A Deadbeat Kitten Taking a Dump of Watermelon Seeds onto a Vigilantes Merry-Go-Round Spirit
On an Easter Sunday, in the afternoon, Jesse Holloway started drinking. Behind a two-story house was Jesse with a shovel in one hand, and in the other, a broken Yueng-Ling bottle. Staggering as he walked, Jesse raised his steel shovel up in the air, over his right shoulder, and swung the broad blade down into the shingled roof of a doghouse.
Jagged asphalt shingles took off in all directions as Jesse collapsed to his knees. Slugging up to his patio, Jesse slumped into his lawn chair, twisted open the cap of a second bottle and took a swig from his chilled beer. Jesse had just finished burying his black Labrador Skipper in his backyard. He stared at the small dirt mound he made for his dog and took another, longer swig.
The sun came down from the smoky gray sky as Jesse finished up the bottle, and shattered it on the patio edge. The shards of amber glass scattered across the red bricks to the beaten down grass. Skipper wasn’t going to be resurrected today.
Jesse sneezed into his rigid hands and wiped away the dripping mucous on his faded jeans. He looked down at his boots; glaring at him was his next-door neighbor’s hissing cat. He picked the cat up and punted it across the damp grass. The cat cannonballed through the air and landed in a half-dried puddle. The uncoordinated soaking cat struggled up to its paws and licked its sore hind leg as Jesse grinned, and blew a raspberry. Not only was this cat rude, but it also lacked grace—which was weird, because cats usually possessed grace. What a stupid animal (unlike his dead, best friend Skipper).
Jesse walked into his house, crumpled onto his sofa, and curled up his body like a pooped out baby puppy as he wept. Diving his head into the sofa, Jesse smothered his screams. His voice gradually became muffled as he lost consciousness. After a few hours passed, Jesse woke up with his face still beneath the sofa cushions; in front of his eyes was a bent silver picture. Immediately, Jesse excavated his head from the padded grave, and plunged his hands between the cushions, feeling the last ten years of moldy potato chips and wonderbread crumbs. He felt warm inside and alive with all of his blood rushing back to his tired body as he massaged the smooth, cold paper between his fingertips, and yanked out a crinkled Polaroid photograph wedged in-between worn cushions.
He sat up straighter as he gazed at the photograph of his wife Jennifer. She was wearing an embroidered cotton sundress, and carried a watermelon underneath her black skirt. That watermelon was named Francis A. Holloway. He clutched the photo as a daydream of better times; back when Jennifer was alive, back when his dog was still around. A year ago, Jennifer pulled out of their driveway in an angel white mini-van and smiled at Jesse for the last time.
As her vehicle was straightening out, the next-door neighbors SUV slammed right into her. Jesse was standing on the front doorstep as the battering ram banged deep into the driver’s side, crushing into the plastic door, creating a crunched tooth indentation. His next-door neighbor “holier than-thou” Samantha Goldflowers, the evangelist, scrambled out of her shattered SUV window, sweating out rosary beads; gasping for breath as if she saw the heavenly gates of the afterlife with a white robed man with red horns sticking out of his head.
Checking her unscathed face in her cracked rear-view mirror, Samantha dialed 911 as Jesse howled in laughter, biting his chapped bottom lip. He crumbled to his knees and dropped his head into his lap and tears flooded across his jeans and plopped onto the pavement. Misery washed over his face and Jesse clutched his head and poked his fingers through his ears to silence the noise. The wailing sob of a grown man percolated through the cul-de-sac. And it came from Jesse. Obviously Christians didn’t take the Lord’s name in vain because they hold onto that characteristic deep inside their souls. The bitch forgot to pray for Jennifer.
The ambulance arrived ten minutes later, but there was no point; Jennifer was dead on impact. She was on her way to Blockbuster to return a late DVD. Now Jesse rents DVDs from Netflix so he never has to leave the house. He tried to sue Blockbuster for the hell of it because he was now a loyal subscriber to Netflix. Jesse wanted the store to become an abandoned boarded-up building for the homeless; if anything good was going to come from this mashed-up nightmare, might as well give back to the community.
Eventually Jesse’s lawyer Ernie Myers pulled him to the side and flashed him two frontcourt seat tickets to next week’s Washington Wizards game versus the Orlando Magic. Washington winded up losing to Orlando 88 to 139; Ernie found Jesse in a bathroom stall with his head submerged in an overflowing toilet. Grabbing Jesse by his shoulders, Ernie hauled his friend out as Jesse’s hand held on to the black, beveled seat. Pepperoni pizza chunks, murky Pepsi-cola, and lemon starburst pieces continued to flush down the bottomless hole.
One time Jesse saw a Blockbuster kiosk at the local Mega Wal-Mart, and he stayed in the store for hours, pummeling his knuckles into the inanimate object. As he crashed his hands into the kiosk, Jesse cried as he thought of a sledgehammer striking into the center of a baby watermelon; wet pink bits of fruit and black seeds soaring through Jesse’s mind.
The funeral was private and Samantha offered to pay for the costs. Jesse accepted her offer, not really caring whether he paid or she paid because one way or another Samantha Goldflowers was going to pay for her actions. She would pay him in the blood of her beloved and receive death; death was nonrefundable. Jesse couldn’t sue Samantha because she was a catholic cripple with an amputated leg, and Jesse had a conscience distorted from a single malt scotch.
Several hours ago, Samantha drove out of the cul-de-sac, and rear-ended Jesse’s dog Skipper, sending his furry, black body right into a Jesse’s mailbox. It took five minutes for Skipper to rise up, and just before he stood up on all fours, a white delivery van steamrolled over his torn up body. Skipper looked like a charred pancake, flattened to perfection on a scraped frying pan. Jesse was standing behind his dining room window at the time, thinking that that bitch Samantha forgot to pick up his NetFlix DVD envelopes from the street. Taking a bottle of whiskey from inside his maple cabinet, Jasper chugged his vice, sinking to the floor as he reminisced on the last thing Jennifer told him. His wife thought they should get a cat.
Blowing his nose into a Kleenex, Jesse listened to Jennifer when she said, “Skipper is lonely all day, Jesse.” She was laying her back on the living room sofa, curling her toes in and out; in her hands and facing away from her was a Polaroid camera snapping photos of her. Jesse was drunk at the time. He watched as the negatives floated through the air, forming into a voluptuous brunette with a watermelon belly. A few photos drifted down and slid underneath the sofa cushions, becoming hidden like time capsules under tender soil.
“So he needs a companion, but not someone that he’ll hump all day, I don’t want any puppies bouncing around the hallway, ya know, we already have the baby coming and all. Ya know what? We should get a tiny kitten!” It had been a while since Jesse had seen Jennifer happy; she seemed happy, she suffered from severe depression and there had been times when she was unmanageable. Usually she lay in bed with a blanket over her body, and her pillow on top of her face. Sometimes she tended to forget about Jesse’s health; how he was feeling, what illnesses were bottled up inside of him.
Jesse winked at Jennifer, grinding his teeth, as he nodded his head. “Whatever you want doll, whatever you want.” Jesse blew his nose again into the same tissue as his wife smiled widely, and she rubbed her bulging belly.
When Jesse sank all the way down to his tiled floor, he picked up his tilted bottle lying on the carpet, and drank some more whiskey. He wanted to bludgeon Samantha’s face in and behead her with his kitchen knife on a cutting board. He wanted to lock her up inside of a confessional box, douse the sinner’s coffin with a carton of gasoline, light her up with melting a candle, and set a black bucket filled with holy water beside the door. He wanted to see her try to extinguish her conflagrating body with a liquid said to be pure, and fail in her attempts. He wanted to sacrifice this fat, juicy bleating lamb in front of a kind prophet nailed to a rotten wooden cross, and be absolved of his neighborly burden.
Meanwhile, Samantha had ranged his doorbell ten times, but Jesse had ignored every ring. She wasn’t worthy of his presence. He didn’t care if she was Catholic; she didn’t deserve her Good Samaritan reputation. He was going to destroy Samantha’s life. He was going to take the life of the only thing she cared about, her cat Lucy.
A few hours later, Jesse woke up in a cold sweat and immediately opened up the curtains. Looking outside his window, Jesse watched the lights go out in Samantha’s bedroom. Quickly, Jesse grabbed his backpack with his supplies and ran out the door. He felt a cold, bursting gust of wind smack into his chest, almost pushing him backwards. Crickets crooned out their miniature souls into the vast blackness; a black-eyed raccoon scurried across the sidewalk and into thick shrubbery; towering streetlamps blinked on and off, and faint humming came from within Samantha’s house. It was the buzzing sound of her television tuning out.
Samantha lived right beside Jesse’s house. After checking both ends of the street, Jesse climbed up a red oak tree near Samantha’s bedroom and crouched on high lofty branches. He took a fishing rod out from his backpack, and laid a smelly, dead salmon on his leg. Breathing laboriously with trembling hands, Jesses’ fingers shook as he tried to loop a rope around the fishing rod. The rope kept slipping out of fingers as Jesse tried over and over to string a dead salmon around the coarse rod: looping under, crossing around, pulling a loop string over and under, and tying a firm knot. Retching in his mouth, he finally secured the bait; hopefully after this pressing errand, PETA wouldn’t hurl a Molotov cocktail into his bedroom window.
Looking into the window, Jesse saw a glowing red-orange lava lamp on Samantha’s nightstand. Her eyes were covered with a dark blue mask, and her ears were clogged up with yellow foam plugs. Slowly, Jesse prodded the window open and stuck the fishing rod inside the bedroom. A couple of minutes went by, and the small cat named Lucy with dark stripes pounced on the fish, and gnawed the scales off of the salmon. Jesse captured Lucy by her hairy neck, wrestled with her limber body, avoiding her razor sharp claws and finally stuffed her inside of the backpack. As Jesse put his backpack straps over his shoulders, he heard meow, meow. Jesse didn’t speak cat. But if he did speak cat, Jesse got the translation wrong because he let go of his backpack, and watched Lucy plummet to the pavement like a tarnished penny being dropped from the Empire State Building. Jesse didn’t hear her throaty wail as he climbed down the tree.
After Jesse picked up his backpack, he walked off the lawn, and threw the backpack down in the middle of the street. Before he left, he wanted to take a better look at his hostage. Jesse unzipped the backpack and in seconds became fixated on the cat, Lucy.
Or rather, it was actually Lucy the kitten. A tiny kitten with bright cobalt eyes, and dark brown streaks that brush stroked her white body from paw to tail. Sneezing all over the place, Jesse dropped the backpack, grabbed at his constricted throat, feeling his heart rate catapulting up his skin. He felt like his Adam’s apple was rocketing out of his mouth. He cupped his hands and vomited half-eaten spaghetti and meatballs into his palms. A few minutes later, after Jesse cleaned his filthy hands on his jacket, he bent down and sealed the backpack shut. Again Jesse sneezed and his hands clammed up while his face turned to a strawberry red.
He sneezed out loud once more, and as Jesse wiped his runny nose on his sleeve, he tried to remember why he didn’t purchase a cat for Jennifer; trying to remember why this cute kitten was making his intestines churn from side to side. Then Jesse remembered; he was allergic to cats even cuddly cute ones. Had he been dazed for that long that his memory was corroding? Since Jennifer left without saying good-bye, all Jasper had remembered her saying was “Make sure to go to the animal shelter and find a cute little kitten, okay Jess….” And after that day, the second person Jesse thought about every night, while he laid on his king sized bed, closing his eyes after thinking about his lovely wife; was Samantha GoldFlowers.
His next-door neighbor would be chained to jail cell bars; being eaten alive by black Labradors with glowing red eyes, and mouths drenched in white foam with pink meat and pieces of a kitten’s tail crammed between there fangs.
Clearing the vapors out of his happy dream, Jesse’s soft chuckle grew into a cackle as he took out a flask from his jacket pocket, and gulped down every single drop. He pulled his wallet from behind his backside, and pulled out the Polaroid photograph of Jennifer. When Jesse stared into his wife’s faded black eyes Jesse had racing thoughts: he thought about his beautiful Jennifer; he thought about Francis the Watermelon Fetus; he thought about Skipper; he thought about Samantha; he thought about the possibility of Lucy the kitten resurrecting her spirit for revenge as he spat warm saliva on the street. Jesse hoped to God that this kitten only lived one life because he was too beat. He was tired of drinking; he just wanted to be numb. Then Jesse stopped thinking, hopped into his Chrysler Charger, turned on the ignition, and with his arm holding the headrest of the passenger seat, he pressed his foot down on the gas lightly, just enough so that his back tire rolled over the strap of the backpack.
And then, as the light began to break into the sky, Jesse thought about his wife and how she would have wanted him to a good man, a better one than who he was. He killed the engine, opened up the door, and stepped out his car. He walked around to the rear bumper and picking up the backpack, opened the zipper.
Lucy purred, staring at him.
In that moment, Jesse felt helpless as he gazed back into Lucy’s face.
Those big eyes,
big as the ones Jennifer had for him.
| Page