The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories by Jackson Shelley

Author:Jackson, Shelley [Jackson, Shelley]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2010-11-30T20:00:00+00:00

After the thumb incident, the nursing home wanted nothing to do with Father. What could I do? I took him home. Every morning I hoist him out of bed. (He’s not helpless, but he forgets what he is doing, and he is stubborn.) When he is dressed and has his bib on, we make the slow voyage to the kitchen. He greets his chair. He sits in his chair. All day, he sits and looks out the kitchen window. At night, back we go.

My father bangs his glass on the table and demands kirsch. “Kirsch!” It is all he will drink. My father was a swinging exercise instructor in the seventies. In the hall there is a photograph of him in leotards and a lab coat, the leotards for ease of movement, the lab coat to underline the medical soundness of his procedures. He has hair. He has his thumb inside a woman’s mouth. She has a large behind.

What is he doing? He is applying pressure to the roof of the mouth to ease sinus pressure, nosebleeds, headaches, and hiccups. Every morning he shuffles past this picture, stops, turns back, and peers at it, as if he does not know what it represents. Who is that darkly handsome mustached man, and what is he after in there? Every morning he tells me, “I used to receive kiss-o-grams from grateful whatchamacallits, clients, ladies with large keisters. They liked the cut of my jib.” Then he weeps. Every morning the grief is brand-new. He does not remember the grief of the day before. He remembers the kiss-o-grams, however.

One morning he dressed himself in his leotards. It was a sorry sight. His jib is shrunken and wobbly. Now all he wears is that damned kirtle. And the bib.

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