the Lunatics

"Why does this winter feel colder than all the others?" My mother wondered, sinking down into the chair with her back pressed against the window. The window that leaked cold air into the house in a frigid square, that she wouldn't fix, that she was continually drawn to like an insect to a porch light, that she sometimes left open in the dead of winter. She had her arms crossed over her bony chest, holding each elbow with the opposite hand.

"Maybe it's because it's your husband shot himself in the mouth" said Aunt Bella, making a gun from her hand and pointing it towards her face. As if we needed clarification.

It's a quiet way to go. After the initial blow, obviously. But a shot is a shot, we heard them all the time. Usually it's the hunters in the woods or somebody's ill-fated dog bearing the brunt of somebody else's bad day, or my mother in the yard shooting at the roosters to make them run. This time it was dad in the kitchen, right out of a shower, his hair greased, wearing starched pants and his nicest shirt, the color of a lemon, buttoned down and tucked in. Thought he'd save us the trouble of preparing him but he hadn't anticipated the blood. How can you plan to shoot yourself and not be thinking about the blood, that's what I wondered. I had a cousin leap from a bridge and he didn't leave us with anything to clean up at all, now, that's being thoughtful.
I think if you're going to go early, slip out the back door and take your hat with you.

My mother was nodding faintly. Then she snapped her head up and looked at us, my aunt and I, and then towards the kitchen. "Isabelle?" She asks, her voice tugging at the last strains of her sister's name, so it comes out like a whine, an insipid question. "Could you make us some dinner this evening? I just don't think I have the energy."
"Oh to Jesus!" My aunt heaved herself up from the couch and shuffled towards the kitchen, a gigantic marionette on sagging strings. "You had your week Eleanor, you can't just keep this up." She spoke with her head inside the freezer. "What happened to the pasta the the Guillinis left you?"
"We already ate it."
"Oh, to Jesus!"

***

That was the year that summer never happened. The snow melted but the grass strained to grow. The apple trees went directly to fruit- hard ugly knots that turned brown and fell to the ground. Birds fell right out of the sky. They pirouetted down, and lay in a daze for half a day before shakily standing up, stabbing at the ground with their feet trying to get their land legs. Lightning waned in the sky for days and my mother refused to sleep, convinced that it was her dreaming causing the storms.

It was the Unseason. And that's when I met the first lunatic, went running into him with the sort of frenzy that takes over when you're running fast down a steep hill and you lose control, your arms windmill and your knees give out, and whatever heavenly body you slam into next is going to take in the full force of you, all at once.

But remember the roosters shrieking as my mother took aim, cold air pouring in through a closed window, the shot gun blast directed towards my father's tonsils, the back of his throat landing on the opposite wall, the ubiquetous lightning. Bear in mind that I wasn't just running full force into the first Lunatic, I was also running away from all of that and the dogs and the grass that refused to live.