Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“What do you do when you go to the front of the church?” he asked his aunt at breakfast the next morning.

“We eat the body of Christ, and then we drink his blood,” his aunt said.

“Does God know you do that?” he asked. She had explained that Christ was God’s son.

“You’re such a funny boy,” his aunt said. She giggled as if he had said something clever. “Of course, God knows. Remember what I told you? He knows everything.”

His father had had a name for people who wanted to know everything, like their neighbor Mrs. Severson, who spent her days peering out the window. When his father pulled up each evening, she’d rushed out to ask him how many arrests he had made that day. His father called these people busybodies .

“Is God a busybody?” Aaron asked.

“Oh, Aaron,” said his aunt, her voice like a slow shattering of glass. She stared at him the way that people at his father’s funeral had, then took his hand between her own, which were sticky with jam. He could tell that he had disappointed her, though he wasn’t sure how. He took in one, tiny breath, but it exited his body in great, hiccupping sobs.

As he cried, his aunt continued to hold his hand, her mouth forming words he could not understand. After a while, she led him to Zilpah’s bed, where he fell into a deep sleep. When he awakened, she was still there, peering down at him, her face flushed. “You beat him,” she said. He lay still, his right hand flung up across his sweaty forehead, breathing in and out and missing his mother, who always awakened him from naps with a glass of water in hand because she knew how thirsty it made him to rest. “He was in you, Aaron. I prayed, but you did it.”

“Who was in me?” he asked, alarmed.

“Satan,” his aunt said. She too was sweaty. “You called God a busybody, but he was making you do it. He was using your voice. Satan is clever, but you defeated him.” She stood up. “You rest some more.”

“I already rested,” he said.

“You weren’t asleep even fifteen minutes,” she said. “You must be exhausted. I’ll take care of things around here this morning.”

He stayed in Zilpah’s bed, listening to the now-familiar sounds of the toaster being depressed and the tapping of a spoon inside a cup. He could picture his aunt measuring sugar into her coffee as she sat in her robe beneath the broken Last Supper eating a second English muffin. Finally, he heard what he had been listening for: the muted swish of his aunt’s slippers against the hallway carpet, the bathroom door being closed partway.

His aunt suffered from constipation. Constipation was not a word he’d known when he came to stay, but during one of their first breakfasts together, she explained it to him with a clarity that was rare for her. She spoke matter-of-factly, and he tried to match her tone, though he was deeply embarrassed by talk of bathroom activities. “I’ve tried everything,” she said. “Now, your uncle, he eats one minute and goes the next.”

Aaron nodded, knowing this to be true.

“Do you know, I’ve suffered from constipation since the day I married him.”

He thought about this, remembering how the doctor who talked to him and his mother after his father’s accident had said that his father had not suffered . His aunt had stood then and trudged down the hallway to the bathroom, leaving the door open several inches. While he sat at the table nibbling his English muffin, she labored loudly to expel waste from her body. When she reappeared, her face pale and sweaty, she shook her head, indicating failure, and he felt then, keenly, that his aunt did indeed suffer .

The morning he defeated Satan, Aaron listened to his aunt moving around in the bathroom, before covering his head with his pillow against the sounds he knew she would soon make. After what seemed a very long time, he removed it. Nothing. He rose and remade the bed and walked quickly down the hallway, noticing too late that the bathroom door still stood ajar. “Aaron,” his aunt called from inside. “Are you up?”

“Yes,” he said. “I want to clean.”

“You’re not tired anymore?” she panted.

“I’m not tired.”

“Well, then, I need you to bring me a roll of toilet paper.”

“What?” He was sure he had misheard.

“I didn’t check the roll before I sat down. I need you to bring one, from the closet at the end of the hallway,” she said.

“Do you really need it?” he asked.

“Someone else will need it if I don’t.” She sounded glum, but then her voice lifted, as it did when she was about to pray. “It’s best to be prepared.”

Aaron had never seen anyone sitting on a toilet, but he knew how he felt — awkward and ashamed, his legs dangling helplessly, ankles bound by his trousers. His father had been the opposite. He’d thought nothing of pulling to the side of the road and urinating as cars whizzed by. “Taking a leak,” he called it. His father had also liked to tell bathroom stories, though not all of them took place in the bathroom. His father’s favorite, which he retold at the supper table every few months, involved a man with a name that was not really a name at all, more of an adjective— Stinky something or other . Each fall, Stinky and Aaron’s grandfather, as well as several other men, went on a hunting trip together, and when Aaron’s father turned thirteen, he began accompanying them. These men were willing to rise at four in the morning and sit for hours in the cold inside a blind, which Aaron found a strange name for a place from which one did nothing but watch . They also trekked through the woods, sometimes for twelve hours before giving up and returning to the cabin. The story that his father liked to tell at the supper table was one that had been told in the hunting cabin one night at supper by Harvey, who was the town barber as well as Stinky’s hunting partner, and when his father told the story, he liked to pretend he was Harvey telling it.

“It must have been around seven that we came across this buck,” he always began, his voice slowing and deepening to imitate Harvey’s, taking on a slight lisp, “but to tell the truth, we weren’t really thinking about deer yet. We were just trying to get as much coffee as possible inside ourselves when suddenly the buck’s right there, maybe forty feet off.” His father’s pace quickened. “Well, Stinky throws down his thermos and fires off three shots, and one of them nicks the back leg of the buck. It takes off, limping, and me and Stinky are running after it, when Stinky announces, ‘I’ve gotta shit something terrible.’ We run a few more steps, and he says, ‘I can’t take it,’ and he unzips his suit. I’m a half step behind, and I see his left hand snaking along to the back. We keep running, and before you know it, he pulls his hand out and he’s holding a steaming mound of shit — like a goddamn magician pulling out a live chick. I swear. Didn’t even break stride.”

Here, his father had slipped back into his own voice to explain how Harvey repeated this last line over and over—“Didn’t even break stride”—and how everyone at the table laughed so hard that they actually threw down their forks and stopped eating. What Aaron had always wanted to know — but never asked — was whether Stinky laughed with them.

The only time his mother commented on the story, it was to say, “It’s just not possible,” as if the only thing that troubled her was its feasibility.

“Have you tried, Dolores?” his father asked. His mother looked at her plate and said nothing. “Not a damn shred of humor between the two of you,” his father said then, which was what he always said at the end of his stories.