After the Kiss on the Mole of His Pelvis

The First Thing

The first thing she tells me this morning is how the bald man with a swastika tattooed across his forehead came in screaming Heil Hitler and swung a bag of oranges at her head. Miss Gracie said she wasn’t scared because she knew the Lord my God would save me. I’m surprised because she wears a silver necklace with a cross pendant the size of my fist. Figured he would know who to heil against.

Miss Gracie tells me that she had never seen the man until that day, and that it happened at the other food bank. She splits her time between that one and this one, working the dessert station. I work the fruits.

Most of the time she sits on a stool with cracking leather upholstery because standing up is hard for her knees and back. She says the pain is like someone shooting hammers at her through one of those automatic tennis ball launchers.

She takes pills for it every hour. And she takes pills twice a day for motor coordination issues, and other pills only once a day for general paranoia. All those take away her appetite, so it’s more pills to boost weight gain.

They make her forget things. Makes something glassy and distant about her. This is why I’ve learned that her granddaughter graduated Summa Cum Laude from Emory University seven times now. I’ve learned, for the third time, that a friend of her’s is going to have the greatest tag sale in a room as big as here to there, and that I need to come by if I want good clothes for cheap.

She laughs when she says this.

I’m not sure why. It’s not funny.

When she laughs her eyes crinkle like it hurts, and her lips curl tight, and she places her two hands onto my shoulder, and places her head onto the little diamond her hands make. She shakes delicately, almost shyly. An “oh, I’m so dreadfully naughty” kind-of laugh.

I keep my body still and lean my head away. I guess I figure that makes it easier to be around her. Still, I can see the spots where her hair is thinning. I can see the way it strings down gray and limp, over her bruised, leathery skin. Something about it is vaguely reminiscent of a baby bird. Everything about her is a baby bird that is flailing down from the top of a tree.

The Second Thing

Miss Gracie has a collection of fifty-or-so paper cranes. They are spread out on the table, behind the desserts. They’re made out of post-its. Sharp and well-done. She touches them a lot. Reorganizing them into different patterns of color. They are a flock of acidic limes, radioactive guavas, and Caribbean blues.

The second thing she tells me is how she’s had her driving license revoked permanently. She was in college, drank one-point-seventy-five liters of vodka, and wrapped her car around a telephone pole. Her right kidney ruptured, two of her ribs snapped through her stomach, and her head rattled so violently in her skull that she saw sixteen of everything for a month. But that’s not the reason why it was suspended.

That was when she ran her car through a house and killed a pair of newborn twins.

I go to bed and pray every night that the Lord gives that poor family what they need. I will always love Him, but that doesn’t mean I understand Him or the challenges he gives us.

It’s around this time when an old man with a trucker hat pulled low over his face comes up to me.

He is all beard, and looks down over his nose with one eye when I start to how are you today, sir? I’m doing great, thank you for asking. For the fruits you have your choice of either one of the large ones–here are the large ones–or four of the smaller ones over here. You choose, mix and match. Let me know if you’d like any advice on what seems ripe or not.

The man doesn’t take any fruit, but he does lean in and, with half a smile of teeth so rotten they look like half-popped popcorn kernels, winks are you single? Let me give you a piece of advice. Stay single, and your pockets will jingle.

He pauses and chuckles to himself. Grow a pair, she can’t do nothing if you stare.

He chuckles again. If he’s a boy kisser, then he wants a fat one stuffed up to his liver.

I want to knot my hands through his beard and slam his face so hard through the cheesecake that whatever’s left of his teeth stick in it like candles.

He takes a week-old strawberry swirl cheesecake from Miss Gracie, who laughs while he limps away.

After the First and Second Thing

At some point Miss Gracie looks into my eyes. I see some kind of watery lump sliding around her irises. It is not a tear. It is something that shouldn’t be there. She takes a step forward and puts her hands around that cross-pendant necklace. She hugs me. She smells like nothing when she hugs me, and she’s so small. Bony in the arms and neck. Bony everywhere except for the soft potbelly she drapes with hot pink, V-neck sweaters. They fuzz at the sleeves, doing nothing to hide arthritic fingers that swell at the digits. Bulging like they’ve been pumped full of air. Hard eyes. She is old. So old. Too old. Historic.

I beg the Lord that I don’t believe in that she stops touching me.

But still holding on to me like dried vines around a tree, she tells me about how her house was a crying nest of shivering siblings panting under her father’s belt or hand or cock. The Lord made him an evil man, a horrible man. The Lord will see to it that he hurts. When she says this she grabs my wrists, and pushes her swollen nails into me. They are fungal. They go down so hard that waxing crescents redden in my skin.

When she lets go she closes her eyes and shrugs her shoulders. I won’t question what the Lord my God asks of me.

After the Hug

A buzzed-head boy that looks about nine walks up to me. I speak in broken spanish. Una grande o cuatro pequeñas. I point at the fruits. Estos son los grandes. Estos son los pequeños…¿la piña? La piña es grande, but no buena. I show the mushy bottom of the pineapple. It leaks in my hands. No buena. He says something, and all I can understand is banana. I lift up our best bushel and offer it to him, and he weighs it in his hand. Smiles at me and I smile back. ¡Que tenga un buen día! My Spanish is horrible. I wave goodbye. He throws back a shit-eating grin.

Miss Gracie is fiddling with her cranes. She abandons them, whispers in my ear. Giving the bananas to the monkeys. Wink.

After the Buzzed-Head Boy

I’m almost done for the day when Mrs. Gracie drops her hands to her pockets. Every time she blinks her eyelids fold over fleshy skin tags. Did I take my pills with food? I take the pills for the pain, but no pills to remember what the pills make me forget! She says this like it’s something she says often. If the Lord my God wanted it so that I did not take my pills, then I wouldn’t have. If He wanted it so that I did, then I would have.

I see how the twisted skin on her ring finger has grown over a five-cluster diamond ring. She sees me seeing it.

When Michael asked to be united with me, he got onto one knee and looked at me in the eyes. I looked back, and I knew that it was more than just looking into my eyes. I felt he was seeing something deep in me. And on his knees he said that he loved me, but that he would always love the Lord more. That’s when I knew he was special. He said honey, you are the one who I want to spend the rest of my life worshiping with.

Miss Gracie crosses her arms and looks to the floor. The lines on her face deepen. Her eyebrows are penciled. Her eyes are wide. I’m so excited to die. I’m not suicidal, and I know many people will think I’m crazy, but I want to die. Wide. Wider. Too wide. Owl eyes. Straitjacket eyes. The other week I was in my home making dinner, and I felt a warm presence like a hug and a breeze, and I immediately knew it was Michael. And, I know what it sounds like, but he spoke to me. I heard a voice that said honey, it’s almost time. He’s the only one who called me honey. I started crying.

Water rims, then trickles and drags through her foundation.

She hugs me, and I am a horrible person because all I want to do is whether she’s ever had the urge to drown her children in a bathtub because she saw the antichrist in them.

And I can feel her tears through my shirt now, and I am a horrible person because all I want to do is take a step away. All I want to do is pitch a soggy pineapple at mach fuck through her head. All I want to do is push the entire length of my arm down her throat, grab onto something messy and hidden, and pull her inside out.

I let her hug me. I see her spoon the paper cranes into her bag when I leave.

The Next Week

The next week someone my age comes to the food bank. Miss Gracie turns her back towards me, rolls her eyes, and reverses to my ear. Marvin comes here whenever the judges make him do community service. The Lord knows he will be judged when the time comes.

Marvin wears expensive clothes in a sloppy way. He has fleshy palms and short fingers. Red crust around the edges like rust. His nails are bitten bloody, tight and peeling at the cuticle. The shape of cracked pistachio shells. I saw this because one of the first things he did was fold a crane from a neon yellow post-it, and give it to Miss Gracie.

She turns to me when he walks away to work the canned goods. He’s practiced origami since he was a boy. He makes a delicate crane, which is surprising, but the Lord gives in ways I don’t understand. 

After the Neon Crane

Marvin stands with his feet turned slightly outward, and with his legs bowed slightly inwards. A baby deer. Staring out into something. Arms crossed. Baby cheeks and soft, rounded shoulders. Sometimes he juggles canned black beans. Four, five at a time. Mouth open and crusted white with spit.

There is something about him that makes me feel ugly and safe. I imagine it’s like bathing in a tub of vomit. The sour, cheesy smell of butyric acid. Bubbling with chunks of meat and pulpy vegetables, but so warm. So heavy.

Miss Gracie looks at me with her lip-curled. He isn’t even greeting them. She shakes her head. Look at him. Used to be so bright. Did you smell him? We are not all God’s favorite children.

Before Lunch

When the old man with the trucker hat pulled low over his face comes that day, I see something snap through Marvin. Inflating like helium has been popped into his body. The old man says a few words, and Marvin says a few words, and the both of them laugh. Marvin gives him one can of green beans and one of peas. He drops an extra can of each with a wink. The old man smiles as he stumbles away.

Marvin dips his hand back into the basket while it moves, and takes out all four cans he gave him. Marvin sees me see it, and pretended to be surprised. Like it wasn’t him that did it.

During Lunch

During lunch he comes over to Miss Gracie with another paper crane. This one is special because it’s made out of a soft lavender color. He makes one every hour, and when Miss Gracie rearranges her flock to fit the lavender crane, she murmurs I can’t seem to remember if I’m taking my pills. I do think I did. The pain is just horrible today, maybe I need something stronger, but I won’t. The Lord is putting only a grain of his pain unto me, I can feel it. Her jowls sag and bridge the space between her chin and neck.

After Lunch

At some point Marvin comes to the fruits and takes five oranges from the milk crates that the food bank keeps them in. The milk crates I am meant to monitor. He turns to Miss Gracie first, and then to me, and then juggles them. Grinning. Pumping them up and down. His hands are wild and careless. The kinds of hands that would not care if he dropped one, and also the kinds of hands that won’t.

Miss Gracie scowls. I watch her watch him. She stays away from me when he’s around. Clawed fingers clasped over her potbelly. Legs so skinny my hand could circle her thigh. When she talks to me, she talks about him. He’ll never repent.

Marvin puts the oranges back into the milk crate and whistles as he opens a wet bag of grapes. Stretching out his movements like he’s from some black-and-white slapstick comedy.

The Lord tasked Michael with the duty of reforming and teaching boys. He worked as a principal for elementary students, and as a teacher for the youth program at the church every Sunday. Michael would know what to do with him.

Marvin squirms his fingers around in the bag, plucks a fat grape, and waves it around in my face. When he waves it, his hands turn into slack ribbon, and then tighten into fists.

Michael worked until he died. The Lord made his struggle his heart. He cared too much, and that killed him.

He rattles the grape in his fist, flourishes his other hand over it, clumsy flutter, and unveils the palm where the grape used to be. Poof. Magic.

Marvin was one of Michael’s students. I knew his mother, and his mother’s mother. Holy people. They’ve done so much for their children, but the boy decides to go to clown school and fold his paper.

I see him slip the filched grape into his mouth when he turns away. Sucking it through pursed lips. Chewing with an open mouth. Miss Gracie frowns.

He’ll never repent. I can only pray that the Lord sees unto him what he deserves for his sins.

In the Afternoon

One time, Miss Gracie comes back from the bathroom to find her stool missing. Me and Marvin watch as she shuffles to get a new one. If the Lord should ask that I take these pills. She moves like she’s having hammers shot at her through an automatic tennis ball launcher.

I do not tell her that Marvin took the stool and hid it in the custodial closet.

And I do not tell her that for every crane Marvin makes her, he slips his hand into her bag and takes out her pills so that she thinks she took them. She’s absent now. Milky-colored sweat rounds on the thin, translucent hair around her lips. She speaks like she has a golf ball in her throat, and so I don’t think she would have noticed. But Marvin makes sure she doesn't notice because he makes her talk about Michael. They both know him very well. 

After the Stool and Pills

There’s something horrifying about Marvin. He’s lethargic. Acts like the bones in his body have been sucked out and left nothing but soft jelly, but then there’s that thing that pulls him straight. Makes him take the cans back from the old man with the trucker hat. Makes him hurt Miss Gracie.

It is like staring down the hot barrel of a gun. Everything is a flutter and a rush, and I do not know when the bullet will crack out in a spark of thin smoke and tear through my eye and out the back of my head.

He speaks to Miss Gracie whenever he can. It’s always about Michael. Michael, Michael, Michael. Marvin says his name so casually. Michael, Michael, Michael.

Miss Gracie’s body tightens whenever he says it. Or maybe it’s because she hasn’t taken her pills all day. She sucks in air like she’s falling from a plane. And then she’s being beat with Michael, Michael, Michael. Marvin says it like she says it. Only where Miss Gracie is mourning, he’s celebrating.

And I have this image of her being so bruised that her skin is a red-and-blue tie-dyed shirt. With her ribs shattered in her body like clay pots on concrete floors, and blood streaming from her nose and gums, and her face twisted like a rotten apple. This is the image I imagine when she told me about her driving license and the one-point-seventy-five liters of vodka and the newborn twins she killed. This is the image I imagine when she told me about her father and the choking and pushing.

This is the image I imagine when Marvin says Michael, Michael, Michael to her. I can see through the image and into her body, and see how her heart is stubborn. Pumping thinned blood.

It is the beating she has gotten, and the beating she is getting, and a very real voice in me is screaming something about death, death, death.

The Last Thing

Did he make you kiss the mole on his pelvis?

And then nine-one-one.

Everybody hears the sirens first, and then it’s the red-and-blue lights through the windows. I am the one who holds the doors open as one woman and one man bomb into the food bank. Both buttoned in blue, both stoney in the face. Ice cubes sliding into a fire.

Everybody watches as they kneel to Miss Gracie’s side. The feeling like a four-foot iron rod forced through her left wrist. The feeling like a burning hand juicing the rhythm from her heart. The vomit bubbling from her lips. White and watery like spittle.

Heart attack.

They put Miss Gracie on a stretcher. I listen to the sirens leave. Hear the way they hollow into thin chirps.

I think she will die. I’m not sure because it feels too easy of an ending, and something tells me that she will outlive me or Marvin. Or that she will die, and she will climb without pain to the pearly gates where whatever version of Michael she wants is waiting for her, in whatever heaven she is thinking of. But there is no version of this where anyone but Miss Gracie gets what they want. There are many kinds of hell.

I look at the spot where Marvin is. He is there. He is looking at me. He is pretending like he’s surprised.

After the Last Thing

The food bank closes early. I see Marvin crumple the paper cranes into the trash when I leave.