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Member
Join Date: Jul 2004
Posts: 24
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Kooshball
There’s a kooshball lodged in the fork of a tree 6 blocks down. I dropped it there when my father lived above the garage of the house that owned the tree that ate my kooshball. My arm, seven years long, didn’t reach. And my father, seven years manic, didn’t live there long. There’s a kooshball lodged in the fork of a tree 6 blocks down, and thank god for orange plastic, or you wouldn’t know I’d been there at all.
He moved without boxes, just the back of a car, into the apartment designed to hide mother-in-law’s without the guilt of nursing homes. There was a bathroom on the left. And not much else. Furniture from our-used-to-be-house longed for wallpaper and floral prints and pink carpeting in his blank box. He’d left empty outlines in the old living room, ripping pieces for his new home. They hung awkwardly by oversized mahogany, half the old house looming in on you.
My kleptomania, half hereditary, half the product of a nasty divorce, kicked in upon entering my new half-house. I passed the bathroom on the left, looking for listed items.
“If you see the silver-,” my mom had said in the car. I nodded. I knew the drill. Punching buttons on an unplugged fax machine, juggling a box of macaroni and a twenty pound cat, he smiled and gave me a turn-in-a-circle tour. And then gave me a cat.
I rocked him, Tuxedo, large with name specific coloring, in the two and a half seconds it for took him to reach up and claw my face. And yowl. A blaring set him off - scratching, clawing, screeching, dropping, shouting, swearing. Cat-mangled hands flew to my ears, and tufts of black and white hair clung to me, an acrid smell crowding my air. A resounding bang. And silence.
Picking cat hair from my tongue and inspecting my set of feline wounds, I turned to my dad, popping my hip, one hand resting upon it. A signature seven year old mimic of my mother’s disapproval. Two minutes I’d been in this house. And look what you’ve done.
Shattered glass, melted plastic, and a smoke detector suspiciously hanging by one battery wire from the ceiling. “But boiling water,” he beamed.
A badly beaten coffee pot, a giant crack running its length and
a black mass fused to one side, sat to the side of the stove, steaming. “For macaroni,” he continued.
I didn’t move. The hip remained popped. “I didn’t have a pan.”
Okay, gotcha now. Macaroni sounds good. I forgive with seven year old sentiment and turn my attention back to Tuxedo, having forgiven him as well. The luxury of the small apartment becomes apparent in my hunt for the cat and I entertain myself with my five-minute-before attacker while my father makes me macaroni in his coffee pot.
He’s gotten out a cheddar block when I turn back. He performs plastic surgery on the pasta, attempting a cheese implant. He was a doctor once. And the macaroni sloshes in my bowl. The noodles, slightly singed and smelling of smoke, float in the murky soup, bright orange chunks punctuating the yellow sea. Overcooked, they begin to form a giant gluten glob in the middle of my bowl, squishy to the touch. And still smoky.
“It’s a little soupy,” I say, pushing it in front of me, eyeing Tuxedo to the side, wondering if cats’ interest in dairy extends this far. Plop.
“To soak up the water,” he’s dropped in a slice of Wonder bread. It soaks it up, yellowing its artificial white perfection before disintegrating into the mixture.
“Is this still smoking?” he asks after the melted coffee pot doused in the sink. No, that would be my macaroni. Blob. Stuff. But I don’t say anything. I just drop it on the floor.
Tuxedo is decidedly not interested, and neither is my father. The yellow lake expands across linoleum, I track it along tan squares. The floor slants against my favor, the macaroni makes its way towards the carpeting, crust and soot caught in its flow. Panic. Not the carpeting, not the carpeting. Can’t even eat on the carpeting at home, let alone pour a blend of barbecue cheese on it. I turn to my dad. Panic. Panic. He doesn’t see it. I turn for paper towels. To stem the flood. I don’t see any. I don’t see anything. I have only my sleeve to stop the yellow river. I hop from the chair-
And my father steps in it, splashing, full on fjords the cheese pond. And keeps on walking. He passes the bathroom on the left. And stops.
“Coming?” I look from the cheese pond, to the cheese pond on his shoe, to him, who doesn’t care about the cheese pond.
“Yeah.”
Seven steps above sidewalk is where common sense ends. He lived eight. And scaling those steps on occasional occasion, I hung my “are you sures…”, my “what abouts…” and my “should we really be’s…” on the rod iron railing. We held marble races down the middle of the street. Automatic disqualification if you were hit by a car. But a guaranteed rematch, of course. We rode giant blocks of ice down a grassy hill at nine o’clock at night. We walked on the wrong side of the road, singing “Lollipop, lollipop,” to passing motorists on our way to the Hoot Owl for the necessary purchase of Welch’s grape soda and watermelon bubble gum - two fruits united not nearly enough in modern cuisine. We ate only the refried beans from TV dinners. And the yellow carpet smelled of smoke.
Pulling what little seven year old sense I had from the railing on one particular evening, with the last piece, a silver platter, zipped conspicuously into my jacket, and black cat hair clinging to me, I left the Kooshball I’d lost in a particularly rousing game of “nail that squirrel,” the previous afternoon behind, with the vague notion of enlisting my father to reach it the next day.
But three weeks passed without a call. Not that that worried me. His fax machine wasn’t plugged in. He couldn’t call. Obviously. But that didn’t seem to comfort my mother. So we bought spice drops and drove to his house. I ate the purple ones in the car. My mother put them on every birthday cake, and I’d try to sneak them off but white frosting gaps always betrayed me. But it wasn’t his birthday. Or atleast, I hadn’t gotten him a present. Maybe I should grab him a rock on the way up the stairs…
The apartment overpowered the sugary licorice in my sinuses, Tuxedo squeezed past my legs outside, and the coffee pot, completely shattered, sat in the sink. What could he have been cooking with then? He was laying on the bed. How can you sleep on your birthday like that? It was already like two, you’d wasted half your birthday! He rolled over and glanced with glazed eyes. Sick on your birthday, that sucks too. My mother talked to him in hushed tones, or she talked at him, he didn’t say much. She sounded upset. Had she seen the stain on the carpet? Don’t tell her it was me, don’t tell her it was me.
“Get up,” I hear. He doesn’t. She turns away and starts to leave. Definitely upset. Lost, I hold out the bag of spice drops, my cheek lumpy with two green ones. I thought I’d try ‘em. He doesn’t take them. He just looks at me. I can’t swallow, guilt hits me, I ate his spice drops. The wintergreen lumps stay lodged in my cheek, and I stand there, just holding out the bag. And he looks. And I hold the bag. And there are lumps in my cheek. But I can’t taste them. And he looks, but doesn’t move. And neither do I. And my mother turns back, grabs the bag from my hand and just drops it next to his bed. She takes my hand in her own, and we walk away. And he looks.
There's a kooshball lodged in the fork of a tree six blocks down and no one left to get it out.
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