by Margaret Christakos

Gerry Krawarhalski could not sleep so at two a.m. he crossed over into Swallow Gardens and lay down on the soil, the arriving apocalypse of his bulk crushing the sleeping iris foliage and drowsing peony bushes. He was of this inclination, to hurt whatever was available. There were worms that just managed to slip beneath his heels. Slugs that saved themselves from his ponderous skull. He released farts one after the other into the still darkness.

His son’s behaviour was inexcuseable. The meddlesome whining from charity camp last year—not getting enough marshmallows, not being Lead Orienteerer for the junior campers, not owning modern-enough sneakers—this order of poor manners would provoke only nostalgic peeps from him now. The current behaviour truly could not be excused. So Gerry’d excused himself and gone to sleep in the public gardens, rolling deliberately across the six-foot-deep bed to crush every living thing he could.

Of course, he didn’t achieve anything as pure as sleep. The back of his shirt and trousers, initially damp, were sweated through with mud in a half hour. He began to shiver and grow stiff. He unhinged his ratty hair from under his shoulderblades. He stretched his neck side to side, opened and clenched his teeth, emitted an alto stream of curse-words. He decided to maintain his prostration until three a.m., by which time his son would feel a suitable pull of remorse. By four, his son might even begin to weep involuntarily, so he revised his target to five a.m., when his son would appear on the fire escape with stained cheeks and eyes like sallow eggs. He could almost taste the moment of due apology. Kid’s gotta learn he can’t treat me like.

An owl landed on a branch that overhung Gerry’s throat. One set of its talons gripped the twig while the other angled up to the mustard-hued beak, to push a limp mouse all the way into its gullet. Gerry gagged as the rubber tail disappeared into the heft of the bird’s face. He watched the chest palpitate and catch, and the owl’s feet shift, nervous, on the branch.

For a moment he expected the bird to keel over suffocating. Would he help it? Could he excuse this stupid owl’s gluttony? No bleeding way, he growled, if it goes, it goes. The owl steadied itself, rotating its head like an infirm grandmother, too self-pitying to pay the slightest bit of interest to the acid tongue of the human below, to say nothing of his alkaline gas emissions, which had increased as his bowels stagnated in the chill. The owl did not care for him. Still, his son was a little shit and that was hard to take. This garden might as well contain thorns and nettles.

He dozed for a while and woke with a start when he heard the owl burp and heckle and begin to retch up—in slow motion unnaturally like birth—a pellet of mouse bones and fur, which tipped past the lower beak’s tiny precipice and plummeted onto Gerry’s chest. Ick, he coughed, get it fucking off me, and leapt forward to assume a frantic squat. The movement had shifted the wet cloth on his back and he grimaced, freezing now. The cold had always made him seize up and want to puke, had made him want his mother. This thought gradually took hold of him: How I miss her, I miss her like Swedish tea cakes, like my infancy, I miss her with my knees and eardrums. He sat back on his buttocks and squeezed his childlike upper arms. He would go into the apartment and leave his mother an affectionate message on the telephone reply service so when she awoke she would catch herself worrying about why her put-upon son was up making phone calls at 3:56 a.m. She would call immediately, not caring about the charge. "How are you, dear?" she would say in authentic concern, then quickly, before Gerry could respond, she would say, "And how is Jesus, I miss that boy so, tell me what he is up to, would you?"

Gerry was the sort of scientific personality who loved every additive fertilizer, every gadget for shaping beds into geometric segments. He loved shoving blocks of concrete down between areas of soil, of minimizing flow. He’d had the vasectomy at age 43 like Jesus’s mother instructed. He’d all but stopped looking at love-objects. All he had was the kid and the kid was tripe. He considered saying it on the phone then. Why protect her? Didn’t his workhorse life deserve some sympathy?

He looked at the somnabulant owl and into the cold air hooted, "Wait till you see this." Given the owl’s digestive lubricants and effective compressions, the hundred teensy bones were masticated against the mashed fur into a hairy tablet that resembled a macro-vitamin for the steroid-ambivalent. Half-laughing, he extended his tongue to a gargoyle extravagance and popped the pellet whole into his throat.

The thing didn’t come up, however, or go down.

Soon, Gerry’s eyes engorged and starred over. His hands shuddered around the gooseflesh of his lower chin and waved emphatically. He felt under arrest for a misdemeanour, deeply misapprehended. He could not breathe, and he could not get himself up to pound on the garden fence. One of the owl’s eyes unmasked and, as if she had heard him fussing before taking the time to see his comical gesticulations, gazed impassively at the imposter below. What a silly, silly man, she pronounced, many dozen-fold sillier than the son, who himself has set some kind of record for the species.

She seemed, then, to inflate her wingspan, and lifted from the branch in an arc of gracefulness inverse to the man’s balletic fall. His neck snapped earthward, the back of his head hitting the soil first, his middle vertebrae like small rocks into grey water splashing down in sequence. His elbows and wrists and knuckles flopped out in a rippling skip toward a silver line of land. The sun was starting to rise, and the boy, bastard he’d become, snored deeper than the worms.

You don’t just have a vision and die. You lie in the mud and all sorts of divine resuscitations occur. Of memory, chiefly. Gerry started to see the kid, in his frilly white underthings, when his mom preferred to think of him girlishly, thinking it would keep him tender in a patriarchal world. He’d told her in no uncertain terms that she was dreaming.

"If you have a lot of money, shove it into a slot machine. Move it somewhere out of view. Imagine its new shape. Murder, I say murder the orthodoxy you grew up with, just correct your focus. Then stop telling me you’re helpless. I knew you would blow it. Knew you couldn’t really handle the picture of a future tense. That you were a slate the world would scribble on. I knew that, from the beginning."

At this point, the bitch’s complaining tirade was a foreground fury set alongside the complacent backdrop image of Jesus’s adorable fist curling around a baton. She shut up, and as if the next item on a symphony programme, the boy finished his listening and threw the red and yellow wand-like rattle across the rug. His fingers shuddered and twitched. To salvage himself, he swivelled his wrist toward his jaw and aimed to park the thumb between his wet gums. In the main he succeeded; only two of the digits were raked backwards, scratching an Xs-and-Os scaffold on his nub of a chin.

From there the ensuing tantrum could be depicted as a misinterpretation. He might not be as frightening as all that. It might be a problem of the era as much as anything. Even fifteen years in the future a child of his temperament would be allowed to barrel about in a room of bright balls while his parents drank milky coffee out of thermal-sleeved cups. Perhaps he would be a psychological subject of illimitable urges, each worthy of consideration from a variety of angles. Maybe the rattle hurtling across the rug would be applauded.

Like Gerry always said, the kid took after his mother in his indulgence of too-blunt soothsaying. Usually about his father’s too-apparent wrongs and rights, about the inadequate height of his spine on a good day or the slump of it on a low one. The boy might have been naturally clever and penetrating but he was never completely sweet. For years Gerry had silently watched his own dad have all kinds of shitty days. If he’d opened his mouth he would have got whacked, or a swift boot in the ribcage, period.

Jesus did have his moments, too, though, when Gerry saw him assume a glow of goodness and mercy. He once slobbered on his ear and then smiled, and Gerry felt for an extended lunch break that perhaps they would be the kind of father-and-son team that changed the terrible rift between the sexes. He thought it, and then the kid said to him, "I know what you’re thinking." Gerry allowed himself to grin right into his cornea, and Jesus winked slowly, "You are thinking that I will make more money than you. Don’t worry Dad, I will always keep you in smokes." Just what the hellhound would have said. He seemed to be her ghost, on some days, so Gerry would head for the basement, and take care of it all, and let the wings of a large fluttering creature flap in his ears until the baying lost its edge. He would love the kid even if it buried him.