*Painting by Corrine Bayraktaroglu and Nancy Mellon
My wife put in her notice today at work. She tells me that she told her employer that she is moving back to Utah to start a family. I told her that I was planning on telling my boss that the reason we are moving back is to be with our families. This doesn’t make her happy. She says that I need to support her in this fantasy that we are manifesting into our reality through the doors of these notices.
You are all about honesty everywhere but here, she says.
This is serious business, I say. In comes adulthood, because in my head it is the child that makes a man. The line dangling from your wedding ring finally catches a snag. All hail a kingdom ultimately dependant upon your presence, risen from the depths of what had been good ol’ childish sinfulness. The lusty moans of that child you ripped from the clutches of her moaning father makes you moaning from the bed turned hospital turned crib. This person coming into the world undoubtedly considers you an adult, their adult, their one of two. That’s just good ol’ fashioned family values right there. I’m getting deeper into the couch as you, so full of promise, are rising up out of it, a crack monster, slithering from a slit, blood borne. Snake of the devil coming to puke in the garden, saying I told you so, said God. Can’t escape you forever, she says, ripping the contraceptive wire trap that I had installed to kill the devil out and throwing it onto the cold metal that soon shall house the scalpels that soon shall wrap your head and pop it like a zit, splurging my karma right back at me into a threeway. All of us vying for the other’s attention. Dollars being fed into the ticket printer to get your ass back here because you can’t expect me to raise this child on my own! He’s got to have a father and a mother, and it’s got your nose. Yeah, well it’s got your eyes piercing my internet history to uncover that moment when I uncovered my dad’s deciding it was time to take it up a notch, watching what it looks like to get a horse going gonzo in the groin sends a safe splooge fest into just another day of paradise wherein no demons hatch from the armageddon holes betraying the psychopompic benefits that I thought my sneaky zodiacal scorpion lineage was affording me.
It’s an angel, she says, so easily confused. She just has these own ideas in her head. They’re dangerous. They’re opening the door and letting the snake slip right in. And now, here I am, and it’s my turn. Gotta show my support and sow my seed as she goes down for the nine month count on the couch where that creature watches me from behind the veil as I watch TV, laughing as I get my revenge on myself right as the reveal airs where I say, Look, I am your father, births being as inevitable as deaths as we all go down, except for the baby who might live forever, snatching my dream from me like how I stole that of my father’s, becoming the artist that he never could be, becoming a god as I become a grandpa to the grave to the goo goo gone lands of Earth’s last going generation.
