by Richard Larson
You like to eat with dirty hands after facing Smirnoff Frenchside-out, a tiny act of bilingual terrorism, after spinning and squeaking Trash to Compactor and poling hot-waffle cardboard down her gullet. Your hands have heels and the heels are oily. They imbibe This Side Up and Glass all day long. They dirty with dust-caked wines, the Cannonballs, Obikwas, all better and more solitary with age.
You peel the grocery bag, astronaut cold from thrumming fridge. You separate the sandwich with black-stained hands, the way your father did on his stalled combine in aching Alberta summers, when your mother waded the canola with platz and vereneke and watched him eat crooked, with Shakespeare’s crooked mouth, and not smile.
You feel knives when she says that he would roll in his grave to see his son, soft-handed, sell liquor and live slicked in city noise. But father, he knew how harvests thin out like hair after chemo, and sometimes people roll over just to get more comfortable where they are.
3 comments:
This was genuinely a unique read for me. I have no idea if I liked it or hated it. I will be back to read this again, I know.
It took me a couple of tries to get it, but finally I did. Unique perspective, but I think it won't be easily accessible to some. Like a puzzle to figure out.
Lovely language, and beautifully woven characters. I especially like how the heels of hands evoke working/walking on hands. When I read this piece I smell dust and pallets and burning paper.
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