The Daughter Ship by Boo Trundle

Author:Boo Trundle [Trundle, Boo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

Smooshed Bug

Katchie threw Jeff away in high school. She treated him like an old tube sock. Just left it on the floor with the lint and the used fabric softener sheets in the corner of the laundry room where she took his dick in her mouth. Mice think too much of themselves. People see them as self-hating. When really, mice are murderers.

She left Jeff behind and we went to college. Our parents drove us up to Brown at the beginning of our freshman year. We slept in one of the motels along the highway in Delaware. Mom and Dad each took a queen and Katchie got the cot. In the middle of the night Mom climbed into our cot. She was crying. She asked Katchie to hold her. Katchie didn’t want to. But she felt she had no choice. That was a deadly feeling.

Mom burrowed against us in her nightgown. Mostly, and deeply, we wished she’d go away and leave us alone forever. Maybe even die. We’re so sorry. These feelings aren’t right. This was our mother. What kind of monster? Katchie couldn’t find love inside. I’d like to know if you can come up with a scarier thought.

We didn’t see Mom again that year until Thanksgiving. Mom changed herself completely the day before we came home. What the surgeon did to her, he traced around her ears with a scalpel. He stretched the skin, snipped off the extra bits, then sewed it back in place, at the sides of her cheeks. Her head was bandaged. The gauze was stained. New blood is red. Old blood is brown. She slept downstairs in the guest room. Dad wouldn’t look at her.

An appliance repairman came by to fix the furnace. He caught sight of Mom as she shuffled down the hall. “Holy shit!”

“What happened to her?” he asked.

“A face-lift.” Dad was casual.

“I ain’t seen nothing like that since Vietnam.”

Dad never, ever, EVER called a repairman. Unless he had to get a part and he couldn’t find a supplier. Unless he could not, as a layman, get his hands on the part he needed.

Mom lost twenty pounds in a month. She had a new body to go with her new face. But still, my dad was under the car. Or against the wall, feeling his way along it with his eyes closed. He looked frightened of what his body wanted, or didn’t want, and might do about this problem. My mom was fucking the floor but Dad didn’t notice. It hurt to watch her beg, to throw her dignity away and for nothing. Maybe Dad had sex with her later after Katchie went to sleep.

Mom was back at it as soon as her incisions healed, rolling around, pounding her fists. In the violence of her performance she accidentally hit her head on a door frame. Then maybe her pain was real, but we couldn’t tell. We didn’t know how to help her. We didn’t even want to.

That was a deadlier feeling.

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