Like This

Len Kuntz

Dad brings the women home for me to audition with my ears because I keep my eyes averted most of the time or else I hide in my room upstairs, a mere wall away from where he and Mom used to sleep, so quiet when they made love, not at all like the new ones with their S and M manners, their palm-stomping theatrics.
…..They don’t tell me they want to take the place of my dead mother.  Instead, each in their own way explains how they just want to be my friend.  They’ll say anything.  They say, “Flat-chested is the style right now.”  They say, “Don’t worry about it, I flunked seventh grade, too.”  They say, “Well, you’re pretty to me.”
…..I placed Rudolph Valentino in one’s handbag.   Rudy was a garden snake, the color of an icicle, shimmery like snot.
…..I put canola oil on the toilet seat so when this skinny one used it she slipped inside the oval and got stuck with her private stuff smothered in a pool of her own poo.
…..One was my teacher, so I just stopped going.  On a lunch break I paid a boy to break into her house and write STOP DATING DOUGLAS NELSON OR ELSE!!! in catsup across her bed sheets.
…..“Go ahead,” Dad said.  “Keep this up and we’ll both live alone the rest of our lives.”
…..The shrink told me her mother killed herself, too, as if that’s supposed to make us girls kindred spirits.  She says it was the same method, only she wasn’t the one to find the body like I did.  But my shrink doesn’t let me off the hook.  Without really saying these precise words, she tells me there are worse things.
…..What’s worse is wishing I had better memories.  It’s hard to find ones I want to revisit, ones that mean something.  I think you can love a memory if it’s true enough, precious, if there’s light in it.  I’ve held infants before and felt that sort of sharp surprise, that funny bone tingle.
…..I have scraps:
…..“Like this,” Mother would say when she taught me how to shave my legs for the first time.  My attempt looked like a migraine, a dozen jagged spots of red.  “You’ll find the right pressure eventually.”
…..She combed my hair standing in back, over my shoulder, staring into the vanity mirror, saying the alphabet backward, counting backward from one thousand.  “Don’t you think time is God’s cruelest trick?” she asked.
…..She ate orange peels but not the fruit.
…..She liked silent movies best, the kind with the fluttery pictures and featuring exotic sheiks.

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The boy who likes me now says I’m fascinating.  But he’s no different than Dad’s girlfriends.  This boy, I catch him kissing me with his eyes open.  He says it’s because I’ve made him a voyeur.
…..One night Mr. Hamid, who sells me cigarettes illegally at the AM/PM, asks me, “Why you always moping?”  When I tell him about Mom, he doesn’t flinch or miss a beat.  “Grow up,” he says.  “Go on, get out of here now!”
…..The thing is I don’t want to grow up.  I go out to the parking lot back by the dumpster that smells so bad I have to breathe through my mouth.  I know a girl my age who was raped here but I sit down anyway.  The night is black black black.  I take a deep breath and count.  I start at one thousand.

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Len Kuntz lives on a lake in rural Washington State with an eagle and three pesky beavers.  His short fiction appears in over sixty lit journals and also at his blog, People You Know By Heart.

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