8FOLD/ACRA: The House of Fiction # 5

Tom Russell milos_parker at yahoo.com
Mon Oct 17 21:30:26 PDT 2005


EIGHTFOLD COMICS PRESENTS
THE HOUSE OF FICTION # 5
BY TOM RUSSELL

   In the real world, my father did not come back from
the dead.

\.oOo./

   In the real world, my little brother, Kevin

\.oOo./

   the chameleon

\.oOo./

   was responsible for a series of break-ins.  The
local police, being generally useless, were unable to
tie him to any of it until he aimed a little higher
and broke into a school board member's house.  Then
they drew up a warrant.
   Which then sat on a desk for a month.
   In another town, he was caught trying to shoplift
and spent three days in their jail until the store
dropped the charges and he was released.  The next
day, he tried to break into another house.  This time
the county caught him and put him in jail in Detroit
to await his hearing.

\.oOo./

   He was in quarantine first, which meant he slept on
the floor with eight or nine other men, close to his
age but most of them older.  "There was this guy who
had been shot in the eye before they took him in," he
told me, "and he was screaming for help.  He was
shaking, and he was all sweaty, but his skin was cold.
 It took them six hours to come get him.  I couldn't
sleep.  He was dead by the time they came."

\.oOo./

   The day before his hearing was a Thursday, and that
was visiting day, and so my grandmother and I came to
visit him, my wife staying behind in the waiting room
for moral support.  As we went through the various
security procedures, my grandmother told anyone who
would listen that this was the first time she had ever
been to visit someone in jail, and that she never
thought she would have to, and that she hoped she
would never have to again.  It got tiresome after a
while.
   The visiting room was very small, very confined. 
I'm a little claustrophobic, which didn't help put me
at ease.  There was one chair in the room, and I let
my grandmother sit in it at first.  A sheet of

\.oOo./

   bulletproof

\.oOo./

   glass separated our tight little room from the
other side.  In the center of the glass was a
cock-eyed little speaker.  I balanced myself on the
tips of my feet, crouching down, and waited for my
brother.
   He had lost about ten pounds, but he looked so thin
and wiry anyway that I couldn't really tell the
difference.  Except that his face was kind of a sallow
looking.
   My grandmother spent a lot of the time telling him
how much he's fucked up, which is probably why he
didn't want us visiting in the first place.  I tried
to reach out to him more, whatever the hell that
means.  I guess it means not yelling at him, just
asking him how he's been, what it's like, what his
plans are, whatever.
   He had gotten three books, he said.  One was called
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE RED DRAGON.  I wasn't familiar
with it and so I assumed it was one of the post-Doyle
books, one of the few forms of published and
royalty-free fan-fiction.  It was the only one of the
three he had started, and he said it had something to
do with an arsonist burning up trees.
   The other books were KING LEAR and a few stories by
Balzac.  I was impressed with his choices-- his tastes
were never particularly literary-- and told him to
read Lear very, very carefully.  "Shakespeare does
write in English.  And if you read it slow, take your
time, you can understand most of what he's saying,
besides an odd word here or there."
   He said he was sure he'd be released the next
morning and looked forward to it.  He was going to go
back to school, he said.  He didn't know where he was
staying, but he'd stay somewhere.  He didn't know what
kind of job he was going to get, but he was going to
get a job.  I told him times were tough, it took me a
year to find a second job and I finished high school. 
Just take whatever you can, I said.  He rolled his
eyes.  "I'll get a job, don't worry about it."
   I tried to joke with him-- I told him not to drop
the soap in the shower, for example.  He didn't
appreciate it, told me there were individual stalls. 
My grandmother thought me irresponsible.  "Now's not
the time."
   But now wasn't the time to yell at him, either.

\.oOo./

   He wiped his eyes with his shirt a lot, and for a
while I sat in the chair so I could speak directly
into the speaker, so he could hear me.  From
straight-on, though, the speaker covered his whole
face, so that it became his head, a speaker sprouting
from his neck.  It was too bizarre for me and so soon
after I offered my grandmother her seat back.

\.oOo./

   He had made a friend, he said, who didn't even do
anything: the friend's father had reported him for
stealing his car.  "But he was just sitting in the
driveway in the car," Kevin said.  "He didn't even
drive it or anything."
   Kevin claims that he's innocent of all charges, but
doesn't answer the questions when they're posed to
him.  He said he never wanted to come back to jail.
   But I had the feeling that he wasn't going to give
up the drugs or the crime either.

\.oOo./

   He was released the next morning, a hearing set for
two weeks hence.  He's living with his dealer.  We
hear from him sporadically, as before.
   Every time I hear from him or about him, I get
anxious.  Sometimes, I wish he would just go to jail
or die so that that would be the end of it.  No more
suspense.  No more back-and-forth and vicious cycle. 
No more ambiguity.  Dead and tragic and over-with.
   I should hate myself for thinking that.  Sounds
like I don't care.  Thing is, I do.  I do care about
the little bastard.  I just don't want to anymore.  It
takes too much out of me.  I want the story to end.
   But there isn't an end in life, no resolution in
the real world.

\.oOo./

   But this is not the real world.

\.oOo./

   This is the House of Fiction.

\.oOo./

   My father has come back to life, and he has found
my little lost black sheep of a brother, and he has
taken him home.  Kevin Fiction says he's tired, and so
he's spared the questions of my mother and
grandmother.  He's sent to bed and he sleeps like an
angel.  No, not an angel.
   A koala.

\.oOo./

   Cutest god-damn thing in the world?  A koala with
asthma.

\.oOo./

   My grandmother heads home, and my mother and my
father go to bed.  My brother

\.oOo./

   the koala

\.oOo./

   wakes up uncharacteristically in the middle of the
night and sits in the living room with our dog, our
old dying cancer-infested dog

\.oOo./

   In the real world, our dog Beauty died, she was put
to sleep.  The night before, I came to say good-bye to
her, cradled her huge fat body in my arms, pet her
nervous little head, looked into the dark spots where
the cataracts had eaten away at her eyes.  My wife
came with me.  She cried.  I didn't.
   I wanted to cry, but because she had fallen apart,
I had to keep it together.  I was not allowed to mourn
my dog.
   I miss that dog.
   Miss her more than I ever missed my father.  That
sounds callous, doesn't it?
   At least the dog gave a damn about me.

\.oOo./

   Kevin pets the dog a bit and stares at the top of
the television set, a makeshit

\.oOo./

   SHIFT

\.oOo./

   mantle-place.  There were photos, and bills, and a
couple of DVDs.  And, dead in the center

\.oOo./

   dead

\.oOo./

   center

\.oOo./

   dead

\.oOo./

   my father's urn.  My father's ashes.  My father's
remains.

\.oOo./

   He picked the urn up and he wants to smash it, but
he doesn't.  He sets it down on the floor between his
knees and he hugs it with his wiry little arms, and he
whispers to it, he says

\.oOo./

   you're dead.  I've got you and you're dead, you
can't be alive.  You're in this box.  You're in a box,
you're dead, you're ashes, you're all burnt up, you're
dead and so you can't be alive, you can't be upstairs.
 I've got you, you fucker, do you hear me?  I've got
you, I've got you, I've got you.  Scream you fucker

\.oOo./

   scream

\.oOo./

   and from the upstairs bedroom comes a scream that
wakes the old dying dog.  And my brother

\.oOo./

   Kevin

\.oOo./

   the chameleon

\.oOo./

   suddenly has my anger

\.oOo./

   Kevin

\.oOo./

   the villain of the piece

\.oOo./

   smiles and says

\.oOo./

   fall down the stairs, and my father does.  He falls
like a

\.oOo./

   like a

\.oOo./

   I dunno

\.oOo./

   like something

\.oOo./

   something that falls.
   Hard.  And it hurts, and my brother tells him to
bleed and he bleeds, right out of his eye-sockets and
his ears and his nose and his mouth and his asshole,
blood spurts all over, and my brother says,
more-more-more, you should be dead

\.oOo./

   and my father bleeds for my brother's sins

\.oOo./

   for his sins

\.oOo./

   for my anger

\.oOo./

   My mother comes down the stairs and sees her
husband covered in blood and spurting it all over, and
she sees my brother there with the urn and she knows,
she knows exactly what's going on

\.oOo./

   she knows the name of the game

\.oOo./

   stop Kevin stop he's your father

\.oOo./

   my father's dead he can't be my father my father's
dead he's a puppet he's a thing he's my puppet punch
the bitch punch her right in the tit

\.oOo./

   and my father has no voice

\.oOo./

   just a body now and not even my father's body

\.oOo./

   my father's body was burned five years ago, put
inside an urn and a little bit inside a locket my
brother stole and sold for drugs

\.oOo./

   and my father beats my mother, something he never
did but something he always should have done

\.oOo./

   and my friend says I should work out my hostility
towards my mother!

\.oOo./

   and now Kevin doesn't even need to talk anymore, he
just holds onto the urn and my father

\.oOo./

   `s body

\.oOo./

   is a flesh-and-bone-and-blood puppet

\.oOo./

   Kevin

\.oOo./

   the chameleon

\.oOo./

   when he's with me, he acts like me, when he's with
his friends, he acts like his friends, when he's with
my brother, he acts like my brother

\.oOo./

   this is the House of Fiction

\.oOo./

   the chameleon

\.oOo./

   I always liked the dog more than my father

\.oOo./

   always liked the dog

\.oOo./

   my father's body touches the dog on her head, her
poor bumpy head that's covered with cysts, and the
cysts are gone, and the cataracts are gone, and the
cancer is gone, the arthritis, it all flows out of her
canine body

\.oOo./

   always loved the dog more

\.oOo./

   flows out of her body and into my father's body

\.oOo./

   into my brother's puppet

\.oOo./

   my father doesn't have a voice anymore

\.oOo./

   but the dog does

\.oOo./

   and the dog says, "Thank you Kevin"

\.oOo./

   and Kevin says

\.oOo./

   to the urn

\.oOo./

   you're mine I got you I got you I got you.

\.oOo./

   I got you.







(C) Copyright 2005 Tom Russell.



		
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