Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
Sometimes I dream there is a boar with a dead man’s face locked in my bathroom.
I am looking at it through the crack at the bottom of the door. It rolls its head and presses its cheek against the floor and we stay like that. Staring at each other. The weight of my body against the door is the only thing keeping it inside.
It does not make a sound, but I know that if it spoke it would be with my father’s voice. I know this because I am his son. I understand his rot more than I understand anything else.
The space between me and the dead man feels infinite, yet I am close enough to see every detail of his decomposition. The dead man looks at me looking at him. His face is so disfigured from the bloating it’s almost purple. Both his eyes are nearly swollen shut. His lips, fat, dumb and drooling. The bathroom is too small to fit him yet I somehow managed to get him in there anyway. He is very still.
My father’s voice finally says my name and it is like cold water hitting the back of my throat.
**
I wake up at the wheel.
Josie has her head resting against the window. I can’t move my neck but if I slide my eyes to the side enough I can see the gentle crescent of her closed eye peeking through the strands of black-brown hair covering her face. Behind her temple the glass of the car’s window is shattered in a spiderweb halo. I can’t see the blood but I know it’s there. I look at her like that for a long time.
Josie is a nurse at the hospital. She steals pills from the patients and eats them with her boyfriend who has a face tattoo and a small cock. She’s confident only in her cruelty to others and sings very badly whenever she gets drunk. Our mother gave up on her before she was fourteen years old so I’ve always had this guilty big-brother thing about trying to take care of her or something but the feeling was never strong enough for me to actually try to do a good job of it. I think mom was just mad about that time at a poetry slam were Josie accused our father of molesting her in grade school even though he was dead by the time she went to kindergarten. We didn’t talk about it.
The deer on the hood of the car hasn’t died yet. It makes sound. Some kind of endless moan. Or maybe that is me. It is hard to tell.
I don’t know how long it takes for me to remember the phone in my pocket, but I call an ambulance, and then Mabel’s babysitter. She’s a rail-thin, brace-faced, thirteen year old from down the block who has a voice that wavers with uncertainty even if you ask her the time of day. I tell her there was an accident and I won’t be home. She says what do you mean an accident. I can feel vomit at the back of my throat. I try to say something like “call you parents” or maybe it was “take Mabel to your parents” but I can’t control my tongue and there’s vomit everywhere and I blink and don’t even know I’ve passed out again until I open my eyes and someone is rolling my body onto a gurney. I blink again and see a big white box. It feels like there’s static inside my head. I blink again.
**
In West Texas, they call the infected skin around a wound “proud flesh.” It must be cut away in order to heal. Sometimes they used a knife. Sometimes they used maggots. Still do.
Our father taught me this as he wrote a poem about a war he had never seen. He thought that this was a beautiful thing. I think now is a good time to say that my father was a coward who didn’t know a thing about beauty or children. We loved him very much.
I look at the boar in the bathroom and see no wound, just the purple lips and bloated cheeks, ruddy and thickly veined. And yet I know it is proud, I do not want to hurt it. I stay pressed against the floor in order to keep him in the bathroom. When he says my name, I know it is an invitation. Closer.
**
In the car, before the deer, Josie was just about to light a cigarette. She was still in her scrubs from work and I had just asked her to not smoke in the car because I had to drive Mabel to school in the morning and she hates the smell. Josie had paused and looked over at me, the butt end of the cigarette clasped gently between her front teeth, hand instinctually cupped around the lighter raised to its tip, her eyebrow cocked in what was about to be a scowl.
Josie had a new tattoo of a rose behind her ear. Her hair was oily and scraped back in a ponytail. When she was little I would comb it for her before she got on the bus for school. Back then it was red-brown and smooth, like our father’s, and she would pretend to like the same music as me so she could look through the stuff in my room. She dyed her hair dark the second time small-cock-face-tattoo broke up with her and it’s stayed like that since. It made her look sad most of the time. She tells me that he likes her hair that way. I think he likes her sad, too, but I don’t tell her that.
In the car, before the cigarette and the deer, I was telling her about my dream. About the boar with the dead man’s face. She had asked me if I recognized him in any way and I had said no but readjusted my hands on the wheel in a way that said yes. She didn’t press but placed the cigarette between her teeth and made a “hmmph” sound at the back of her throat that meant I thought so and we both knew that so I scoffed and turned my head to start the same spiel about put that shit away and/or who gave you the right to think you know everything about everyone and Josie looked over at me, rolling her shoulders back in the way that meant she was really ready to get into it, and that was when the deer thought it would be a good idea to crucify itself on my windshield.
**
I grew up outside of Uvalde on our grandfather’s ranch. Our father wrote poetry in the attic and our mother would watch through the window above the kitchen sink as the trains passed, pausing for a long while with whatever dish she was washing in her hands.
We moved to Columbus when Josie was born. I think she grew up mean because she was bored. We drifted apart once I went to college. I grew my hair long and went to too many punk shows. Got a girl named Caroline pregnant in the bathroom of a 4Skyns concert, too strung out to remember the condom. She said she was on her period so it was fine but she was lying.
A guy with an open wound on his leg gave me a solo cup of cold water after I stumbled out of bathroom and it was the best thing I had ever tasted. The guy smelled like something rotting. The skin on his knee was split open like a gaping mouth. A skinhead bumped me into the wall and I spilled some of the water down the front of my shirt and sort of just stayed there, pressing my temple into the cinderblock. There were a lot of skinheads at that show. I didn’t fuck with it but I didn’t do anything about it either. The wall behind them had a big mural of a bloodied chimp barring its teeth but it was too dark to see much of anything at all. The man with the bleeding mouth on his knee asked me if I was okay. I didn’t remember anything else after that.
I got clean and started teaching poetry classes at a night school then a community college. Mabel was born. Mom left me the house in her will. Caroline moved in and then out, fast, leaving Mabel with me for some reason. Then Josie lived with us just until she finished nursing school. She used to be good with Mabel, especially back then. Later, I wouldn’t let her in the house anymore, but I would still sometimes pick her up from work and we would drive to the donut shop I used to take her to in high school and she would spend the whole time talking like she always did. We would both get pumpkin cake and black coffees. She would tell me that I was getting fat and that the beard didn’t suit me, nudging my shin with the tip of her shoe. I would always laugh at that, no matter what. Laugh and shake my head.
**
In the car, I didn’t tell Josie that she was the one who let the boar into the house.
If I did, she would accuse me of being our father, like she always did. Of speaking in metaphor, being “insufferable.” Just tell me you think I’m gonna ruin your life. We’ve been through it a thousand times. No matter where we were, we always spiraled back to some variation or another. Every time you relapsed I was the only person there for you. In the donut shop, over coffee and pumpkin cake. Just because you have the same stupid face as dad doesn’t mean you’re gonna turn out like him you know. If you do then it’s your fucking fault--not destiny, not mom, and especially not me. All you. In the middle of the street, in cars and public transportation. You don’t have to take care of me I’m not a little kid. It was like a script we ran through, practiced every few weeks or so until we got the screaming just right. The diction pronounced, biting and stage ready. And I am especially not your no-mom daughter that can’t even sleep by her fucking self at night because she’s so scared you’re gonna ditch her.
Josie rehearsed her rage with small-cock-face-tattoo. I was quick enough to learn that silence hurt Josie more than anything so I practiced the clench of my jaw instead. Staring at the space just above her head instead of looking right at her. Just the basics, the things that never resolved anything at all yet somehow still got her to finally stop talking.
That was all I ever wanted, the silence or the laughter. Josie knew that. I’d do anything to make the yelling stop as soon as it could. I mastered the hazy stare, the blank look into a distance neither of us could discernibly see. I learned that from Mom.
Josie would start bawling, but she’d always do that. That was easy to turn away from.
**
I wake up to a nurse standing over me.
The thought Josie sits half-formed in my head. The room is dark but the light from outside hums against under the green curtains pulled around my bed.
“She’s gonna be alright,” she says. She has her hand on my bicep. I am curled on my side. I didn’t even know I had asked the question aloud. It felt like there was a heavy warm blanket over me. She gave me apple juice to drink when I asked for water. It felt like everything was a warm blanket. “She’s gonna be just fine, lay back down now, like that. She’ll be just fine.”
**
We are standing in the kitchen of the Uvalde house, looking out the window above the sink. I am trying to show Josie where the trains would go. The boar with the dead man’s face is in the grass outside.
Josie is young, Mabel’s age again. I have to lift her onto the counter so that she can see. She breathes quickly in that way toddlers and puppies do, warm and happy. Her little bare feet teeter on the thin strip of wood. I am worried she will fall if I let go so I don’t. I am trying to show her where the trains would pass but she isn’t looking at the horizon. She’s looking at the grass. She’s looking at the grass and pointing and saying look there he is look and then it is just me and I am standing in my mother’s place at the window. The train is no longer outside. Neither is the boar.