as murray finishes
the dishes he stares
out the window out
somewhere that isn’t
specific, his gaze glazes
the tops of the cucumbers
that have been sitting on
the sill since night before
last, after geoffrey arrived
home – much later than
usual, murray scrunches
up his face as he recalls –
from his weekly run to the
food emporium (murray
twitches as he remembers
back when it was a piggly
wiggly; how his mother
would drag him there
in the middle of the
night after waking
him, one time, and
this he recalls vividly,
from what he’s pretty
sure would have been
his very first wet dream –
it was new year’s eve –
well, that would have
made it the morning of
new year’s day, he corrects
himself, for some hamhocks
to go with their own garden-
grown black-eyed peas that
she’d dug out of the flatbed
freezer just as the clock struck
twelve and the fireworks began
to erupt in the distance in pyro
maniacal celebration of some
year that must have been at
or near the mid 1970’s. he
felt completely destroyed
by being pulled out of
sleep, on that particular
morning, his mom
practically dragging
over the floor, out
the living room
door, the noise
of the broken
screen flapping
in the cold wind
as it slammed shut,
by which time she had
released her vice grip
and had already put the
key into the ignition of
the pinto station wagon
with its plasticky-peely
faux wood veneer.
suddenly he found
himself craving
hamhocks and
those mushed up
blackeyed peas
just the way his
mother’s would turn
out – as far as the
neighborhood’s
housewive’s
kitchen ingenuity
went, his mom’s
was pretty much
at the bottom of
the list. his tummy
grumbled a bit. he’d
only just eaten, which
was why he was all
yellow-gloved and
sudsy over the
kitchen sink
finishing up
the last of
the dishes,
of course.
he was still
staring out into
the nowhere that
was their backyard now
for some twenty-some-odd
years, and was suddenly struck
by the thought of how well those
cucumbers would go with geoffrey’s
clunky-plump legs. he allowed himself
to dwell on this thought for what he knew
was an inappropriate duration (as if there
was an appropriate one) before he quickly
sucked in his breath, reeling at the very
thought of such morbidity, and let out
a whispery-scratchy yuck! quiet so as
not to awaken a very loudly snoring
geoffrey who had practically sleep-
twisted himself into the innards
of their living room sofa (with
a floral print that murray had
unbudgingly insisted upon.
and then it was back to the
here and now, time for murray
to drag his man to bed, if that
could even be mustered. but
until he finally dropped into
his slumber that night,
murray had a taste
that he kept trying
to dig with his tongue
from near the very
back of the roof of
his mouth that for
the life of him he
could not shake
the idea that it
was precisely
what that of
a cucumber
and certain
chubby
hubby’s
leg dish
would be.
