“The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
It’s the 4th of July today and everyone is home. Off. Free. Loose. Unchained. It’s summer theater around here at this time of the year. I’m writing this at the kitchen table/ knowing full well there will be interruptions. Noise is imminent: high-pitched voices and galloping horses on the stairs: loud TV: doors slamming shut as the kids come and go as they please: short intervals of outside reality between long stretches in a dank YouTube cave.
As of right now though: at 10:19 am EST, there is very little action. Charlie, 9, is on the couch watching something at a low volume. He is wearing winter pj bottoms and no shirt. His hair is moppy messy indie cool without trying. It covers his eyes but he seems to see fine.
Now Arle just walked into the kitchen. She’s wearing tie-dyed shorts and a black Dover Nascar shirt. Pink lettering. All of her red hair is up in a messy bun and she grabbed a bottle of kombucha, poured herself a small glass and went back upstairs. It’s the Walmart brand of kombucha because the locals that make it around here charge a lot. I don’t know why. I guess that if you take that dive/ that scary uncertain leap into the dark abyss that is dealing kombucha/ you are a certain kind of person. You want some good money but you don’t want to come across like that. Kombucha allows you to play those alternating angles at the same time. You can come across as very ‘wellness’ and ‘lifestyle’/ which also can lead to ‘kindness’ and even ‘inclusion’ branding possibilities/ but you also are tempted, beyond all human control, to charge large amounts of money for the actual product. Because the consumers are typically honkeys with loot. Or honkeys who want to experience what it’s like to be a honkey with loot even if they don’t have much money themselves.
So, anyways, Arle came in silent and went back upstairs with her kombucha for the masses. I don’t know where she falls in all of this. Definitely not a local well-off person. More like a local poor-ass motherfucker who wants to live the ‘happy gut/happy butt’ life or whatever they call it.
I think she’s also upset with me because I was in a shit mood yesterday. I hollered at the kids for dirty dishes and un-rinsed tuna cans in the recycling. I yelled at a kid to towel off outside after they were flopping around back in the crick. I got short with kids about leaving the goddamn AC on in their room with the door wide open.
Maybe it was one thing and maybe it was a combo.
Full moon.
Hungover.
Tired of working, tired of the game.
Same old shit, hoss.
I’ll never understand most of what I live through.
I’m still slinging the same old horse shit as before.
There is a fly buzzing around here, landing on my leg, fucking with me for no apparent reason. I think more flies have shown up since a few days ago I brought home a frog that died at work in my hand. I must have hit it with the weed whacker/ took one arm clean off. He was still breathing when I spotted him in the grass and I tried to tell myself that he must have just gotten dropped by a hawk or an eagle but I didn’t see anything like that sitting in the treetops waiting for me to fuck off so it could come back and get its lunch.
As I watched the frog dangling from my fingertips I could tell he was on his last breaths. There was just this feeling in the air. I looked at him as I was trying to figure out what I should do but I was also not doing anything. I just watched him die. Like a Civil War soldier, his arm blown off right next to me. My old friend. My old pal from back home in Pennsylvania. We used to swim in the crick out back the house and his dad would holler at us when we ran in through the back door dripping cool water gone warm.
We’d laugh and laugh, me and him. His name was Rebert (proununced REE-burt). Rebert Stoltzfus. Dutch German. His dad was a cobbler. His house smelled like lemons covered in molasses. His sister was Ginny and she was the woman I would someday marry in my mind.
I twirled the frog a little and told myself to shut up.
How do we end up where we do?
How did I end up here at the kitchen table on the 4th of July, still plugging away at this writing thing?
I press my thumbs slowly into the sockets of the past.
I hear the screams/ block them out/ feel the jelly give way.
Je nous libère de cette prison.
• • •
“Stubborn and ardent clinging to one’s opinion is the best proof of stupidity.”
— Michel de Montaigne
Violet is here. She goes by Blake now. THEY go by Blake now, but I still call her Violet and ‘her’ and it’s only because I’m selfish, not small-minded. She is eating some rice and a block of cheese next to me at the table with the fly bum-rushing our faces.
Hold on, since she’s here, and I will ask her a question.
“Violet, if you were weed whacking along a wall and you suddenly saw that you had hit a frog and you didn’t mean to, but it was dying… What would you feel?”
She stares at my face,
“Guilty,” she tells me.
“Yeah? Even if you knew you did it by accident?,” I ask.
She stays focused on me.
“Maybe I should have paid closer attention to where I was going,” she responds.
Now she is eating her food again and it appears as if the question I asked isn’t resonating with her. She doesn’t appear to be thinking about it even in the slightest. Should she be? Should I find out?
Hold on. I’ll ask her.
“Are you still thinking about the frog?” I say.
“Kinda,” she answers.
There’s a pause as I type this.
She’s in the ridge again.
“What are you thinking?”
She doesn’t say anything.
She’s washing dishes.
“Do you want to see it? I brought it home so that Arle could put it in a jar of flesh-eating beetles so they will leave nothing but the bones and she can use it in a piece of art. The frog bones, I mean.”
“Ummm,” she says,. “Okay. So YOU hit the frog? It’s like an actual scenario.”
Yeah, I tell her. We go look at it out back. There’s some flies but not too many. The scene is gothic, dark, jarring. The larva and the tiny beetles have made good use of the body of this little dude I killed by mistake.
Violet stares at it. She says it’s kind of gross. I say I feel bad.
We head back in the house and in the summer kitchen she stops and says something.
“You know, if humans continue to have these big machines like cars and weed whackers, things like this are bound to happen.”
I nod in agreement. It is what it is.
“It’s all just invatible,” she whispers.
I raise my eyebrows.
“I’m not saying that correctly, am I?” she asks me.
“Inevitable?,” I ask her.
“Yep,” she says. “That’s what I mean.”
Then she disappears upstairs into the house.
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• • •
Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
