Today's writing

When we got to the front door my mind locked up. Something shut down inside of me, went hard and flat. An envelope of sorts, mailing thoughts, emotions, fears. Wait a minute, Mr. Postman. The front door itself was a sculpted master class in craftsmanship. The whorls alone could rival a fingertip, the depth, the intricacy. The ugliness was so deep that it was lovely. It was beautiful in that way that six-year-olds regard as beautiful, something gaudy and careless, something without the significance of subtlety or the framing of creative fear. It was simply what it was, and what it was was one crazy piece of shit.

 

I reached for my mother’s hand. She looked at me as if I were a mental disease and she the reluctant lithium. “What’s with you?”

 

Scared, I said. I was scared.

 

“Jesus Christ. It’s a sleepover, not a scalping.”

 

She jabbed at the doorbell with such force that I thought she’d knock off her Lee Press-On. I grabbed that hand, too. We stood there with both hands entwined. It could have been a sweet goddamn moment, but this was my mother.

 

Leslie Morrison came to the door. She was taller and darker than my mother. She held a cigarette. Do parents still do that today? Aren’t they all relegated to puffing in some dark outpost of the backyard?