Mantis In A Basket: Part I Sinful Wafer

Sinful Wafers


In the dust and the haze of a Sonoran summer, in the dead of the afternoon, in that hour when the heat flattened the horizon into a receding slick, Eugenio walked from his shed in the field into the back yard, sat on the middle of three kitchen steps and blew his brains clean out the back of his out with a shotgun he had shoved firmly into what soon used to be, his open mouth. The noise cracked for a second before the heat and pace of that insufferable siesta muffled his farewell salute. That morning he had gone to church. He took communion without confession, content to have taken the wafer at all. Afterwards he had played with Carmenia, his eldest daughter and five years old. He spent an entire hour lifting her up by the under arms and swinging her about wildly, until her laughter crescendoed C-sharp, then broken giggles, until finally, the pay-off, "Te amo Papa!" She still wore the blue trimmed white dress, knee highs and black baby doll shoes that she wore every Sunday and had worn the prior six months. Eugenio then drank tequila by himself, the inescapable feeling that he was done was his only company, done there and then, for good, that afternoon. He was employed, married and had three children, two daughters and a son. He spent no time with his other children or his sweet wife. They would get over it and move on. Carmenia, however, was another matter. Born with a regal air, and ephemeral aspirations, she would be devastated at the perceived slight. She was all dreams and no practicality; the spoon in her mouth the only silver the family owned, Carmenia would marry money. Margarita, Eugenio's other daughter, was a plebe by nature, as grounded and unassuming as the dirt that grew their food. Where Carmenia laughed out loud at everything like Eugenio assumed a Spanish princess might at the antics of the constumed dwarves enslaved to her care, Margerita, more dwarf than princess, gave only an ever suspicious stare. She taught second grade for forty years before retiring to thirty yeas of tequila mixed with Squirt from the United States, pension from the Republic of Mexico, and cigars from Havana. Eugenio, his son and namesake, was a gentle soul, a deaf mute standing six two and one hundred pounds overweight. Junior was not built for the outdoors, but a lad, all mumbles and nods, at home in the parlors and kitchens of older women. Eugenio's only gripe in life was that he was the only person who tended to anything outdoors, often accompanied by his salty youngest daughter, dress rolled up, no shoes, swinging a basket full of bugs, rocks, dead mice, dead birds and whatever else she happened to find. And Margerita found everything. And, at last, Eugenio loved his wife, which he confirmed in secret, her voice the last thing he thought of as the powder cracked under two accelerating hammers. He had no reason to do it. And so he did it. And just like a man, in plain view and carelessly in front of the open kitchen door, giving his wife one last chore on his account, one last mess. Margerita would find bits of skull for weeks, placing the fragments alongside two gold teeth in her basket, just next to a dried praying mantis.