gnats could testify, but Adam’s wanderings were still irrelevant to the grand scheme of the Barnes household. So Adam figured it best to keep private-things private. Maybe if Adam had taken the time to pray about it or contemplate the extent that he had already paid for his crimes in a short-order sentence, Adam may have responded differently. The boy replied, “I don’t remember, except there was fire on me and the rest is kind of blurry.”

JoAnne started to cry. Mr. Barnes had a pensive wave undulate across his face, as if the knowns and unknowns of the situation glittered. Arthur saw each facet of the chemical configuration of electrons and neutrons in the particles of the idea that this has happened to his son, yet there was no clear vantage of reason or justice or why.

There was the culmination of whatever did occur in the hospital bed before him, a lawn somewhere, a perpetrator lurking, and that bitch of doubt of what-if unknown creeping and chipping away at Arthur’s manhood. Arthur was supposed to protect, to have the answers to be able to prevent bad things and bad men. He did not. Bad things whispered in his son’s ear and overtook his innocence into a crawling sludge snail-trail of a future.

Every day from here on would be altered and burdensome. If this day were reset, recast to put his arms to task and eyes to watch over and see fit harm bypassed Adam’s domain, Arthur could retain his paternal-promises of this morning’s dawn. There would never be another like today’s rise.

Arthur could pretend and stare his eyes straight into the orange-belly sun until on the cusp of blindness. Maybe Arthur could make a trade with God and barter his own martyrdom for a miracle salve of skin. Like the Little Mermaid Arthur’s prayerful voice committed to the symphonies and arias of the lord for a leg and a torso and a lobe. But the man knew.

That night Adam’s mother stayed on a wheeled-in cot. Adam began a regimen of medicinal additives to ward-off infection. Oxygen tubes assisted his healing. Aeration and ointments, treatments and appointments with doctors and aids were administered. Adam experienced the arduous mixed blessings of a catheter.

Adam spent a couple of days with his sisters visiting. People made the event a big deal as if Adam had won an award, an Oscar in the infirmary. Adam’s left foot was talentless, but my how his right could act. It could perform like a pretzel or a rumpled potato-skin, a folded brown discolored flop-mass dented in function. In the movies the director could call cut. Viola his flat-aesthetic racing-peddle would be back in action, a phoenix-foot on command.

By the third day, Adam woke up to the rooster-alarm clock of his new roommate’s watch, Mrs. Sullivan. The two had not been formally introduced. The forty-something woman rolled in during the night after having her uterus removed while Adam was resting. Adam’s stomach was nauseous, but the feeling in his leg was like a door ajar. The sensation was different, hard to read if it was good or bad. Adam felt something. That had to be better than the so far usual nothing, whether it was from the drugs, the adapting new play-pal skin or the bridge crossed to where ever this was. Something had to be the opening in order to exit nothing.

Adam swept his tongue across all his ark-teeth as if counting them one-by-one with the tip. Adam celebrated each sensation from the edge of the crown. His body was more present. The door was cracked. Adam contemplated escalating the titillation by scratching his leg and then thought better of the idea. Based on prior conversations with the medical professionals Adam knew the potential perils of such self-exploration.

Adam was not sure if he was up for or even capable of digesting breakfast. He stared around the room until fixing on the humming-yellow tint in the ceiling light. The glow made his eyes squint to where it felt more natural to just go ahead and close them rather than retain their displeasure with the propensity of the luminous radix. After about three minutes Adam was gone.

Adam died of a blood clot winding its way through his system. His parents were not in attendance, working and planning, preparing for this Columbus life of therapies, assassin man-hunts, and revamped college-scholarship filing procedures. The locomotive clot arrived at the station of his heart. The clog set off buzzing alarms and salvation procedures.

Nurses and doctors scrambled into defensive patterns to get the passenger back on the ground, but cave tools can not wake the dead or pull astronauts immediately out the far distant skies when challengers explode. Boys do not always grow up to be cowboys and dancer’s do not always have synchronicities glittering their feet.

The funeral was on a Tuesday, at the First Methodist Church on the east side of town next to a donut shop. Preaching followed by sugary treats was always a symbiotic dynamic, either that or alcohol. The sun was out. There was a line of gray mourners like a cabbage patch of school kids taking a field trip on death. Their correlated parental units conveyed condolences to their child’s departed scholarship competition. The majority of them self-focused, the way most of us are at funerals, thinking, “Thank God it wasn’t fill-in-the-blank with my kid’s name.”

The remaining quartet were dressed in formal regalia, suit and pressed dresses befitting winter in May. Maybe it would have been easier if there was some cliché precipitation to frost the lot, but there was just that sun and the aggregation of faces and a body in a less-than-standard-sized box. The concept of cremation seemed excessive despite the pragmatism. Converting the boy to ash would have brought about dysfunctional inferences.

Arthur’s father was in from the country. He had Alzheimer’s from metallic shrapnel leaching his blood for a war wound and a window-based dementia. If there was a shooting lane far enough into the woods of where his life had grown from, he could see so clearly, but if there were branches or twigs or the wind interrupted the vision, it was if the memory never was. You just never knew where the lanes were.

The family figured out the gist of what had happened or at least as much as Mr. Marshall’s knowledge of his insecticide practices and the location of stop-drop-and-roll ten-year-olds bowling over additional kerosene ant hills could surmise. Maybe not the whys or what their son was thinking, but the logistics and evidential matter seemed to rule out a mysterious arsonist-terrorist acronym-assassin not in Mrs. Hoover’s fifth-grade social studies class.

Mr. Barnes began to swell his thoughts as he sat in a steel chair to watch the day’s presentation. Arthur begged the question,

“Do you ever really know what your kids are thinking as a parent? They seem happy in their iterations of routine, fun smiles, scholastic victories, sports championships, friendly games of hide and go seek. Modern indulgencies that the previous generations are baffled to contemplate partaking in as adults become standard practice. There is always that space of conjecture.”

“Did I teach him enough? Are the tools there to have him handle that defining moment when the shields are down?”

“It’s the fawn in the open clearing with the rifle barrel honed in a secluded sniper-shot salivating. The two are within a second of impact. Maybe you notice and save them. Maybe they notice and save them self. Maybe he doesn’t even have time to hear the shot. What do you do when the blood comes; when white spots are gone and clouded in crimson over a tan hide?

The spirals of grief: shock, denial, barter, depression, anger, guilt, and maybe hope and letting-go rotate and re-rotate. Traversing from point A to point ZZZ, you have no idea how many iterations it will take for this tub to drain. You can see the inevitable stoic-dancing there of what will be, this immutable statue mocking you to testify to an incomparable future, that nobody asked for, but is.

Wail, roll on the floor and contemplate crawling back inutero, to re-gestate and anti-impregnate your own fetus to disallow this travesty. Go talk to Nietzsche’s demon and cancel out the horror of having to relive everything over if it must include this moment. All these considerations bombard the mind like Nagasaki sunshine, virulent and luminous.”

These were Arthur’s thoughts, of a parent at his son’s funeral, like an everyday parallel occurrence. Mrs. Barnes did not speak much. JoAnne smiled big when people offered their condolences. It was the proper thing to do.

The flowers were suitable, not too feminine. If Adam was going to finally get laid in heaven he could not have his funeral looking soft. When you damn near blow yourself up in flames of charred-death, survive and then your own body fails, it probably would have been cooler to have perished in the first wave. Most humans would have probably preferred to avoid the radiation and be right under where the bomb drops then the concentration camp. Sometimes it is easier having your parents know you lied to them and admitting it then having to hold the deceit in your whole life.

Perfection is a bitch nobody should try to tame. Mr. Barnes knew his son was not a saint, but JoAnne tended to hedge in the other direction. The minister read the eulogy. There was no Forever-Young-Dylan serenade to be heard nor cupcake regurgitated commentary.

The eulogy was based on Biblical facts, the stern guide with single-name authors that knew what the fuck they were talking about when it came to death and accidental fire-ant-mound incendiary childhood disasters. The answers to all of this were in that book and be damned if that preacher was not going to lay it stone-cold Methuselah-style with Abraham and Isaac with some last minute ram substitute on their asses.

God had a plan and this was part of it. The words, “God loves you,” pin-balled through Arthur’s mind as the minister flung the plunger back and launched the holy silver-sphere of insight in his direction. This was God’s love and Arthur was going to need it.

The family watched Adam go back to the Earth, planted him firm to prevent zombie recursion, even though a walking-dead might be preferable. Maybe a zombie Adam’s skin might match a uniform pattern and his legs might work. Mrs. Barnes would gladly provide her own cerebrum as breakfast. What else would you offer your newly reborn zombie son? Surely he would be hungry. It would be inhospitable not to offer at the least an oblongata. But alas, JoAnne got to keep her mind, even all the fresh wrinkles she wished she could pass out to feed the homeless.

The quartet rode home in the Belair sardine-like, yet with extra room. The smell still lingered. JoAnne had requisitioned a chemical-compound review to extricate burnt human from the bench seat, but the consuming vapors still wrapped the space like a cursed choker.

The smell was decorative in a medieval way. The scent was the kind of cologne a warlord or a dark-skinned Disney villain marauding the countryside would splash on the nape to attract unruly pagan women if sexual or olfactory processes had any place in cartoons. The uncomfortable smell repressed the verbalization of small-talk like a morning fog hovering over a field after an all-night battle.

Maybe one could escape it, but the subject of the conversation would have to be completely out of the context, bizarre like bringing up North African politics, or Kandinsky paintings, or what heaven non-Christians go to.

Maybe Audrey could have brought up such indulgent pathways of thought. Surely whatever Audrey could suggest somebody had thought of before, or was thinking now and however weird or queer or seemingly disturbing, would it really be more unsettling or deranged as the topic in the air?

Audrey liked to cut the hair on her dolls short and parade them in the nude when her door was closed. Maybe Audrey could mention that. What about putting peanut butter on her friend Cassandra’s fingers and licking it off in a game of who could do it the fastest. Maybe her dad would play later.

Sara thought about a boy Vincent in her class. Vincent’s father died of lung cancer last year. The kids in school made a big deal out of the death for about a week. He was the kid without a two parent household, a total mathematical anomaly. Maybe Sara could ask Vincent for advice. Maybe he would want to take Sara out on a date. They could discuss the politics of smoking objects or why Vincent’s haircut looked so peachy.

Maybe they could run off to California and roll around on the beach. The couple could stare into the Pacific and reside in the calm of the undulating waves. Vincent could be manly and break the silence with a steady hand of there must be something greater than the weight of moments like these. Maybe Vincent could propose by the undying flame of a tear-drop sun bombing on Hawaii in a bursting-orange splashdown.

The moment could be grand the way grand things are destined for good little girls who close their legs and emulate images perpendicular to their dad’s mattress magazines. But all that made Sara think about was this damn aromatic seat rubbing between her thighs, irritating and brash.

The minutes racked up like bowling pins. The seconds to pass normal routine landmarks made every sight into one of those green interstate signs prompting a question of how far wherever somewhere other than here was. JoAnne put on a smile with a temperate overlay to the malaise by practicing lying to the rearview mirror by adjusting the angle mid-drive to reapply her lipstick. The altitude of the region was some how higher. The air thinned. The alteration in the humidity must have warranted the cosmetic replenishment.

Mr. Barnes pulled into the drive like he was Frankenstein walking naked off a Higgins’s stern at Normandy with his arms spread-eagle and chest exposed. His mouth was a gapping maw taking all comers. Arthur was invincible. What else could anyone do to hurt him now? Arthur tempted fate to trade places with Adam.

Like a noble gentleman on a proper social outing Arthur walked around and opened the car door for his wife without a word. The children exited and collected the superfluous formal accoutrements they had removed for the ride of respective bow and hair ribbon. Purses and American flag lapel pins, along with a card with a Gospel verse to commemorate the occasion were removed. Mr. Barnes unlocked the front door. Mrs. Barnes headed in the kitchen to start food preparations in case relatives visited. Audrey headed to her closet to change close. Mr. Barnes asked Sara to sit on the porch swing.

Father and daughter sat together in a subtle motion. The sway was slower than the breeze but faster than the speed of breathing. Arthur put his arm around Sara. Sara laid her head on her father’s right shoulder, folding into the vulnerability of an origami swan, still rigid in the structure of appearance but graceful and softening in the essence.

Sara melted there and smelled San Diego sands on her father’s jacket. The scent was like a shoreline of peaceful web-footed turtles being born in the black cotton. Thousands of webbed feet emerged from out of nowhere appearing from the subsurface under this midnight moon, shining, racing for freedom. The reptiles darted in a waddle to dodge sea gulls and the billion dangers of the open ocean.

There was no protection, but the self-directed evolution of survival. The infants had to make it through these waters now. Father and mother were gone. Only countless siblings were present for the extrication from the hard shell pit. So many siblings, who keeps count when a plover picks one up to God’s nowhere? At least Sara’s feet were moist dancing and swaying with the turtles.

Continue to Chapter 3

Parallel Paths: Pathos, Politics, and Poetry

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Sunday, December 2, 2012

Chapter Two – Spiders and Turtles

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