An autofiction
There’s Blood In The House
Sometimes, you are a walking crime scene.
You are a crime scene. Chalk outline. Yellow tape. Blood river runs. Before the mess you made in the bedroom, you’re barefaced and lonely. Eating dry cereal out of boxes. You are neither lucky nor charmed. Instead, your face is turbulent. A body tumbling into the black ocean. A mother ties her son to a chair is the headline everyone reads on the website everyone hates. While they ask for how long, what kind of rope, and what’s the son’s condition, a mother in North Dakota types but why.
You remember a hard fist. Chiclet teeth rattling in cages. You’re not the kind of woman who learns her lesson.
It’s winter and you walk around with two black umbrellas covering your eyes because you’re in hiding, a kind of witness protection for the bereaved. The four friends you have left tell you that you’re laying it on pretty thick — even for you. What are you mourning? My former life. The version of you filled with possibility. You were a comma, an exclamation point, possibly a semi-colon, but now you’re a period. End of sentence.
Is there a hashtag for the funeral? Open or closed casket? Your sighs are Byzantine. Everyone’s a laugh riot, your friends are comedians.
