Tom Piccirilli - Every shallow cut

The grey in my beard didn’t wake me up to reality, but the grey pubes started to spook me a touch.

Then she got pregnant. My unsophisticated dreams managed to press back the edges of a clinical depression. Church sensed the difference and started prancing around the house like a happy uncle ready to pass out cigars in the waiting room.

The word father took on a whole new meaning. It stopped being about my old man and started being about me. I saw a little girl in a pink bed holding her arms up and calling for “Daddy” after a bad dream. I saw myself sitting in my library recliner with the kid on my lap, reading her Through the Looking Glass.

My wife wasn’t as certain about being a mother, but she was willing to ride it out until the serious pain hit and she began to spot. The doctor told her to stay in bed for the next twelve weeks. My wife liked to go out dancing, if not with me than with her friends. Some of the friends were male. I wasn’t jealous, or at least not as jealous as I should’ve been. I stewed behind my obesity and ate even more. I sometimes stopped off at the ice cream shop across the street from the club where she liked to go on Friday nights. Churchill was especially fond of butter pecan.

She talked abortion. I stayed up night after night sweating it out. I wanted kids. I didn’t want to be alone with my wife for the rest of my life. I knew we were falling apart even then. I didn’t just want glue to hold us together. I wanted someone who needed me, who would help me to fulfill the myth of myself. I thought I could wake up to cries in the middle of the night almost happily. I would pick up my little girl and shush her with my lips to her chubby cheek and press my forehead to hers and will all my love into her life. She would quiet and coo and giggle, and I’d put her back on her pink pillows and stare at her for another hour in the dim grey light of the wolf’s hour.

But my anxiety medication didn’t always help out. My mind raced and my teeth buzzed. The money wasn’t there. The marriage was on the skids. I’d overshot being a father by years. I was old and fat. I needed silence when I wrote. I wasn’t going to suddenly get strong and pure this late in life. I was greedy. I didn’t want upset, I’d already had enough of that. How was I going to have a kid when I had no benefits? How was I going to pay off the hospital, the babysitters, the pre-K, the clothes, the food, the college tuition? I heard the baby screeching and wailing and it wouldn’t stop and I was too lazy to get out of bed on my darkest days when the antidepressants weren’t working.

She made an appointment. That morning, I followed along after her in a state of trauma. I felt the same way I had while watching my mother’s heart monitor continuously slow throughout the course of her last night, stalling, redlining as her breaths came in agonized gasps, and I found myself halfway between hoping it would end and wanting to scream out, “Mommy.” I trotted after my wife to the car and drove to Planned Parenthood.

Protesters walked their picket line in the freezing morning air, calling for me not to murder my own child, saying my baby wanted to live, please give it a chance at life.

Christ, if only I’d had a gun on me then. I would have killed every one of those fuckers. I would have used the speed loader until my flesh seared and the shells were too hot to handle. The cops would have potshot and tasered and billy clubbed me before dragging me away in cuffs while I shrieked. I wouldn’t have been able to stand trial. They would have put me in a rubber room. I would have butted my head against the soft walls in a straitjacket, rocking like a newborn myself. Christ fuckall, if only.

I sat in the waiting room with young men who looked expectantly relieved. Some of them were boyfriends, some only one-night stands. Some might’ve been husbands who, like me, thought about bills instead of baby booties.

At that moment I realized, This is the thing I will never be forgiven for. This is what is now being written in the great Book of Life by the weeping saints and martyrs. This is the moment God will point to with his burning hand at the hour of my death. This is my chance to have and love my own child and I am freely passing it by. I am committing my baby to oblivion because I’m too fat and lazy and intellectual to work a factory job where I can receive insurance. I am consigning my soul to hell because my taxes are too high. I am sacrificing myself and my blood on the ancient stone altar of mediocrity and the monthly terror of my mortgage.

A nurse appeared and told me it was all over. And it was.

I hadn’t mapped out my return home. I didn’t want to shoot back in a straight line. I wanted to do whatever I could to forestall the next step along my journey of the inevitable. I crossed into Kansas and saw flat empty farmland from the flat empty highway. I spotted an exit that promised gas and food and wound up driving through a dead town that looked like the plague had hit it.

I got back on the highway and passed two other exits before getting off and finding the same thing. Main Street was lined by barren stores with For Rent signs in the windows. Abandoned houses on the outskirts had foreclosure signs slapped on the doors. The word itself made me tighten my fists on the steering wheel. Church glanced up at me nervously. I wheeled past collapsed barns and stone wall-bordered weed-choked fields.

We were looking at the days of the dust bowl gangsters again. When your average citizen was losing everything, they were forced into desperate, mad actions. Bank robbery attempts were at a thirty-year high. A husband and wife team had tried to take down my local bank and been wiped out by six cops in the parking lot, a couple thousand bucks in hand.

The media replayed the surveillance footage for weeks. Just before they’d been cut down the couple wore expressions that said they wanted to take the whole thing back if only anyone would grant them a do-over. My old man wore the same expression on his deathbed. I looked in the rearview and thought I was getting there fast.

I did what I usually did. I wrote in my head. The words drifted in and out, the music of the language singing in my ear. I edited as I went. I had visions of what should be happening. There ought to be a hot teenage girl hitchhiking along the side of the road. She would bring me wild pain and nights of burning glory and ultimate redemption.

She would mark me with her teeth and I would battle the demons from her past. Maybe a dirty cop who was hounding her just to squeeze information out of her about her drug lord ex-boyfriend. I’d have to be smarter than everybody, sharp enough to take care of the cop, the boyfriend’s killer thugs, the boyfriend who raised piranha, kept a stable of whores, and who’d act friendly to me at first before pulling out a straight razor. He’d slash open one side of my face and maybe take an eye, but I’d overcome because I was pure of soul. The hitchhiking honey with the breeze in her hair and the gams that didn’t quit would love my scarred and brutalized face anyway.

I didn’t have much but I still had the urge to write. The stories went on and on. I wondered if that would ultimately save me or only doom me further. Was I finally going to write my masterpiece or just hack out an angry vapid potboiler because friends of mine had made money writing angry vapid potboilers?

I checked off the topics and narrative elements that were hot in publishing right now. Vampire tween romances: When you got down to it that was pretty fucking creepy, really. Centuries-old teenage vampire males sexing up sixteen-year-old sophomore human chippie gals. Then there were the Christian metaphors couched in heart-tugger tales about women having to raise the spoiled children of their condemned sisters about to get the chair on death row. What else, what else. Zombie mashups with classics of literature. Nobody took them seriously, not even the millions of people who bought them.