Dead Stones [manxman] [boyxboy]

quaintly retro

More than a year ago Gilda brought her car into Trent’s shop for repairs. While Trent imagined a stupid small brain behind her burnt ochre forehead, Gilda was unimpressed with the serious smell of petro-carbons or his glistening growling look that promised a price gouging; neither was pleased her daughter Janice who erupted into wailing when she had to take a phone call. However, Trent moved quickly to sooth Janice to wheezy stillness.  Gilda was immediately smitten with his capable masculinity, but he was immured with the image of ten-year-old Luke blinking over Carly’s body crooked and bloody by the jagged black of a car tire.

Now they lived together in a Culver City apartment on Venice Boulevard, still scrabbling to impressions: Gilda to Trent’s bearish allure, Trent to her feminine promise of preserve.  And on this Sunday afternoon—April coolness and Los Angeles everlasting sunshine—Luke, Janice, and Trent recuperated at the dinner table to the sounds of competitive cupcake baking on television.  Janice danced about the Luke’s knees, flashing up her kindergarten paintings of genius. Blue and pink blobs were mommy and daddy; slashes of black crayon were supposed to be Luke.

Gilda was retrieving a container from the kitchen cabinet to pack a lunchbox for Luke(skinnier than a pin) when she recalled the black mole on an ex-boyfriend’s nose(Jarhead called me more bendable than rubber!).  The container slipped from her fingers, and flint was sharpening its harsh hot flecks in the darkest corner of her heart.  But the greasy pans sprawled across the counter and the sink and the dish pile therein tilting at a dangerous angle, and all hers alone to clean.  A firmness crept into her wilting lips, and she slapped her hands over her apron to wipe them clean, to prepare herself for that exciting duty of living.  “I’m alive and good,” she would, in the kitchen lined with faux-wood cabinetry, have yelled, and if perhaps she could spare Trent’s plosive sneers against happy shit, she would have twirled her impression of a liberated nun jubilant amidst the greenery of the Swiss Alps.

Yes, she was alive and well. Lisa was dead, ashes in a kitschy urn dead for seven months (bad luck maybe but she should have drunk more green tea). She leaned on the counter facing the dining table; a giddy relief warmed her heart. She and Trent could now stroll arm in arm down the breezy walkway towards the azure horizon.  They had suffered the last year in the thrall of that mountain burning, spewing a blackish red over their good skies, lunting a stifling miasma over their good home. The mountain had appeared at her door at two in the freaking morning, knocking and knocking, and after Trent had driven him away, knocking and knocking still.  Gilda’s grandmother would have said the angel of death was demanding to be let into their apartment. Trent did not offer to kiss away her unvoiced images of a traitorous husband, only to say, ‘I’m divorced, honest.’ 

Now things would be good, yes, good and gay, now that Luke had brought over a box of chocolates for Janice (Real fancy. Did he steal it?) and gobbled up her toothsome Shake-and-Bake pork chops. (Who’d have thought of such a great combination?). And look here these oranges for ratty Luke to take home—two weeks old, but still fresh.

Gilda gathered herself off the counter and said out loud to Luke, “What have you been up to?”

“Go. Playing lots of go,” said Luke playing slap-the-hand with little Janice at the table.

A smile twitched on Gilda’s face as she unraveled puzzlement on this new occupation of  ‘go.’  Was go as useless as watching foreign cartoons for weeks on end?  It seemed better than staring at the ocean for five hours or parlaying with vagrants.

 “Spent the whole of last week watching a go anime,” Luke added.

Sure, why do I even bother? Gilda went on to pack peas into the container. But the fluorescents were beaming a milky heat over her nape, and she unburdened herself against the counter again and watched the lovely bird’s wings of Janice’s arm flap against Luke’s baggy side.  A sweet thing Janice… agate eyes, prim nose that just demanded to be kissed. But Luke… and the unsmiling slit in his beard and the hair weedy and crispy-looking over the striped shoulders.