At Least They're Committed

Kicked the shit out of me. Didn’t know any better. That’s how it was. And, oh, those cloven hooves cut deep and, man, do they scar.

I knew they were going to fire him because he was Wickan. Firing him was an act of discrimination and illegal and of course and they were aware of that. Still, I was instructed by the messianic publisher and editor to document every little thing he did wrong because they wanted to get rid of him because he wasn’t a Christian. Yeah, I already was trying to get the hell out of there. I’d long known these ‘good Christians’ had obviously forgotten the ol’ ‘Judge not lest you be judged’ passage in the Bible.

I was thinking of this as I was cleaning my room just now. Maybe the ‘cleansing’ was a metaphor for my state of mind, or vice versa. Purging. Anyway, Malcolm Brenner was one of my reporters at the Daily Times. He was off-beat and pagan and when they found out the latter they wanted him gone, period. ( “As good Christians, aren’t we supposed to bring the sheep back into the fold?” “Some people aren’t worth saving,” Messianic Man No. 2 replied.) I never wanted to be city editor in the first place. I prefer to be part of a team, not some dictatorial, power-starved, egotistical leader. They made me. They eliminated my writing position, they wanted me close to them.

I never clean my room. I mean, I pick up and dust something off once in awhile and vacuum every other week or so, but domestic I’m not.

Firing Malcolm, documenting every little thing, was stupid so I countered by bearing down him hard, becoming more rigid and demanding, trying to bring his rogue behavior in line with what was desired of a ‘Good Christian’ reporter . . . I wanted to make sure he gave them no reason to let him go, to abandoned his eccentricities and exceed all professional expectations.

My finger tips have no feeling, at least my index fingers. While I was wiping down the dresser, I looked at Micah sitting so patiently next to Katy — my sweet African American Daddy’s Long Legs clad in turn-of-the-20th-century doll clothes — only his arm was twisted behind her in an unnatural position. When I pulled his arm up, I noticed his hand had been resting on his disembodied left foot. “Ooooh, sorry, sorry, sorry!” I’d meant to fix that months ago. AND as chance would have it, I’d run across a brand new tube of Super-Glue minutes before (too many minutes before and I’d have forgotten, of course). There’s a chunk missing from Micah’s leg, I had to put entire clots on my finger and let them dry for a minute or two before smudging the glue into the gap in effort to reunite foot with fibula. I then proceeded to do the same for Earl, the ugly old man with the gin blossom, a crown of white hair atop an otherwise bald head and grossly large hands and feet that my husband’s now-dead Aunt Bobbi had made. They’re drying now. Not fixed entirely but at least to the extent of my abilities. The glue is fused to my flesh like a tortoise shell. I wonder if my finger prints will be altered. Random, yeah, I know. But it’s also a metaphor because I like to fix things.

And I like to protect things. Which was why when my attempts to rein in Malcolm made him angry — screaming at me that I’d changed and had become a royal bitch — I was shocked and dismayed. Fine. I let them fire him. They had ME fire him. I hated it I knew it was wrong, but my feelings were hurt.

The thing I had to take into account was that Malcolm had no idea of my good intentions. All he saw was me coming down hard on him, acting out of character and rigid. Imagine you accidentally scare up a wild animal, say a white tail deer, and it’s charging toward the road and there’s a truck bearing down on it. The threat it perceived you to be is actually right in front of it and you throw yourself on the frightened beast to try to pull it from danger. Cloven hooves tear through flesh on your arms and your face; they rip deep into your chest as they kick out terrified only by you, completely unaware of the danger ahead. Sometimes you can hold on . . . sometimes they get their bodies twisted, eviscerated, disembowled and crushed beneath the truck. Either way you just got the shit kicked out of you and you’re no better for it, no hero. Necessary evils are still villains.

It’s gross what you find when you don’t really dig your room out more than once every few months or so. Amazing something so vile — such as a moldy apple (or was it an orange?) and ‘Good God! Is that cat shit?’ — can lie totally undetected (you would think you’d smell it!) for months. But maybe that doesn’t apply here.

Or maybe it does. Got scraped a little last week. Not so bad as Malcolm: just a slice or two . . . maybe like a healthy debate if it didn’t turn out that we suck reeeaal bad at arguing with each other which is freakin’ hilarious or maybe a little sad. I don’t even know if his feelings are going to be hurt when it all comes down. Maybe not, maybe he’ll shrug and maybe he’s just naive enough not to notice, but I’m protective of the things I care about and once again I know something he doesn’t and it won’t matter but either way I was trying to warn him without saying so. He perceives it as me being bitchy and no matter what he’ll never know any different.

But I guess the important thing is that my room is clean and now maybe so is my conscience. Hahahahahaha! Yeah, right.