Contributor: Chris Vola
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1.
One evening Uncle shat into your sister and reached for a towel.
“Snap Crackle and Pop,” he said, and you shoved his snakeskin then, for you and your sister, into the corner table next to him until its head split and he made you lick the ketchup off and your dad charged in and you were bellowing through the house with your tee shirts pulled up, fleeing to your room and hidden under your blanket, exposed. You thought they would smack your bellies then.
Instead, things were quiet for hours. You fell asleep being aliens. Afternoons spent you up.
Your asleep sister was fine, then screaming at the wall, “We’re not afraid of you,” regenerated, grown into two new heads, mothlike as she jumped, punctuating the word kitchen and wanting to know if you wanted some and laughing like crazy. At some point your sister’s throat slit was swallowing mint chips, silently muttering.
The weirdness of being a twentysomething. The things that make Rice Krispies (the snapcracklepop), the things that make your snake. You hadn’t considered the sharp things you did. You smeared ketchup on slices cracked open, your sister’s slices.
Your sister started wailing and left the bread on both your plates. You ran around demanding to know what had happened. You, your heads, arms still in the sleeves, stomachs expecting horrible punishment at any moment.
Oyoyoy! you thought.
Eventually your dad woke and came in. His head had split in two. “Uncle the Grouch!” you shouted that over and over.
Uncle came in, having some ice cream in his “grouch” and landing on your back slits instead of the front ones. You tottered from the kitchen as one expressing displeasure at a given situation.
Your dad licked his lips. “Snap Crackle and Pop,” the old mouth.
One remembers the origin of this phrase.
2.
At the side of the water mattress, your dad had the morning, yelling the orders back to your sister, watching the TV, whatever was on anymore. He only poured coffee to read the paper.
The court roundup was messy, lots of ketchup, and he gave you and your sister wet naps. He didn’t read the deaths. He didn’t have to.
“Right your snakes!” your sister belched to everyone in particular, drooling ketchup.
That night, your bodies wriggled like slugs drowning in salt rain.
3.
Your dad took you into the city. He liked to scratch his ticket around.
While you waited in the gas station parking lot he bought sandwiches and a lotto – it was a Powerball day. The ride had been short, but your sister was scared of the radio and the fall asleep:
“Everything is good! Everything is really good,” squawked the same radio people who make America the country.
What you thought they were saying was like before you were a twentysomething when your dad had had to come in to buy the Ceremonial Super-Lotto in Bushwick and there’d been no more but you said how you liked to eat oranges, so your dad had bought several.
The fleshy bone is gross, you thought. Tradition traduces no oranges.
“Home Depot?” the gas station man asked when he came to the car back with your dad.
Can you imagine how happy your dad was! This used to be what the men he used to bring to the car called
Home Depot, but that had been before Uncle, before whatever else your dad had told you was in the papers. Before your dad had to drive his post-suburban vehicle forty-five minutes to welcome “women-boys and gays” and everybody else in the metropole who knew how to get to your Home Depot. It had been a requirement.
“Once you were airstrikes in São Paulo,” the gas station man muttered as he unbuckled your buckles and licked at his mustache. “Once you were telemarketers in Sri Lanka. Once you were e-readers in bull rings.”
Your sister rubbed the gas station man’s belly and before biting his open snakeskin winked at you and whispered, “We have been enough.”
4.
The highway was closed.
FASCIST-DOGMA-NECTAR-OVERFLOW streamed across the ketchupy sky.
“We only cradle what we distill,” you dad muttered to the absence of space or maybe the rear-view.
“I dream of ATMs burning,” your soggy sister moaned into your ear.
5.
Back in the kitchen your dad made you old catfish from the grill. Before that, you ate on ping pong balls.
“Stop it,” your sister said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” or “You’re off.”
You never actually did it, you never screamed in the kitchen.
At a quarter to seven, the tsunami your dad had told you about brought Uncle in the door and let him use the bathroom. He was teary eyed, Uncle. Your sister made him wipe his finger sometimes, then, too.
You had a memory of Uncle’s cracking on your face. When you cocked your head back because you could just feel it melting. Uncle made you do things you didn’t want to, he had really cracked the Home Depot Code.
Did you know what was even weirder tonight? His new boxer shorts, and then you were both wet-legged?
Always a soggy way for Uncle.
6.
Excitation is an elevation of energy level above an arbitrary baseline energy state. Your sister’s brain did not know that the lifetime of a system in an excited state is usually short.
Your dad dropped your sister in mid-air. She fell into Uncle’s “grouch,” both pockets filled with pajamas. You wanted to run upstairs to hide in your room.
“Don’t you dare,” your dad belched, and “God, don’t twist my words around,” spitting at Uncle’s tsunami-slick mouth. You tip-toed over to the freezer. You had to do it.
“I broke my neck! I broke my neck!”
Your sister’s pieces rolling in the spilled ketchup, at least forty pints.
7.
The next afternoon, Doctor came into the room for a chat. She liked to scratch her ticket around.
She couldn’t understand the ketchupy kitchen – “And on a Powerball day,” she clucked, her brown hair flopping in catfish oil from the grill while the TV laughed into a speech.
Your sister sucked on ping pong balls. Her machine sucked.
And for no good reason.
You removed the lid from the cookie tray. Mint-chip cookies Doctor had made. Doctor stood there in the dark for a minute. You liked her helium voice, you liked her white bread. You liked her jotting fingers. Your sister’s swollen stitches were an alien way. Doctor made you both take a picture of it.
Your sister sucked.
Doctor made a cluck, and your dad woke and came in the kitchen.
This is what Doctor did: she stabbed your dad with frowns and mega-clucks like her brow was bigger than Brooklyn.
But your dad was smart. Your dad was crafty. He was Crafty the Grouch. He knew what to do. He looked alien sad, and then found his escape in Doctor’s white shoe, started doling out nicknames to what happened when your sister’s head
tsunamied the ketchup, when the
karmic assload flooded out of the kitchen:
“Uncle would have stopped, but he wasn’t in the breakdown lane,” and, “It’s bad glands.”
Doctor was so fat she couldn’t hold her pen any longer. Her fingers stopped jotting.
“To ruminate is not to be right,” she told your dad.
“Snapcracklepop,” he grinned.
As Doctor spooned you mint chips, a shimmer of dead skin sailed furiously across her heel. She sighed, knowing that she could, that summer evening, lay thick and still upon her Brooklyn bed.
“Your family has good teeth,” she explained, an abstract theme that meant everything was Powerball good: you and your sister would have catfish from the grill and Uncle would remember and behave within the Code.
She made your dad wipe his finger before she heaved into her idling Hummer and shot off to Wal-Mart for the sale on Succulent Melanomas.
Your dad’s dark lips curved like pomegranates.
8.
The earthquake brought Uncle in the door at a quarter to seven.
Uncle?
Oyoyoyoyoyoy! you thought.
He spread his worksheets out across the kitchen, and some soggy yogurt for you and your sister. Your dad made him wipe his finger, smiled, smiled, then frowned when he remembered Doctor and the Code.
Do you know what your dad did? He pulled over Uncle, communicated to him in furrows and whisperings, just like the Universe was his brow.
“Slit it back up inside,” and, “It’s better on your face than your hands.”
He paused, then, “Sike!”
Uncle had good teeth. He let you and your sister see their size.
You had to swallow mint chips not to scream, you had to find a semi-quiet area, or, in a sense, a non-word.
Where is it? Or, What? Or, Oh!
Your sister sucked on ping pong balls. Her machine sucked.
9.
The things you did when no one was looking.
Here is what happened: Your sister’s scrunched toes against Uncle’s chilly grinning face, the wet under his plaid trousers just starting to quicken. Your dad was in the corner, answering four a.m. phone calls –
“It was about the lake,” and, “He brought her to the Far Side,” and, “Deep in winter and nobody was around.”
Your sister screamed and you knew you had to do it.
You tip-toed past your dad, the fridge was open, and you shoved Uncle’s snake, more than snakeskin because the corner table crushed his thin tin dome near the base of his ketchupy brain. His big nose? There would be no more soggy way.
Your sister’s smug smile of satisfaction, the first in the history of the kitchen.
Uncle’s face was stuck in a perpetual crackle, the feeling of having the shit thrown
out of his molecules. But you hadn’t dared to smile because your dad was smart. Your dad was fast. Your dad flew from the corner faster than your sister could say “Cheap-ass-dirtbag!” and
snapcracklepop, and he was squatting on top of your chest, screaming into your face, way, way, way crazier than ever.
“The Code!” he screamed, “THE CODE!”
He wasn’t going to stop, he was way past the breakdown lane. But he didn’t know that after you shoved Uncle sense, your sister had obtained non-screaming-mantra-status, this new kind of steel-hard self-identity. You saw your sister the alien lift the Magic Marker over your dad’s white bread.
You saw your sister the alien slice through your dad’s ugly ceiling.
You saw your dad’s rubbery eyes plop onto your face like a piece of catfish smacking against the kitchen floor. It was ketchup-overload.
That was why you started laughing, why you couldn’t stop even when your sister the alien made you wipe your finger, when she made you swallow mint chips.
“Snap, crackle, and…POP!” you laughed again and again.
10.
Doctor made you take a picture of it. Then she made you look again.
“I feel really sorry for you,” one of her favorite accusations, and “Time, after all, can only perform so many operations at once.” She reminded you of a pay phone booth
that was missing its pay phone.
Her fingers didn’t have to jot down anything anymore. Your sister looked past the kitchen, the door with its bell, the shards of sirens in the front yard, the highway, the slit of ketchup-light in the trees.
Nobody was around. You didn’t know where they were at.
Remembering her idling off-road artillery vehicle and the heavy afternoon traffic, Doctor stood up. Teary-eyed, she left yogurt and catfish, trying to remember her place within the Code.
No, she couldn’t bring you home, “but you were relatively young and could be anything” – writers of love poetry, Turks with smartphones, banana-yellow Blue-Staters.
“Leave our soggy pocket to make its own time,” your sister snarled, “we have been enough.”
Doctor nodded, then vanished in a cloud of formaldehyde and diesel-fuel. It was now your job to realize that you and your sister were really alone.
That evening, you both fell asleep being aliens.
11.
Two molecules must influence each other in such a way that they function as a more or less stable whole.
Your organism must water and flower. Your sister’s organism must metabolize. Your organisms drank twenty-five Mexican Screwdrivers and stabbed with cracked retinas.
Crumbling train to Brooklyn, your self-righteous pilgrim.
Mutual symbiosis and a torn black pigment. A bleached asshole. Your sister labeled this variation
morphogenesis, she labeled your smoked-out apartment a
chemical factor, she labeled her hips a
sudden white streak. You discarded the ability of your systems to maintain a stable condition by means of multiple dynamic equilibrium adjustments controlled by interrelated regulation mechanisms.
Your sister imagined how filthy the gas station man’s sandals must have been.
A sound: your sister’s ketchup nails carving the backbone of six blind stanzas separated by a sparrow at the window grate. His white bread, your snake, the real contraction of all that passed by.
“Omne vivum ex ovo,” your sister moaned, until your ears spilled the taste of your dad’s deep-fried mistake.
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Chris Vola is the author of a novel, Monkeytown, forthcoming from S A M Publishing. He lives in New York.
