Jellybeans

Hugo did not eat Jellybeans because he liked them. He ate jellybeans because they bought notoriety, an eccentric quirk of character; it was the decision to be known as a jellybean eater. Ever since, Hugo received jellybeans for birthdays, anniversaries, christenings, Easter, Christmas, and Halloween. He would later be buried with a jellybean tin; one housing the expensive ones that tasted like hot fudge sundaes, root beer floats, piña coladas, and Pepsi.

Moles

Marco had moles. His skin looked like a real time photograph of space, the infinite lights blending together in undifferentiated dullness and punctuated scattershot by celestial happenings, predicates on the make. Nova. Class D Star. Black hole. Collision of quarks. He used to wonder if he was meant to be darker, to be a person of color. All the moles were a single mocha hue. It was as if his coloration had been stopped, the recessive whiteness given a boost, a childhood vaccination—his color the victim of a big bang. Alone, nine years old and asleep within the water heated bowels of Westminster Academy, Marco had wept over the miniscule remnants of his blackness. As an adult he spent his summers oiled, prone and pleading.

Baby

I went to a cemetery on Easter Sunday.

The place was not pedestrian friendly and had no sidewalks. It was crowded. Everyone but a single jogger, and me, arrived in a car.

I walked up a series of empty hills to my uncle. The graves were old, the dead never knowing the second world war. If anyone remembers them, they don’t visit. Some stones only have a single date, mid-century, marking vacant graves, waiting and abandoned, all unneeded, secret or forgotten. Beloved husband, wife, son, daughter, the monikers bleed together. Only “baby” stands out. And it is only used to describe the very old, seventy plus. No one describes a dead infant as “Baby”.

A casanova in mismatched heels

Steve had a lump. He had been wiping his underarm with a washcloth when he felt it, presenting underneath a terry champagne shroud. He said nothing to anyone for a month. Several times a day, three conjoined verified his discovery. He always used three fingers, disinterested by design and never a single, probing inquisitive one.

Sometimes Steve thought the lump was bigger, at others, smaller—wishes conflating into thoughts, certainties stumbling on hope; forgetting at each instant whether this lump, this piece of his flesh, aberrant and invasive, was supposed to grow and ripen, or whether it was to his advantage that this thing inside him should shrivel and recede back into itself, which was inseparable from him. One morning, precisely which morning he never committed to memory, Steve knew that the lump had grown. Rising, pivoting, bending, lifting, and moving, Steve inspected his pit in the bathroom mirror, one arm raised over his head, stubble protruding from his underarm scattershot, it’s concave surface paler than the rest, pigment reaped by countless a dual razors’s manicuring plastic cradled edge. He held his arm up without effort, but also without strength, his arm hooked and still, in tangent with the top of his head; waves of raven black hair, sprung luminous and cascading underneath his arm, eventually tapering into a dozen thick wet tips that sat propped and solid on the smooth light brown skin of his thin back.

He held his breath, once, twice and again, until he touched the varicose lump; this, his unaccompanied index finger’s maiden voyage; he moved the finger with conviction, but faltered, losing all courage at his pit’s never-ending give and refused to push the lymphatic cork too fat back into him. This Steve felt but didn’t see. He looked not at the lump but at his whole reflection, an amnesiac and a stranger; his face distorted by fear, an unrecognizable, trembling hummingbird quiver.

The doctor suggested that Steve wasn’t cleaning properly and prescribed hygiene, imposed a good healthy scrub. Within time, wasted, futile and ordained, the euphemistic lump belied it’s fast moving character, a system in revolt, a loom spinning misdiagnosed dirt into cancer, metastasized and pervasive.

Steven was given six months to live but half a year to be added to eighteen; Sagittarius to die mercurial, too swiftly and too young, morphing Mercury into endgame, dual capricious midwives giving birth to the dead.

Jenny

My mom bought a BMW when I was kindergarten, rust colored with ecru cloth seats, lightly textured maize by the weave fabric. We had driven straight from my school to the Sears in Glendale. My mother and grandmother sat in the front and for once their heads could be seen over the dashboard. German engineering and ingenuity accommodating even women of Mexican stature. From the back I stared as they excitedly unwrapped the cassette tapes they had just purchased.

As usual my mother and grandmother had made identical music purchases, two of each cassette, three each in total, and my mother excitedly put one into the tape deck of the new car. She turned up the volume and stated with an upward pitch that she “loved this song.” I watched the road from my view in the back, crooking my neck to look in-between the two front seats. My grandmother removed a butterscotch candy from her mouth, wrapped it in plastic and dropped it in the space between her seat and the passenger door.

My mom said to me, “Your grandpa always said I looked like her.”

“No, you are prettier,” my grandmother retorted, never giving Oscar the last word—even when he was absent.

My mother, wearing red sunglasses shaped like hearts sang along.

Tennis Anyone?

Being pegged a good listener has its downside.

When I was thirteen, my grandfather spoke to me, man to man, over a game of tennis about his sexual frustrations with my grandmother. I was gathering the balls that had collected three feet from the net when he started. He walked towards me and rested the head of his racket on the net, face up. He stared at the head and rocked it side to side a couple times before he looked up at me.

“You know when horses get horny, how they get mean until they can have sex?”

I looked up and didn’t answer. For the record, my answer would have been “no, I haven’t contemplated the sexual frustrations of stallions.” Even though I was listening, I stared at my grandfather—all I could do was watch. He was wearing a tight-yellowed polo shirt of no brand or notoriety. A worn, frayed cotton that was stretched tight across his belly. His shorts were brown terrycloth and obscenely short, reminiscent of a past when men must have been compensating for the fact that women couldn’t show their legs. His legs were thin, a jolly torso scooped onto legs.

“Their balls fill with cum and it hurts them so they get nasty and agitated. You know what I mean?”

“No.” I had collected all the balls and stood there staring.

“Well it’s like that between me and your grandmother. We fight and fight and most couples have sex after to have some relief. But your grandmother wont have sex with me so I’m like a horse.”

“Your balls hurt?” I didn’t want to know but I had to be sure I was hearing this correctly.

“Yes, I have no release.”

I proceeded to lose the tennis match to my blue balling grandfather, undoubtedly due to his rage.

Or maybe it was because all I could think through out the match was “I can’t wait to tell grandma!”