So…whatcha doing?

Sitting around, eating some Doritos, wondering when that thing from Star Trek will be invented so we can say “I want a cheeseburger” and then it magically appears on a plate?

Me too!

Since we’re both just sitting around chilling like the iced out bitches we are (haha…naughty words!), let’s go ahead and talk about something near and dear to the heart of all Americans.  Cat glittering.

How to Glitter a Cat

You can tell these aren’t cats because penis.  Wait…what?  Oh right.  Penis.

1. You think cat glittering starts with commandeering a cat, don’t you?  You arrogant son of a bitch.  Haha, no but really cat glittering starts off with making sure you have all of your equipment in place, including your cat glittering uniform.  Personalization is key so the cats can tell you’re no doormat that follows everything a beautiful lady on the Internet says because they are horrible self-centered creatures.  So let’s talk uniform:
   • Cats. Hate. Pasties.  One moment you’re taking off your shirt to put stickers on your boobs and the next they’re looking at you like your mother did that time you wore your her earrings and accidentally swallowed one.  They looked like licorice, mother!!!  How is a thirteen-year-old supposed to know any better???  Anyways, sticker away those boobies and show those cats who’s boss.
   • Sombreros.  You’ll need one on your head and one in your truck to lure those cats in with the delicious prospect of tacos and mariachi music.  I had not one but two mariachi bands at my wedding and let me just say I have never before had the pleasure of watching so many cats use Matthew as a human scratching post.  To this day he still finds stray whiskers.
   •   Galoshes aren’t just for rain anymore.  Really were they ever for rain?  Haven’t they always been for people to say “Hmm…that lady ain’t right in the head wearing those galoshes without a shirt on”?  Well now they’re also for cat glittering because cats just love scratching the veins right out of your ankles as much as they enjoy judging your choice of boobie accoutrement.  Bastards.
   • You should probably put on some pants.  Cats love dangly bits if you know what I mean…………………………………………penises.
2. Be Kanye West.  Okay so I read this meme somewhere that said something to the effect of “I wish someone loved me as much as Kanye West loves Kanye West” and I was all like “Hey, I should really buy more pasties” and then I was all like “Ding, ding, ding, yes!  Kanye West has this shit figured out!” because cats hate nothing more in the world than someone who truly loves herself/himself and/or Kanye West.  And pasties.  And dangly penises.  Did I mention penises?   Penises.
3. Don’t have a penis.

That pretty much covers it.  There are some extra details you should take in consideration like rolling in a vat of salmon and charmingly whispering things like “Meow, meow…meow meow meow…penises.” (These are also highly effective if you’re married to my husband.)  But really, cat glittering is all about having heart and knowing you’re doing something good in the world with a container of glitter.  And without a penis.

Photo credit: Travis D.

They are family and when they talk it rubs a blister in his ear.  Lou presses into it, his pointer finger jiggling the skin and hair that forms his canal.  It makes the sound of static.

“You okay dad?” Marnie asks handing him the bowl of lumps Rita refers to as “mashed potatoes.”  No, Lou isn’t okay, but he nods and smiles.  He has been thinking about the same thing for weeks now.  Finding Marnie’s unconscious body in the basement three months ago.  Believing she was dead.

“Oh the old fool’s fine.  Probably running his last golf game through his head.”  Lou watches his wife spoon a spineless tangle of green beans onto her plate.  Rita is a cruel kind of pretty, even now at sixty-two her lashes are ink-stained wings, her eyes a shrill flash of water.  But her mouth has morphed into another creature all together.  Her lips are two dried worms, renegade tags of skin flicking from their creases.  He imagines they cry out for joy when she gulps from her glass.

“Tell me about Eric.  You talk to him lately?” the worms ask Marnie.

“A little bit.  It’s been hard.”  Marnie’s eyes are lined with wet soldiers.  Rita offers a vague nod, simultaneously smacking Lou’s hand when he goes in for a second pork chop.

“Well, men.  They never know the right words, do they?”  Rita doesn’t look at him when she says it.  She hardly ever looks at him now, merely parents him with a blind hand.  When she used to look at his face, his heart would plunge and weave throughout his body.  His chin would nuzzle the small orifice of her ear and he would tell her so much in a whisper.  Those words, the best he had ever tasted.

“I don’t know.  I thought maybe he’d understand,” Marnie says.

A quiet spits on their plates.  It stabs its finger into Lou’s ear and the bister’s membrane is tested.  The coil in a spark plug, a nautilus shell.  These were the things his daughter looked like heaped into herself on the concrete basement floor.  He had done everything right, he knows he had.  Locked the doors, set the alarm.  It was only a quick jaunt to Carol’s, the Glintwood Apartment complex less than a mile from his house.  As he slipped Carol on like a reliable coat, his mind was incapable of biting into the ripened truth.  Rita: stuffed on pills and Pinot in their upstairs bedroom.  Marnie: battling with her future demon in the basement.  Lou: shamefully detached in every respect of the word.

“What’s there to understand?”  Rita.  Her nose is a pinched straw, a clipped wheeze aching through her right nostril.  Everything, Lou thinks, the syllables crushed with each bite of green bean.  He had spotted Marnie from the basement doorway.  He had called 911.  He had consumed the stairs two at a time, rushed into their bedroom and yanked Rita hard into reality.  He had put his wife in the ambulance with Marnie, hardly fit to stand let alone drive.  He had followed into a hot drool of rain, pricks of red light cutting through his windshield, the sound of his unbarred voice, a needle seeking his quick.

His wife trims a sliver off her chop and with a damp smack, kills the quiet.  “Karen Hannigan.  Pregnant,” Rita says and with that the kitchen revolves, a top snapped from two fingertips.  A swirl of fluid in a cyst.

© 2011-2013 Ericka Clay All Rights Reserved

Photo credit: James Kendall

Sara can’t see because she hides her face
behind crooked fingers she’s cocked sideways
so the middle one points somewhere between
my neck and chest.  You and I dine at Ace’s
steakhouse, waiting for plates of beef that seep
cold blood, our cheeks rouged with heat or shame.
I’m sorry we’re here and even sorrier we sit
close to a woman who’d skin me with canines
and claws if no one was here to witness.
We all pretend to notice wall color,
the veins on the backs of our hands, every-
thing that is nothing compared to the truth.

I see her face and wonder if she’ll break
framed wedding pictures in her head and light
the marital bed on fire when observing
your indiscretion, your moment of painful
clarity, your moment with me.  Yet, knowing
her I know she’s wedded the thought, broken
bread with it, bleached the sheets and burned
the splinters only to open herself
up, once more, for someone like you.

You see, I’m like her too.  I had
something before this moment, went in so
sharp, so quick that I hardly noticed it.  But
the wound was there, it festered, coated thick
with his spit and sperm until swollen, congealed,
knot-like. It became a part of me, became the part
that does not heal.  So now I watch her, watch the way
she scratches at the skin with a dirty nail till the edges
tear and life is drawn to the surface, only for it all
to scab over once again.  You see, I’m like her
because I let him, let you, let everyone in
and never found a way to
let myself out.

© 2010-2013 Ericka Clay All Rights Reserved

EVIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sleeping has become a thing that doesn’t interest me.  That’s what I keep telling myself.

It’s pretty much the same mantra I repeated while watching the royal wedding except I replaced “sleep” with “Prince William” and instead of saying it quietly in my bed at night, I yelled it down my street in a tear filled rage wearing the wedding gown I had made for myself in sixth grade while tearing at the sky with his royal highness’s dog eared poster that he signed.  And by “he” I mean my mother.

The thing is, I have a child, and apparently children are pretty evil.  You are the reason I was previously unaware of this, and by “you” I mean my mother.

Dear Mom,

Remember that time you decided to have one kid who was all things perfect and routinely entertained you by saying things like “Why are you obsessed with culottes?” and “Are you sure orange is your color?”

Well, guess freaking what.  Apparently not all children are helpful fashion critics because yesterday I dropped my daughter off at school and she didn’t even have the decency to tell me my pants had a hole in the crotch.  And that I had forgotten to put on pants.

Do you know how easy you had it?  Do you??  I’m over here dealing with Shirley McScreams a lot because I forgot to coat dinner in chocolate again while you could have made a side of string freaking beans and I would have eaten it.  As the side to my prime rib.

How was I to know children are terrors that think sleep is the archenemy of the human race?  There I was at twenty-four, reliving all the gorgeous times I allowed you to be seen in public with me, thinking how wonderful it would be to spend precious moments like that with my child when little did I know I was harboring a trained sleep assassin in my uterus.

Really, I blame you and TV and the parts of the Internet that feature unglittered cats and that guy at the Steak and Shake who said I can put the shake in his steak any time (what does that mean, Mom??  What does that even mean???) and hair spray.  For the love of unglittered cats, I just do not understand hair spray.

So this is what we’re going to do.  I’m going to start wearing orange culottes and burning pot roast like it’s my freaking job and you’re going to dress like Princess Kate on Wednesdays and Fridays and regale my neighborhood with your “blue blood ankles.”  And yes, you have to say “blue blood ankles” or they won’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

Maybe if we switch places then we’ll see what it’s like to be in each other’s shoes which from where I’m currently sitting, is just lovely.  Your daughter is intensely attractive and I’d make out with her if she weren’t me.  Plus I just tried and hit my head on my night stand.  It hurts.

So have fun wrangling a pint-sized war lord who doesn’t even know how to apply eye liner properly.

This pot roast won’t burn itself.

Yours in this life and in the next as long as the next life consists of talking roosters who compliment me on my posture,

Ericka Wilhelmina Clay

PS – Wilhelmina?  Can you imagine???  Haha, no but seriously, please stop wearing orange.

I just sent it to her.  Let’s just hope this puts us back on good terms.  Now to take a nice nap on that lady selling suede handbags.  No, wait.  That’s just my dog.

I am so tired.

]]> http://creativeliar.com/2013/05/02/dear-mom/feed/ 23 erickaclay Dear Mom, #funny | creativeliar.com http://creativeliar.com/2013/04/26/helga/ http://creativeliar.com/2013/04/26/helga/#comments Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:00:26 +0000 Ericka Clay http://creativeliar.com/?p=1693 ]]>

Photo credit: ndanger

This all began when Richard left, when Helga
forced herself into an empty bed and
grazed a melancholy hand across the
dent where Richard’s sleeping body would heave
and gasp startling snores at three in the morning.
There were other things too.  There were the looks
she received from neighbors that said “It happens
to the best of us,” and the others that
read “Poor thing will never get it right, find
somebody else, get herself together,”
etcetera, etcetera.   It was those daunting
voices Helga imagined slipping out of her
neighbors’ mouths when they made lunch dates
without her.  It was voices like these that changed
what Helga was.

It was necessary, a metamorphosis,
a lifestyle change, the development of
self-control that would keep Helga from making
a permanent safe room out of her refrigerator.
But Helga’s change wasn’t change at all.  She
continued to take mini-vacations
to the fridge.  Her kitchen was a halfway
home for the confused and abused, for those
who needed to bake a wall of lasagna,
or a fortress of bunt cake.  Helga’s obsession
was defined by degrees: Hostess cupcake
for an energy boost, family size
bag of Doritos after taking a
two minute walk around her living room,
double stuffed Oreos when it rained.  She
would only break out the big guns for emergencies:
dead dog, broken ankle (the result of
decorating her ridiculously
tall Christmas tree), flat tire, flat tire again,
her favorite soap opera going
on permanent hiatus.  For these situations
she didn’t think, she acted.  Turkeys would
roast in the oven, bathing in garlicy
juices; pie crusts would cling to pie pans, dough
curling over the edges; homemade ice
cream shivered in the freezer, counting on
the occasional gap between door and
fridge for warmth.  These days were the
hardest to bear.

Still, Helga had no use for change, she only
smoothed over the situation with compliments
and false good feelings as if icing a
cake to hide its imperfections.  She bought
new clothes, accoutrement for her brand new
figure.  At first, she attempted to try
on clothing two sizes smaller than she
was, like the flower print pants that enfolded
her legs like sausage casings.  Sometimes she
succeeded like the time she squeezed into
that Nicole Miller tube top.  She had a
full two minutes of victory until
she realized the top would not budge and she
had to cut herself out of it with the
hot pink Swiss Army knife Richard bought her
last Christmas.  It was embarrassing stuffing
scraps of a perfectly good tube top into
her hand bag and even more embarrassing
being chased by store security.
Helga was not two sizes smaller.

It was like this for a period of time.
Weeks went by where Helga would sit by the
Window and close her eyes tight praying that
Richard’s car would make an appearance.  No
Amount of baked apple tarts or seared salmon
steaks filled the void where Richard used to exist.
Helga went to bed every night, her
ritual always the same.  She took a
long, hot shower and sang every song
she could remember from Les Miserables
and by the time she finished she had become
a five-foot-four blotchy lobster struggling
to make the ends of her bath towel meet.  Next,
she’d slather on lotion, careful to cover
each crease and fold while congratulating
herself on maintaining such an excellent
weight.  Smooth and a bit sticky, Helga would
tug on the blue flannel night gown that Richard
had said brought out her eyes.

Then Sunday happened.  Helga didn’t mean
to stop by the Marmont Motel.  In fact,
she had meant to drive southbound, not northbound,
but her two wrists, the one that had inconveniently
grown around her “Polex” wrist watch and the
other that lay naked against the steering
wheel, jerked to the left and she found herself
at the place where Richard had resided
for the last month.  She got out of the car
as if she had a purpose, as if she
was there to visit an old friend.  For a
moment Helga almost believed that Richard
was inside one of those cracker jack boxes,
perched on the corner of the bed with legs
crossed and a bottle of Don Perignon
in hand.   But Richard wasn’t in his room
at all.  He was actually leaning
over the railing and looking, looking
right at Helga.  Helga went into fight
or flight mode and thought of sixth grade biology
when she learned her body was in control,
her mind merely a passenger along
for the ride.  Her body failed her this one
and only time, so instead of breaking
out into a manic run, she found her
eyes on Richard’s face.  Richard squinted at
Helga like she was there but wasn’t, as
if he was trying to make out a spot
on his shirt to see if it was an ink
stain or an insect.  He drew hard on his
cigarette and flicked it over the railing.
He turned and left Helga there, knee deep in
a puddle of what was.

Sunday night was not like all the other nights.
Instead of sneaking down the stairs for a
late night snack, Helga subconsciously closed
the kitchen in her mind.  As she lie in
her empty bed and felt her body spread
from end to end she realized, once again,
the immensity of her size.  Right before
she closed her heavy lids, Helga stretched the
fingers of her corpulent hand and waved
goodbye to the Richard sized depression
beneath her.

© 2010-2013 Ericka Clay. All Rights Reserved.

It’s wonderful.

So here’s a glimpse of me.  Of what it’s like inside my head:

• When I look at men I see little boys.  I don’t mean that in a derogatory way.  I mean I see their faces before life dug into them, etched away the excess.  When they smile, laugh, I can see them when they were simple and pure.  It’s nice knowing what the “before” was like.
• I sense things sometimes.  Evil.  I’ve seen a demon before, heard my dead dog barking.  I’ve passed out because of the spectral tension in a haunted hotel.  It was the same hotel where my husband proposed to me.  And I can’t wait to go back.
• I jumped into the pool at my wedding reception.  It was my main goal for the day.  Besides getting hitched and what not.  I was not arrested and in fact the entire wedding party decided to join me.  They all passed my test.
• I have an extreme fear of the dark, a phobia actually.  I can’t explain it but if a room goes pitch black I feel utterly devoid of life like I’m slowly being suffocated.  I have to see light, even it’s just a little to revive me.
• I have depression.  It’s a part of me and on the days it scuttles out the door, I miss it a little.  I feel it feeds me, gives me the root of every word that leaves my fingertips.  I generally stay a little sad for this reason.  Not that I don’t know how lucky I am.  But the superstitious side of me thinks this is why I’m so lucky in the first place.  I don’t take anything for granted.
• I used to suffer from exercise bulimia (and yes, that’s apparently a thing).  I used to be obsessed with my body.  My past had a way of focusing on the outside and refuting the in.  But I made a decision before I got pregnant that I wouldn’t be this way anymore and with a will stronger than I was used to harboring, I started to eat for health, for life, for her.  I never want her to know the bad side of me, my weaknesses.
• Everything overwhelms me: writing, wifedom, motherhood, work, life.  But it does so in such a delicious way that I could never deny these things.  They make me peaceful even when there’s chaos right outside my eyelids.
• I’ve kissed more girls than boys.  College.
• I don’t tend to trust people who deal in extremes.  There’s always a middle.  That’s usually where you find love.
• I know my husband on an all encompassing level.  He is the greatest thing I’ve ever accidentally won.  And I won a goldfish at a carnival once that lived four years.
• My greatest role model is Mother Teresa.
• I’m Catholic, I guess, but sometimes I don’t really know.
• I can tell people have a hard time pinning me down.  I wish I could make it easier for them.
• I am not insane.  I mean not the insanity you generally tend to find on my blog.  Just the insanity that is this post.

All right.  Your turn.

Photo credit: Jeremy Brooks

He shook a random current, the buzz biting hard off the granite and sending a pulsing scream through the kitchen.  He was in the wrong place.  He hurt at his neck.  His body was shot.

And it was all the stupid baby’s fault.

That baby was peering at him now.  Toothbrush stood resolute on the kitchen counter because the outlets near the bathroom sink were fried to hell and Margie could no longer keep him plugged into the outlet near the floor.  That’s where the bad thing happened.

It had been warm.  Margie never left the air conditioning on during the day so his hard plastic had begun to swelter. Margie came into the bathroom with that baby on her hip.  She was a larger woman, keeping the thick of the middle in line with the thick of her backside.  But toothbrush liked that about Margie because her hands were soft and nestled him like a sweating loaf of bread.

She had used him like she did every morning.  She put him to his purpose, brushing and stroking the curves of her teeth.  He vibrated, the length of him shaking with hardened focus.  He was serious about his work.

Margie rinsed him, shook him dry.  She stood him on his stand on the bathroom floor where he came eye to eye with the baby.  He thought nothing of Margie’s baby.  She was nothing but a lump of flesh glued to Margie’s hip.  A screaming, snotting goiter.

Margie moved away to the alcove where the toilet squatted and the shower stupidly drooled.  Toothbrush watched her rear poking out from the cabinet where the towels were kept, her head and hands rooting while her legs and ass wiggled in time.  There was no way she could see.

The baby grabbed him by the neck, jerking him off his stand.  She started to run on her wobbly legs.  She knocked his butt into the door frame, jammed him hard into the ground when she fell onto her own backside.  But she gathered her limbs, stuffed Toothbrush back into her sticky hands and took off again.  She ran through Margie’s bedroom and maneuvered through the door Margie had left open a crack.  She hit his button as she wobbled and he felt the current run through him, loose and all willy-nilly like mid-air.  He had no purpose.  That baby had no teeth.

Finally they stopped.  They were in the living room, in the cramped corner where the baby had a mess of toys waiting for her.  For him.  She took his quivering body.  She thrust him in the air.  She smacked him hard against a tiny sized drum.  She laughed.  She laughed at him.

When it was done he knew he was broken.  He vibrated but only a small whimper.  He was spent and it hurt too much to cry.

When Margie came in she was angry.  Her arms flapped like hearty wings.  She smacked the baby on her backside, only delivering a fraction of the pain toothbrush was currently harboring in his parts.

Margie had removed his head and replaced it but this time, backwards.  It was the only way the current ran smooth through his body again.  She set him up on the kitchen counter, his bristles shamefully brushing against the wall.

But he could still see the baby on the floor clapping her sticky hands.

He could hear the toaster snickering.

© 2010-2013 Ericka Clay All Rights Reserved

Being a girl means wearing shoes that look like a drunk ass garden gnome took a dump on them. So pretty!

If there’s one thing I know how to do in this life, it’s to be fully and completely myself until someone not so politely asks me to stop.  Seeing that I am, in fact, a girl (despite what Brendon Schufflemier yelled out during our sixth grade assembly on proper hygiene) and that I’m pretty freaking good at it, I’ve decided to give you a step-by-step run down on what it’s like to be given the privilege of embarrassing yourself on a monthly basis by buying sticks designed to stick up your hoo-ha.

First, you should know that I’m fully qualified.  I’m so good at being a girl that I actually do research by watching one of the most notably awesomest shows to ever grace my television set: Girls on HBO.  This show is what it would be like if instead of one Alf, there were four and all of them had vaginas and instead of eating cats, they talked about how awesome it is to live in New York and barely wear clothes.  The fact that I’m not doing either of these things at this particular moment is making my heart break into tiny baby hearts that won’t stop crying.  It is so loud inside of my chest right now.

So seeing that I’m a certifiable CEO of girldom, let’s get busy.

HOW TO BE A GIRL

1.  You’ll need some boobs.  I know, I want to be all like “No, no you don’t need boobs.  Boys like the fact that you have a working limbic system and a penchant for not randomly pooping in public,” but let’s face it, boobs are the world’s currency plus pooping isn’t the worst thing that could happen to you in public.  Trust me.  Also, if I told you that you didn’t need boobs to be a girl, I’d be channeling my mother circa 1995 who wouldn’t let me shave my legs like the rest of my friends because a razor is, and I quote, “the devil’s match stick.”  Okay, she didn’t actually verbalize it but she did say it in the way she’d accidentally (and frequently) called me by my poodle’s name.  Fifi.  Seriously.  They let this woman have children.  So boobs and you.  How can you amplify what God/Buddha/nothing/thatmagicaldragoninthesky gave you?  Here are a few tips:

* Become friends with flat chested people.  But not real friends.  Their love of sports bras and book learning may rub off on you and you may start saying things like “I don’t know about you but I could really go for a venti latte and a shit ton of poetry right about now.”

* Speaking of bras, get one.  Fill it with boob-like substances like pudding or nacho cheese and put it on.  Then put another bra on top of it.  Then wonder why your parents decided to have children.

* Constantly cross your arms in front of your chest.  This says things like, “Under these arms are boobs bigger than my Uncle Victor’s head and he once drank an entire six pack of beer while yodeling the national anthem” and “I don’t like it when people hug me.  Also, people in general.”

 2. Care about things that don’t make sense.  Things like men who never call you back, men who think you need to lose weight, men who think you need to gain weight, men who have no clue how much you weigh even after you sent them a copy of your medical records because you were just being polite and thought the reason he was wearing that brown sweater when you first saw him at the library was a sign that he was deeply invested in your triglyceride count.  Basically, men. 

3. Don’t learn too good.  The great thing about being a girl is being able to do silly things like accidentally glittering the wrong cat (Trick alert: there is no such thing as “the wrong cat”) or filling your bra with too much nacho cheese and then rectifying the situation by screaming “I AM ON MY PERIOD MINIONS!!  BRING ME MY HOO-HA STICKS!!!!”  So it’s absolutely just fine and dandy if learning ain’t your thing.  I SAID SUPER ABSORBENT!!!!  Ahem.

Well, that’s all the time we have for today.  I have to go on a cat finding mission (don’t worry, it’s not too difficult.  After all, they live in other people’s houses!), but stay tune for the next installment when I break Brendon Schufflemier’s spirit once and for all and let you know what else makes you a girl.  Psst…it involves badly written novels…and not even the ones I write!

***

Photo credit: Martin Gommel

People think of hands. They say words like “fingers,” “palms,” phrases like “time etched in skin.” They never say “phalanges” though. Just once I’d like to hear “phalanges” in a eulogy. But I never give my opinion. I’m purely the keeper of the gates, a crypt keeper of sorts, whose main task is to curtail the pressure that pumps out the floor vents and from every pore of the inconsolable. It often mirrors the swollen ball of gas throbbing in my stomach even as Great Aunt Lydia tickles my arm with rubber fingers, as Uncle Marty pats my back with a restrained hand. Fingers. Hands. They act as the sticks to which all of this is measured.

Many times I’m found in the break room beneath the politely terse sign that reads “Please Keep All Drinks In This Area.” Rosa calls it the mourning room because this is the real place people acknowledge their grievances. They talk, real talk, not whispered and often the subject recklessly travels from the sadness at hand to others that plague real time. For example, Benny’s soccer game: a real letdown, heartbreaking for all the kids, a travesty to sit in the sun all afternoon for nothing. It’s inappropriate talk, inappropriate outside of the confines of the break room where skin forms at the top of the coffee pot and mends the shredded tissue of unguarded hearts.

Skin. I guess I think of skin in general more often than fingers or hands. It’s because Rosa is incessantly harping on the proper way to care for dead skin. Of course she uses terms like “deceased,” “passed on,” and “not long for this world” (although I often have to point out that this phrase is in reference to those who are about to die, not those who have already taken the final plunge so to speak). Rosa hates reality even more than I hate avoiding it. So I let her win and offer a constant ear to her musings on her morbidly wrought beauty routines.

“Preparation is key. You must always clean the face first. I mean after you turn them over to dress them sometimes they well, they leak out of their mouths and noses,” Rosa whispers through pursed lips. She’s not saying it for shock value because for Rosa the dead aren’t shocking. But she whispers it because Rosa is nothing if she isn’t respectful.

We’re sitting in the break room, the mourning room during a perfectly quiet Wednesday afternoon. There are no takers (under or otherwise) willing to sully my few minutes of peace and quiet so I have this portion of the day to myself. Rosa’s decided to join me so the only nuisance in this relatively nuisance free afternoon is the subtle scent of formaldehyde that resiliently clings to Rosa’s skin no matter how hard she scrubs.

“It’s the things that you wouldn’t think matter that really make the difference. A little tissue builder in the chin and cheeks goes a long way and sometimes I even look for stray hairs. Nobody wants to view a porcupine,” Rosa says, murmuring the “porcupine” part and stealing glances at the empty room. I’ve heard this little schpiel for years now whether she begins with the porcupine comment or abruptly ends with it. Sometimes I think the fumes have finally taken their toll on my poor friend whose skin remains youthfully preserved while her brain seems to sizzle and drain out of her ears.

I look at the clock above Rosa’s raven hair and count the hours until the curtains draw back and our little show is open for business. I know my father is currently in the basement, working mad scientist style on his pretty little row of corpses leaving me to contend with the breathing clients. I don’t fault him for this because as much as my father acts like a mad scientist he looks like one, too, with hair bursting in surges around his head and his hands pickled from working with too many chemicals.

I excuse myself from coffee hour even though I have plenty of time to get ready and utter my lines of condolences into the mirror. But I long for my routine of plucking and pulling, cleansing and tucking, dressing my warm body much in the same way Rosa dresses the cold ones.

My room sits high above the funeral home. It’s the room I’ve had for ages and it’s the only part of Golden Oaks Funeral Services that seems to thrive. It pulses like a pink, pliant orb because I’ve decorated in shades of rose and everything in it can be moved around at a moment’s notice. I don’t like when things get dusty and stale, when the carpet’s fibers permanently bow to the weight of monotony.

I shower and I shave so I am smooth in all the right places for a spicy date, all the wrong places for an impending viewing. I don’t like the rules so I wear make-up that makes me look pretty and I wear colors that sizzle hot in fluorescent lighting. It’s not a lack of respect or disregard for the sorrowful. It’s the thought that I, like anyone else, could very easily become my job and I’m not being the least bit sardonic when I say I’m deathly afraid of the notion.

When time does its duty I go downstairs to make sure the candles are lit, the memorial programs are set out. I receive the family, the closest of kin and make them feel welcome.  They are the Pattersons, Ron and Linda, and they stand side by side with their three-year-old daughter, Montgomery, trailing at their knees. In any other circumstance I’d snicker at a name so blatantly contrived that it probably spent as much time in the oven as the flaxen haired girl herself. But I’m the “welcomer,” the pair of arms open to the weeping little lambs. I don’t make fun because the Pattersons are here to celebrate the life, the death of their five-year-old son, Parker.

At five-thirty the home is abuzz, alive with hushed words and open mouth wailing and at a certain point I escape to the coffee room for another shot of caffeine I don’t necessarily need. It’s in this room that things are real because this is what I experience:

“The lighting, I think it’s the lighting but that poor boy looks like a puppet. I’d never say a word to Linda…”

“They had so much hope for that boy. Such a smart little thing, even at five. Montgomery seems decent enough, but I don’t know if she’ll ever be that sharp…”

“No, no in Pemberton. I get my nails done in Pemberton. Her name’s Janine, here let me see if I still have her card…”

In this room reality washes me clean and I feel wounds heal, wounds that I wasn’t even aware were sunk solid in my flesh. I walk out of the break room after chucking my Styrofoam cup and losing what little resolve bonded my feet firmly to the floor. I’m met with the “funeral smell,” the over indulgence of expensive cologne as if every person in this place is olfactorily compensating for the loss of life. I meet, I greet. I explain that I am nothing to this place or to these people other than a brightly clad Angel of Darkness.

It’s not what I do before or during the service that even matters. I mean, yes, it matters because who else would do the mundane things? Who else would vacuum tissue fibers out of the carpet or scour the dirt brown ring in the toilet bowl? All of these things matter, I know this wholeheartedly. But what happens afterward is the secret thing that matters most.

Before Rosa can sneak upstairs to admire her work once again or before my father can make sure everything is on the up and up, I go and find Parker and give what little respect I can offer him. This is what it amounts to:

“Parker, my name is Vienna Oaks and I am thirty-two years old. I work for my father who owns this place and no matter what I do I can’t stop smelling preservation. It’s chemically sweet and it hurts when I breathe, and I, and I’m sorry but Jesus Christ I’m jealous, Parker. I am so jealous you’re gone and I’m still fucking here.” I say it but I’m not saying it because I’m gasping, pawing the smooth wood of his casket and breathing in the heavy scent of misspent youth. I feel unhinged and unloved. I feel everything “un” and would do anything to trade places with this little boy, but it has nothing to do with him personally. I’d trade places with any of them.

I’m touching Parker’s cool wooden coffin, soaking in the smooth, unadulterated feel of death. I feel the stillness in this room. I feel the stillness of his hands.

Here’s a post from an old blog explaining my whole “I’m just gonna have one child so I have plenty of time to glitter these two cats who I’ve named Sybil and Harmonica for Dave Coulier’s birthday” theory.  It’s also been published in the New England Journal of Medicine.  I mean the DSM IV.

***

Ava, taking a break from tying me to this chair. Can one of you bring me a glass of water? Thanks.

my husband and i want only one child. you may not know this (especially if you’ve been able to survive the baby epidemic up until now) but having or wanting only one child makes you a bit of an anomaly. in fact, sometimes i feel as if people treat me like i’m contagious, as if my willingness to allow my uterus to shrivel up will most certainly send theirs into early menopause. i assure you i’m not that powerful (sorta).

so why be so selfish and have only one bundle of joy? easy: there’s more i want to do with my life than be a mother. i’ll take a second for you to catch your breath after choking down your mild (or not so mild) disgust. i know what you’re thinking. you’re wondering why the state would allow someone like me, someone who wants to do something more than just stare at her baby and crochet all day, to raise an actual human being. i promise you i’m not as evil as i seem (in fact i’m usually too gracious for my own good no matter how much of a badass i pretend to be. ask my husband. he does this killer impression of me answering the phone where my voice goes up ten octaves higher so i sound like a little school girl. i can’t stop doing it).

i’m not evil, i’m just ambitious. when i was younger i never thought about marriage or weddings or babies. i thought about this: graduating college with my creative writing degree, getting my MFA, publishing a couple of novels, becoming a professor at a small new england college, living in a bungalow with my dog who i never got around naming but for our purposes here let’s call her midge. i’ve accomplished one of those things – i have my undergrad in english/creative writing from the university of arkansas. check and check. so imagine my surprise when a husband, two dogs and a baby fell into my lap (and i swear to you it happened exactly that way. one day i was minding my own business trying to be all free and single and what not and then this jackass had the audicity to introduce himself to me and change my life for the better. douche. bag.). so some might say i’m clinging to the future i thought i’d have, the one where midge and i play ball for hours on end before heading into the bungalow to grade a crap load of papers. but i’m not. i just know what i want and i’m tailoring my life to achieve it.

i see nothing wrong with this. i see nothing wrong with having one child because i know i’ll be able to concentrate on my writing and raising my kid (emphasis on the singular). i see nothing wrong with knowing you’re not equipped to take on more than you can handle. in fact, i sometimes wish other people would adopt the same mentality.

now don’t get me wrong. i’m not hating (oh hell, let’s go with hatin.’ it just feels right) on people with more than one kid or those who want more. as long as i don’t end up paying for them knock yourself out! if you respect my decision i will most certainly respect yours (unless you decide to kick puppies. then you shall fear my wrath).

i must go and pay attention to my child now and the incredibly tall pile of laundry i must conquer. oh and by the way, i totally know i’ve just jinxed myself by posting this. i should probably add “study up on baby names” to my to-do list.