Consolation Miracles by Aaron Tillman

Author:Aaron Tillman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gateway Literary Press

Urges and Monsters

There’s as much life in a jar of pears as there is in anger or sex or wild ducks or love. It’s what you choose to keep alive––what keeps you alive––that matters in the end. That’s what I learned when Elie “left us” and grandpa roared out of town and I was left alone with Myra and Jonas: the silent parents, allies of the unspeakable. I’m the caretaker now, and I know what’s important to preserve––even if some refuse to see it or hear it. No matter the monsters, the story must never die.

For me it begins in the living room, on the misty gray couch near the window where I can see Elie running back from the trail. His brow streaming with sweat, his sliced hand scabbed over and beginning to harden. I watch him scramble after our father, bounding up the stairs of our split-level house: Jonas beating down to the basement, Elie scampering up to the living room floor. Grandpa is in his nightshirt, back at his telescope, muttering indignities to his dead wife.

“We did the stairs four times!” Elie spits at me, pulling at the skin behind his ear as he tells me about the wooden planks that lie like stairs along the steepest part of the Coastal Trail. “My legs were fiery logs! The burn means it’s working! The burn means it’s good!”

“Where I’m from,” says Grandpa, his eye still fixed in the open lens, “the burn means you should have worn a rubber.”

“The burn tests your will,” Elie snaps back. “The brain and the body are connected in ways that you”––pointing at me––“couldn’t understand.”

“The brain’s a part of the body,” I try, my arm tight around the shoulder of the couch.

“What the hell’s the point?” Grandpa diverts his open eye to Elie. “That’s what I want to know.”

“It’s my training,” answers Elie. “My education!”

“Education,” Grandpa scoffs with a wide wave of his hand, his blind eye popping open as he tugs at the tufts of his frosty red beard. “Education’s a life sentence where they teach you to fear death! Urges are all we’re about. Instincts. And I know where mine want me to go. Eh, Quentin?”

Forcing a laugh, I nod back at Grandpa.

“Where do they want him to go?” Elie demands of me. “You don’t know anything that Myra hasn’t told you.”

“Elie!” Myra blares, stepping out of the kitchen with a paring knife and an Asian pear. Elie tilts his head toward our mother and rips the soft scab off the bridge of his pink hand.

I could feel Myra’s face start to twitch, disrupting the airwaves. Pointing the paring knife at her baby: “It’s your hand, your hand,” her fingers pressing into the flesh of the pear as she slides back into the kitchen.

The blood from another wound creeps around the crest of my brother’s hand. A cold fist tightens in my chest.

“Myra has to calm down,” Elie says to me, wiping his open sore across the thigh of his shorts before bounding down to the basement.

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