Knockout by John Jodzio

Author:John Jodzio
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781619027688
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2016-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

My mother came to stay with me a few weeks before my due date. She’d just turned sixty-five, was fresh off her third divorce. Her latest marriage ended when she walked in on her husband, Dan, sucking on the back of her dog walker’s knee. She thought her Pomeranian, Snowball, was partially responsible for Dan’s infidelity and so she’d given Snowball to me.

“He could’ve alerted me to what was going on,” my mother said. “It’s as much that fluffy bastard’s fault as anyone’s.”

I quickly tired of my mom’s constant chatter about Dan and the dog walker and I certainly got sick of seeing her standing in her panties in front of my bedroom mirror, wondering if her knee joints still looked hot.

“Even if Mitch comes home in one piece,” she told me, “he’ll probably leave you in a few months because your hamstrings have gone all saggy.”

My mother drove me to the hospital when my water broke. She held my hand and fed me ice chips during labor. We tried to update Mitch on my dilation, centimeter by centimeter, but his staff sergeant could not reach him. My mother called every half hour, but everyone told us he was unreachable.

“What does ‘unreachable’ mean?” she asked.

“It means that he’s out on a mission,” they said.

We called and called after Swayze was born, but Mitch was still on that mission. I knew there was something horribly wrong, but I tried to stay positive because I knew that staying positive would keep my breast milk positive and positive breast milk would give my baby a wonderful outlook on life instead of a dire one. Still, I couldn’t help thinking that my milk was betraying me subconsciously, that it knew it was sad and worried milk coming from sad and worried tits and that it was probably poisoning my baby against the entire damn world.

After the second day without any word from Mitch, my mother and I began to escalate things, calling our senators and representatives, wading through governmental phone trees and their patriotic hold music and being stiff-armed by their secretaries and schedulers. Finally Mitch’s colonel called back.

“I’m truly sorry,” he told us, “but there’s been an accident.”

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