Meeks by Julia Holmes

Author:Julia Holmes [Holmes, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: science fiction, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781931520652
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A Brother's Tale, Part 3

Last night I dreamed that the Brothers of Mercy had me pinned to the ground. They were hunched over me, their heads silhouetted by the setting sun. They were swabbing my face with a strong-smelling cloth that made me want to fight, and I struggled and fought with all my strength, which seemed to amount to nothing. They cut away my pale suit, and then they brought over the park bum and forced him to lick my naked body. I was disgusted—by the smell of him, by the feel of his coarse, wet tongue on my skin, by his muffled voice crying out in protest and revulsion as the Brothers of Mercy pushed his head down again and again. It was almost more than I could bear, but the dream took mercy on me and dropped me in the bow of an old whaler, painted blue and black and white, sailing upriver toward the Mountain Lakes, where our parents had taken us as boys, where the hearth was always hot and the world silent and white, the sleeping bees and foxes waiting in the dark for the golden fuzz and mint green of spring. When I was a boy and I used my brain for other things! Some men were carving up a whale on the shore: clouds of fat fell open in the sun. Some men are innocent, I thought, and others are not, but all seemed well with the world again. The clear, cold water split around the bow. Then I heard a soft thumping, the thunk . . . thunk that always invaded my dreams, and I looked over my shoulder and saw that my brother was in the boat with me. He was slumped beside the fishing lantern; the lantern cast a thin gold light over the water as it swung back and forth, cutting into my brother's head.

I woke up, sighed with relief when I saw that we were still safely in our little room by the train station. There was my brother, passed out on his bed of coats. I liked to watch over him, just as our mother watched over us when we were boys, leaning over our soft round heads in the dark, dreaming about what we might become. Poor Mother. All of our relationships deform us (i.e., make us “human"), but how do these loving creatures (our mothers) survive the person-imploding disappointments of their sons?

By the time I turned sixteen, I knew who and what I was (an artist). I told my mother that I planned not to marry, but rather to live and die in the theater. After the briefest hesitation, she gave me a wry smile. She was masking internal panic with an amused look—oldest tactic in the book. Then she began to recite the Old Prisoner's Tale, the grisly tale of “impossible choices” that she had told us almost every night when we were boys. “Do you know the story about the old prisoner?” she said.

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