—I WISH I COULD STOP SPINNING ABOUT THINGS THAT HAVEN’T EVEN HAPPENED

 

 

Twenty-one

 

We gave birth to a monster, but didn’t know it.

 Minutes old, and gleaming like a pink clay pot, he already wore dimples, as if adoring angels had pinched him there. 

Just look, we said, astonished.

At six, both parakeets disappeared, their feathers dusted around the mouth of the garbage disposal.

At seven, the cat went missing, her tail chopped, and found behind the swing set curled into a question mark.

Eight and nine, we’re not sure.

Twelve, the garage went up in fire, a plume of dusky charcoal seen from blocks away. Maybe farther. Smoke signals to be sure.

Seventeen, there were sometimes girls around, some tatted with a stick up their ass, and some who just looked uncomfortable, if not endangered.

Eighteen, our neighbor, who had always been friendly to our son, was found with a fork stuck in his throat, collapsed on the lawn head-on.

Nineteen, the grade school our son attended burned halfway to a crisp, except for bricks and mortar.

Twenty, he must have Jerry-rigged his mother’s evening serum, because her heart stopped in the middle of the night, dying silently beside me while I slept.

Twenty-one, I shot him point blank, middle forehead, near the beauty mark I once caressed when he was a babe.

He seemed to smile, or apologize as he crumpled, yet the bullet may have missed. No one’s talked about it since. Not even us.