morning noon and night – Chris Benton
October 22, 2022
For Trace
7:57am I awake with deja vu, the prelude of a spell, uh oh, please god fuck no but the spell doesn’t come though, for the first time the spell doesn’t come but the premonitions and visions remain drifting, dissolving echoes of past and future, and never the present, for the present is eternally hiding, the child never found, dumbass. I reach for Bronx, my beloved bulldog, but she is dead for nearly a year, and I pull the reeking pillow Bronx rested upon to my bosom, beloved Bronx.
This is the day of my death.
My granddaughter slowly pushes the door to my humble room open like a magician and ruthlessly leaps upon me, pure joy of creation everlasting. We exchange the delights of the morning and I rise, oh fucking Jesus, my hip, my magic munchkin healing it with rabid kisses. “Scrambled eggs, a little runny not burnt the way mamma makes them,” this angel, totally oblivious to my agony. My first and last born join the table as well, and are so fucking cute in their dread of their work. My middle daughter, my lone wolf artist, lives across the river, like her uncle, which I’m proud of, she is not consumed by memory, shall never be.
Breakfast is perfection, everything is perfection this morning, all the small talk and random bitter bites of dialogue completely perfect, save for the stalker, I still see it within the sliding glass door projected onto the desolate back yard, the once lean towering smoke totem behind me in Christmas and birthday polaroids nobody mentioned, and the timeless hunched shadow upon me, pressing its ass upon my heart, and then the strawhaired wailer in the mirror, made humanoid at last, no, none never mentioned but this time it’s none of these apparitions, it’s my reflection, detached from the glass, standing on the scorched grass.
12:27pm My daughters are gone for work and I have the day with my granddaughter, Lydia, we watch her favorite shows for an hour and we go outside to jump on the trampoline, I remember trampoline jumping with my old friend Lee, remember her and me laughing and grossing out at my baby bro’s sweaty feet, while jumping on Lee’s trampoline on Masonboro Loop, my granddaughter can backflip on the trampoline, was screaming worried at first, but my baby is a ninja master now, she’s gonna be a professional dancer, an Olympic gymnast, she’s going to be a brilliant physical artist.
“Hungry, Nana,” she says and Nana makes her favorite, a tuna salad sandwich with pickles, we have lunch and watch the latest episode of her favorite horror show, Lydia loves horror shows as well like her sisters, they have horror culture in their DNA, just like me and my baby bro and my beloved Donnie. After lunch, We walk my youngest daughter’s dog, Crow, under the Carolina Blue, Crow was one of six pups I pulled all by my lonesome from the canal of my beloved Bronx who was fucking raped by the Labrador owned by my first-born daughter, who knows nothing of dogs and never will. I loves me some Crow, though, what human wouldn’t love a pup pulled outta their momma’s womb with their own hands? I have another deja vu and drop to my knees praying not for my daughters, not for my granddaughter, I pray suddenly for my baby bro, forever hanging from that Dogwood limb.
Lydia jumps upon my back like a little monkey angel and whispers with a deep and commanding cadence “you are okay, Nana, better than okay, you feel like mother-earth, filled with power and pride.” Where the fuck did she learn this bullshit new-age rhetoric? I really don’t care though because it actually works, I don’t lose consciousness, feel the brittle heat of the sidewalk cooking my knees and I slowly rise, my little sweet homunculi still wrapped behind me like a breathing backpack full of future history books. I do remember a vagrant vision though, when I was a nurse, at New Hanover Hospital, this is right before I had my first spell, or perhaps it was my first spell, there was a terminal lung cancer patient who was, I shit you not, like the long lost twin brother of my father, perhaps he was, for my father’s mother’s brood was immense and swollen with proud unspeakable secrets.
8:57pm All my daughters are home, the greatest feeling on earth, dinner is Lasagna, I’ve become a genius at it. I text my baby bro I’ve become a Lasagna genius I need to make it someday for you and Emma.
I feel the deja vu again after dinner and bury the panic and again, the spell doesn’t come, what I do see in lightning glimpses is the total extinction of our originary tree. No, but not my baby bro, no, no, no, NO.
10:07pm All my beloved bodies are here, my incredible creations, and they know it, because the new breed are not stupid despite their bullshit internet fetish, they feel the fate of their creators, these future conquerors’ kisses infecting me with dizzying power, but it’s Lydia who sends me into my mighty nighty night…
And here is the night, here is my sleep, here is where all these teasing spells today arrive to finally fruit, I first slip into a soft reverie where my beloved Bronx impossibly devours a ten foot alligator while we’re walking around Greenfield Lake, and the gator explodes outta Bronx and devours me and deep in the gestating, farting belly of the gator I see you, baby bro, see you once more hanging from that Dogwood tree, I clutch the heart of the gator in my hand and burst it open and crawl outta its jaw with my elbows to find myself on Cabbage Inlet Lane, the land of my youth, of our youth, you’re still there, completely silent, hanging by your hood as meant to be, you look at me and reach towards me and my toes are clutching the white sands of the North End of Carolina Beach, it is night, and the sands are shimmering yet there is no moon above this shore, no stars, only writhing dark above, a darkness I can terribly touch if I reach long enough, I’m shivering with shock, but my beloved sweety, my soulmate, my husband Donnie is there, oh my beloved dead babe is there and tackle him into the sand suddenly aglow and we roll around for a few hundred years more and he says unto me, I’m fine, babe, I’m fine, but we need to deal with the body of your rapist Dane, and here again is you, my blessed baby bro, my hanged boy, my beloved, now dragging the corpse of Dane all by your Herculean lonesome, so young and corrupt with devotion, dragging him past the breaking shore and into the sea, I yell to my dead husband to help him, but Donnie is gone and I begin to bawl and my baby bro screams back at me from the baby black waves, “HE AINT SINKING! HE KEEPS COMING BACK!” and I don’t seem to mind but my baby bro drags him deeper, with historical strength, until I lose sight of both of them, and I screech my baby bro’s name, and the roar of the sea eats his name, and now I can see the roaring of all life spilling back at me and now they’re gone, and my father kicking down the bathroom door because I had just slit my wrists, but I know I wouldn’t die, I did it the wrong way, I learned the right way by a pro in Black Oaks, Yolanda, “it’s vertical honey, if you truly want the deep dark, you been watchin too many bullshit movies” and here is Nan, chasing me up the Cedar, trying like hell to whip my ass, I’m a master tree climber, heart aching I should have climbed mountains, I would have conquered every peak, but I know I will never die, never truly die, like my baby bro never truly died, no he is the best swimmer of all of us, and during all the bright black hour before the sun rises from the sea while walking down the shore with the patient dread of a doomed damned god, waiting for her final priest to return from the depths, shore-stalking for two million miles until my mind was finally empty of all human memory when I find him, my forever silently hanging priest, my baby bro, 14 years old and you’re lying on the shore of Buzzard Bay, curled like a giant stillborn and scream your birth name “Christopher!” over and over for I believe you will never be dead, never be dead, not before me and you are not, never shall be and you open your beautiful bright brown eyes and declare unto me, “He’s lost, Big Sis, I finally lost that asshole,” but how could you have lost him baby bro, he’s beside me now and his throat is crushed in my gigantic fist and his once arrogantly handsome head is pale, eyes weeping blood, his tongue trying to crawl outta his skull like a desperate mollusk and I feel a calmness I’ve never felt before, feel like I’ve discovered a secret cure to cancer baby bro and here is hell before me or is it heaven, all words incinerated by the glorious dueling roofs of river fire racing above and below me and I see you now, my murderess, you fucking charred enraged cunt, here we are at last, you fucking stalking bitch-spirit, falling failing carrion bird beside me now and I can command my hands to wrap around your thistled throat at last, here is another visionary cure baby bro, the cure of demonic possession, I shall keep squeezing, and squeezing and squeezing and squeezing until we dive together into this rushing silent roaring flame, is this hell, is this hell you fucking stalking shit so be it then, so be it until your head bursts into cinders but are the cinder spores reserved for my baby bro, oh fuck, oh fuck, I wail my ass off but the fire finally fucks my soul and I behold the terrifying shape of all love living and dead…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
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