Murder Me Before I Become Something, Appalachia
By Giancarlo DiTrapano
Every human heart has the lesion. And in every neighborhood, in every town, just inside the chests of the men of the town, there are hundreds of human hearts. Besides heart, a good neighborhood man also has eyes and hands, and a man’s hands do terrible things to his life and body as his eyes watch, looking down on them, or out at them, shaking their heads No and Don’t. Hands are the beginning of everything, both the stars and the creatures that look up at them through the night from the edge of the woods. My hands are cupped with corked hearts and I’m not yet ready to change anything about that at all. The hearts I’m cupping are covered with lesions. You can’t even tell they’re hearts. I flip them over and inspect them. I run the tip of my finger over the ridges that run down the lesions. I lift the hearts up to where you can almost taste them.
The smell of the skin on my arm after a swim is the same smell I will make when I die. Saint Peter will take a moral nosing of me and, since I am not swine, he will belt out a jovial Entra, figlio! Women (more of Heaven than men are) are fragrant in a sweetened way. I can smell them in the winter, on the coldest streets and in the bulliest of winds. Men, however, smell more on the inside. Honest ones give off a scent of gasoline and onions, and it’s muggy and it stings my eyes. The long unbathed, like priests, add the scent of things behind. For priests smell terrible. God, they smell like shit. They smell like bears. But Give me of the priests, is what I always say. They remind me of black bears and I desire them because they make my greater decisions for me, like Should I ruin my life this way or that way? Should I cut my throat or cut my cock off? In childhood, a 50ish one revealed the bulge of the Lord before my eyes. A hotheaded fireplug, his duty was to teach us to not drown and to do it speedily. He often spat on the tiles, smile at what he’d done on the floor, then look up and smile at no one. Then smile at me. Pacing the indoor Olympic where we kicked and splashed, he screamed at us to not drown faster and I’d count an echo of four from the high blue tile walls. I was half my age now, and I am not at all old enough now for that to be old at all.
I was the fastest of all the River School’s swimming boys. We were coached by the General and trained in the wide Kanawha River that ran right behind the school. Through the yard and pass the benches and down the bank and there you are. Even in winter we swam at dawn, and even in winter the river ran. When it’s frozen white the river still runs, albeit a bit chuggingly. I made it a habit to daydream of my drowning while swimming those winter mornings. I am in shock, a small freezing boy with his lips a violet wound and dying eyes. My arms grow tired and knot up as the Kanawha’s current strengthens, pulling down on me from under all the winter’s water. The river’s water has ice hands and they go all over my neck and chest. In my dream the small red light on the stern of the General’s boat that guided us swimmers in the dawn, I watch it thin into a tall crack in the wool resting on the river, and then I watch it disappear completely. I swim numb up to a thick sliver, surrendering, and quarter-heartedly save my own life with the loosened shelf of river ice. I cling to it and pray. Drag me, currently and deep down, River. Twist my young throat. Pop my neck while pulling me, great creek of flowing Charleston piss, South Charleston piss. Wedge my legs up to my hips in the dead catfish and the riverbed’s litter sludge. Murder me before I become something, Appalachia.
The General always changed back and forth between the dressings of a priest and a bearsuit. I was always getting school and church switched around myself. The possible priest in me made me think about the impossible priest in him. He showed me how loss was not great and how one’s wishes don’t appear just by reciting them and then asking of others to hold them up. But I already knew that. I had always known that. Me and him’d be in church the time of day when it floods with that scarlet light coming through the stained glass. A shaft of that light touched the golden object in the General’s hands and appeared fractured as quivering tears of red wine on its surface. My face was still wet from before and he ran the back of his knuckle up my cheek to catch some. He then walked me out of the church, down the church steps, and out to the curb to the traffic. Clouds had come into the valley. Rain was falling on the church, noiselessly. Wait here, he said, and went up the stairs of the church and back inside. I heard the bolt on the tall wooden door shut, and I heard it checked twice. It was an hour before I finally started walking home.
Earlier he had asked of me my face in the back of the church. I knelt and closed my eyes and when it hit it was cold on my cheek. A thin spray of trickling buckshot. The swinging font spilled holy water down its wing, and what I’d expected to be shown made no appearance at all. I was glad and disappointed by this. It must have been sleeping and unattended to; lifeless and small. It’s eye closed, holy, as if it were praying.
After my minutes in the Kanawha, before first period, I was putting on my uniform of dark blue corduroy and oxford in the corner of the locker room. I was hopping on one leg, batting my head with the butt of my hand to get the water out of my left ear. Then I was drying off my calves and shins, careful to not get my socks wet. Having wet socks has always made me feel poor. I tried to tiptoe around the puddles in the broken floor tiles but it never did much good. The other boys, more comfortable boys, were dressing two stacks of lockers over from me. The lockers of the room were freshly painted red and were numbered at the top in gold. I undressed on the less illuminated side where the overhead lamps were burned out, cooked, and had burns like gunpowder burns cooked into the white paint. I was still trying to exit the water from my ear when I heard the General on the other side with the other boys. I was drying my calves and shins again when a boundary was compromised. A paw came between me. It lifted me, and then it lowered me. I was taken up once more by it before again being dropped. I thought of mirrors in the center of carousels showing me how my up-and-downing was looking. I was stuck on a bucking fence, a half-dry child with water in his ear standing on a cold Monday morning’s tiles. Wearing one wet sock I was being smothered by drools and groanings. You could see my face bone through my face as I shined being shown the b-side of youth in the bobbings of an old bald head. Looking back on looking down at him, he had plans of digesting me. There was huffing in the air. The odors came in tastes like diet cola, menthol cigarettes, and the smell of piss, all joined together in the drying spit on his palm when he used his hand as a mask for me so I wouldn’t look down at him as he ate. I was up on one leg and my shoulder blade was being pinched by the hinge of locker #98. He opened me to face locker number 99 and I was eye to eye with that golden number. When I close my eyes now I see it. Number 99 in gold. The sparkle of the number was an inch from the iris of my eye. The tip of it was an inch away as well. The sparkle opened on me three times. I felt something inside the General, something in the room, unfasten. The General’s body eased as he set me down and emptied himself of that which smelled first of cinnamon, then ashes. Done, he walked out from the lockers, looked back, and his eyes said to my eyes, Now your eyes are really dead. Later at home, right after I did not tell my weeping mother what had happened, I went upstairs to my room and finally never got that old water out of my ear. It is still there. When I shake my head No and Don’t, I hear its rumble.
The terrible things a human heart can do. It is what the lesion is there for. But it is also what the lesion is from. Instead of all this, I thought of putting down the word “hands” or the word “cathedrals” a thousand times, one after the other. But that would have been a terrible mistake.
*A different version of this story appeared in NO COLONY issue 1
<< ISSUE #1
Every human heart has the lesion. And in every neighborhood, in every town, just inside the chests of the men of the town, there are hundreds of human hearts. Besides heart, a good neighborhood man also has eyes and hands, and a man’s hands do terrible things to his life and body as his eyes watch, looking down on them, or out at them, shaking their heads No and Don’t. Hands are the beginning of everything, both the stars and the creatures that look up at them through the night from the edge of the woods. My hands are cupped with corked hearts and I’m not yet ready to change anything about that at all. The hearts I’m cupping are covered with lesions. You can’t even tell they’re hearts. I flip them over and inspect them. I run the tip of my finger over the ridges that run down the lesions. I lift the hearts up to where you can almost taste them.
The smell of the skin on my arm after a swim is the same smell I will make when I die. Saint Peter will take a moral nosing of me and, since I am not swine, he will belt out a jovial Entra, figlio! Women (more of Heaven than men are) are fragrant in a sweetened way. I can smell them in the winter, on the coldest streets and in the bulliest of winds. Men, however, smell more on the inside. Honest ones give off a scent of gasoline and onions, and it’s muggy and it stings my eyes. The long unbathed, like priests, add the scent of things behind. For priests smell terrible. God, they smell like shit. They smell like bears. But Give me of the priests, is what I always say. They remind me of black bears and I desire them because they make my greater decisions for me, like Should I ruin my life this way or that way? Should I cut my throat or cut my cock off? In childhood, a 50ish one revealed the bulge of the Lord before my eyes. A hotheaded fireplug, his duty was to teach us to not drown and to do it speedily. He often spat on the tiles, smile at what he’d done on the floor, then look up and smile at no one. Then smile at me. Pacing the indoor Olympic where we kicked and splashed, he screamed at us to not drown faster and I’d count an echo of four from the high blue tile walls. I was half my age now, and I am not at all old enough now for that to be old at all.
I was the fastest of all the River School’s swimming boys. We were coached by the General and trained in the wide Kanawha River that ran right behind the school. Through the yard and pass the benches and down the bank and there you are. Even in winter we swam at dawn, and even in winter the river ran. When it’s frozen white the river still runs, albeit a bit chuggingly. I made it a habit to daydream of my drowning while swimming those winter mornings. I am in shock, a small freezing boy with his lips a violet wound and dying eyes. My arms grow tired and knot up as the Kanawha’s current strengthens, pulling down on me from under all the winter’s water. The river’s water has ice hands and they go all over my neck and chest. In my dream the small red light on the stern of the General’s boat that guided us swimmers in the dawn, I watch it thin into a tall crack in the wool resting on the river, and then I watch it disappear completely. I swim numb up to a thick sliver, surrendering, and quarter-heartedly save my own life with the loosened shelf of river ice. I cling to it and pray. Drag me, currently and deep down, River. Twist my young throat. Pop my neck while pulling me, great creek of flowing Charleston piss, South Charleston piss. Wedge my legs up to my hips in the dead catfish and the riverbed’s litter sludge. Murder me before I become something, Appalachia.
The General always changed back and forth between the dressings of a priest and a bearsuit. I was always getting school and church switched around myself. The possible priest in me made me think about the impossible priest in him. He showed me how loss was not great and how one’s wishes don’t appear just by reciting them and then asking of others to hold them up. But I already knew that. I had always known that. Me and him’d be in church the time of day when it floods with that scarlet light coming through the stained glass. A shaft of that light touched the golden object in the General’s hands and appeared fractured as quivering tears of red wine on its surface. My face was still wet from before and he ran the back of his knuckle up my cheek to catch some. He then walked me out of the church, down the church steps, and out to the curb to the traffic. Clouds had come into the valley. Rain was falling on the church, noiselessly. Wait here, he said, and went up the stairs of the church and back inside. I heard the bolt on the tall wooden door shut, and I heard it checked twice. It was an hour before I finally started walking home.
Earlier he had asked of me my face in the back of the church. I knelt and closed my eyes and when it hit it was cold on my cheek. A thin spray of trickling buckshot. The swinging font spilled holy water down its wing, and what I’d expected to be shown made no appearance at all. I was glad and disappointed by this. It must have been sleeping and unattended to; lifeless and small. It’s eye closed, holy, as if it were praying.
After my minutes in the Kanawha, before first period, I was putting on my uniform of dark blue corduroy and oxford in the corner of the locker room. I was hopping on one leg, batting my head with the butt of my hand to get the water out of my left ear. Then I was drying off my calves and shins, careful to not get my socks wet. Having wet socks has always made me feel poor. I tried to tiptoe around the puddles in the broken floor tiles but it never did much good. The other boys, more comfortable boys, were dressing two stacks of lockers over from me. The lockers of the room were freshly painted red and were numbered at the top in gold. I undressed on the less illuminated side where the overhead lamps were burned out, cooked, and had burns like gunpowder burns cooked into the white paint. I was still trying to exit the water from my ear when I heard the General on the other side with the other boys. I was drying my calves and shins again when a boundary was compromised. A paw came between me. It lifted me, and then it lowered me. I was taken up once more by it before again being dropped. I thought of mirrors in the center of carousels showing me how my up-and-downing was looking. I was stuck on a bucking fence, a half-dry child with water in his ear standing on a cold Monday morning’s tiles. Wearing one wet sock I was being smothered by drools and groanings. You could see my face bone through my face as I shined being shown the b-side of youth in the bobbings of an old bald head. Looking back on looking down at him, he had plans of digesting me. There was huffing in the air. The odors came in tastes like diet cola, menthol cigarettes, and the smell of piss, all joined together in the drying spit on his palm when he used his hand as a mask for me so I wouldn’t look down at him as he ate. I was up on one leg and my shoulder blade was being pinched by the hinge of locker #98. He opened me to face locker number 99 and I was eye to eye with that golden number. When I close my eyes now I see it. Number 99 in gold. The sparkle of the number was an inch from the iris of my eye. The tip of it was an inch away as well. The sparkle opened on me three times. I felt something inside the General, something in the room, unfasten. The General’s body eased as he set me down and emptied himself of that which smelled first of cinnamon, then ashes. Done, he walked out from the lockers, looked back, and his eyes said to my eyes, Now your eyes are really dead. Later at home, right after I did not tell my weeping mother what had happened, I went upstairs to my room and finally never got that old water out of my ear. It is still there. When I shake my head No and Don’t, I hear its rumble.
The terrible things a human heart can do. It is what the lesion is there for. But it is also what the lesion is from. Instead of all this, I thought of putting down the word “hands” or the word “cathedrals” a thousand times, one after the other. But that would have been a terrible mistake.
*A different version of this story appeared in NO COLONY issue 1
<< ISSUE #1
