3 Flashes
Mitchell Grabois
4 Women
1.
A woman supine on a Mexican blanket is pitted like an olive, with one deft twist. The brass bars of a wind chime hang above her like a skeleton. Her joints glow in the dark, like something freshly soldered. She sleeps.
The men in the front room peer out the glassless windows and listen for moans. When the infant comes, it will be an icon of metal scraps and fish-heads. They will set it in a bare corner atop a stool.
It will scrabble. White powder will film its brown belly. One of its arms will be crustacean.
The dark man and his wife—their hands will fit together grimly, like railroad cars coupling.
2.
I took the tiny Guatemalan doll out of its knitted pouch. It looked like Nanci, recently dead. Dark hair, straight features, a Twilight Zone moment.
Nanci could have reincarnated as this doll, comfortable in her little pouch with no need for food, toileting or other mortal maintenance.
She looks forward to my gently removing her from the knit-work to hold insomniac conversations. She has plenty of time to catch up on her sleep. After all, she’s dead and, as she always joked, busy painting or making photographs or traveling in distant lands, I’ll have plenty of time to sleep when I’m dead.
3.
My dentist tells me I have acid erosion. Then he bashes Princess Diana. She might have been pretty but she was dumb, he says, a typical aristocratic British daughter raised to be a potential Windsor broodmare.
What are you saying, I demand. Diana’s been dead... how long? And today you want to bash her? You know I admired and respected Diana. You know I was in love with her (I stifle a sob).
I regret taking the nitrous oxide. Me and Dent huff it recreationally after my appointments, at other times too. We prefer it to cocktails.
Oh, he says, a new biography just came out about good old Princess Dead. I’ve been reading it, and the author’s style and sensibilities have affected me.
Dent and I have been friends since junior high, when he admired my performance art. Now I’m a portrait painter, not terribly successful. I show up in his office in paint-spattered pants. Dent pays his assistant extra to work on me because she despises me and the smell of turpentine.
Dentistry is soulless, I accuse him. Every year you become more callous, emptier. Princess Diana shone like the Virgin in the grotto at St. Mary Star of the Sea.
Dent turns off the nitrous. He yawns. Yeah, yeah, she was a princess she was, he says in a bad British accent.
4.
My favorite cousin killed herself. She took a massive dose of Benadryl. She won’t have to worry about bee allergies ever again. She won’t have to run screaming from them. She won’t have to fear any toxin. She won’t have to fear the toxins inside her head.
I’m so pissed at her, I want to plunge my arm into a beehive. I want to scream in earthly pain.
***
Dead Lithuanian
1.
I photographed the bull begging for mercy. I photographed his unconditional acceptance of cruelty or mercy. I photographed you putting down your sword and your butcher knife, and the
black-clad rabbis as they held you in awe. I photographed them as they committed to veganism,
as their wives removed their required head shawls. I photographed everyone in the world
becoming enlightened. The contrast was stark.
I photographed your soul leaving your body. The rabbis fed me pixels so I would never run out. I put my camera on the ground and stomped on it, like a Jewish bridegroom with his wineglass.
2.
Dr. Umran is Syrian, about five-four, stooped over, bald, face more grey than brown. Kindly
little guy, he reminds me of my deceased dad. He walks into the colonoscopy room and says:
Who do we have here?
The nurse says: Mitchell Grabios.
Dr. U. says: That’s Grabois. He doesn’t sound like a surgeon. He sounds like a sommelier.
After the procedure, he gives me the news. He’s sliced out a couple of big polyps on their way to being cancerous. He wants another colonoscopy in a year.
OK Doc , I say, but I see the future. I see my fate: Colon cancer; chemo; my once luxurious hair
gone; my cheeks, once “cute as a chipmunk’s,” gaunt; remission, re-emergence, death at age 64.
So who cares how anyone pronounces my name?
3.
In Illinois, I stop at Duffy’s Tavern, its brick mortared in 1892, paint peeling from the tin ceiling, but not anywhere it’s gonna fall onto your corn beef and cabbage. The waitress is mean as one of the snakes St. Paddy ran outta Ireland, but life-giving as a potato. Not everybody’s gotta be a sunbeam.
The Countdown to St. Paddy’s Day board reads 150 days. My ragged Keds are rimed with ice—I might as well be back in the Merchant Marine.
1892 is two years older than the schoolhouse in which I reside, I tell the bearded boy leaning on
the bar next to the position I’ve taken up.
So what? he asks.
Show some respect, I say. I don’t care if you’re Irish. I can beat ya arm-wrestling and drink twice as much too.
What are you? he asks.
Lithuanian, and that’s a fact.
Lithuanian my ass. You’re a generic old fart. Any Lithuanian that was ever in ye was drained out decades ago.
What you say?
He grabs his 32-ounce beer and we walk over to his table, where he introduces me to his mother-in-law, to his wife, his teenage daughter, his little daughter, who looks to be in second grade. He puts his elbow on the table, says: Okay, let’s go, Mr. Lithuania.
You gotta buy me a beer first, I say.
Only if you win.
I put my elbow down, we grip hands, someone waves a snot rag, Slam! My hand’s on the losing end of that deal.
Maybe you want to arm wrestle my mother-in-law, Irishman says with a grin. You beat her, I’ll buy you 2 beers.
But mother-in-law is one vicious Irishwoman. So’s the wife, and the teenage daughter. Even the second grader is one vicious little Irishwoman. Everyone at the table’s laughing, everyone in the bar. My feet feel cold in their ice-melt Keds. Everyone buys me drinks.
Sometime later I’m on the floor. The ceiling is spinning. It’s pressed tin, like the ceiling in the schoolhouse in which I reside.
The ceiling in my schoolhouse is just as good, I say, but no one hears me or no one cares. It’s as if I’m already dead.
***
Fibro/Periodontal
I want to feel your hands on my body @$75/hour, plus tip. I want you to draw me into the deep cave where your spider hands live, where they hang like bats, and where your fibromyalgia leaves your flesh and bathes in a deep bowl of holy water.
There’s too much excitement, too much excitation, of nerves and skin, your nerves, my skin. I am nearly mummified with physical satisfaction.
Eighteen years older is not too old, you tell me. Only 21 years older is excessive. I can have you, you promise. I can take you out of your cave into tropical sunshine, where fibromyalgia will never find you.
But I have my own health issues. Even on Thanksgiving, my lover harangues me about my teeth and gums, about Acid Erosion and Periodontal Disease. Baby, honey, you’re way beyond gingivitis, she says. Her concern is understandable. She’s not only my lover, she’s my dentist. She “sexually assaulted” me on my first visit to her office, while she had me helpless on nitrous oxide. I knew that cocaine enhanced the joy of sex, but I’d never realized that the same was true for nitrous.
This woman, my dentist, my girlfriend, is eleven years older than me and sometimes I catch her examining herself in the mirror with a worried expression. She thinks I’ll stop loving her as she ages, as wrinkles appear and the flesh on her arms gets loose. She works out with dumbbells as we watch TV in the evening. I think she’s gotten stronger than me, but I’m hesitant to test it out, like challenging her to an arm-wrestling contest or something.
But she’s right (it’s like my father used to say, one of his favorite expressions: When you’re right, you’re right): my gums and teeth are a mess. Maybe my dental baby will stop loving me if I don’t consent to expensive and painful treatment.
Work by Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois appears in magazines worldwide. Nominated for numerous prizes, he was awarded the 2017 Booranga Centre (Australia) Fiction Prize. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work in a state hospital, is available for Kindle.