Blind hearts-ManxMan-boyxboy

Mom oh mom!

Alex’s room was irradiated with the morning light. He woke up with a crick in his neck, and a familiar sinking feeling yawned in him as he pushed to his feet.  He had lived twenty-two years within the four walls blue and mauve.  The same rug beady underneath his bare feet. The Napoleonic soldiers pieces set in an eternal march over folding table, a few glimmering the same tinned patina, others peeling with paint of primary colors. Over in the oblong nook by the closet, the baseball bat in the same slanted position.  And now time for that daily shower.

As he slugged out of his clothes, his body resurrected those still smoldering moments with Dimov.  He just as soon killed the ungainly jaguar of the morning with a quick act and the mental note to forget him already.

Red hair sheened in mist and blanketed in the scents of musky soap and minty paste, he shuffled into the kitchen and was greeted with the one surprise of the day—occupying the space between the stove and the kitchen island, a whale in a baggy gown, well, Susan, one hand unsteady on a cane, the other shaking a cast iron pan, being hard-lipped over the business of breakfast.

Smiles fluttered over his face. “Finally, you’re making me breakfast the way it’s supposed to be.”

She bunched up her lips over the steam rising from onions browning.  Alex warned himself to watch out for the crevasses of ill feeling that her countenance augured. Susan ignored the frying pan to open the fridge, but the pallid wing of her arm trembled uneasily over the fridge door handle, dashing Alex to her aid.  With the cane hand, she swept Alex back to the perimeter of the kitchen, muttering, “Sit down, I’ll handle it.” Eh voila, the cold air wafted from the dun cocoon of the fridge.

Alex eyed the onions shading to black then the hand hard-knuckled on the grey hook of the cane, and still his nerves were quivering. “Mom, let me handle breakfast.”

“Please let me make you breakfast.” Her tone vibrated grittily over stove.

Alex pouted, but since she was nice, he could the good little boy for a little while. “Oh I forgot. I picked up your prescriptions yesterday.”

“Thanks—when did you come back last night?”

“Don’t remember. Can you believe it? I’m getting old.  I forget where I parked last night. I spent damn near an hour wandering in the dark.”

Susan took too long to open the fridge again, curdling Alex.

“Dad called me while I was looking for the car.” He waited for the grimace to wash off her face. “He wants me to walk for graduation.  Imagine he’s still mad I didn’t walk for high school graduation.”

The crack of the eggs coincided with a slimy feeling that he may have been too enthusiastic about David’s phone call. Then the whisking of the eggs, languid and roiling, he wanted to snatch the steel bowl from her.

“Well,” he prepared his reserve, “are you up for me doing this whole graduation she-bang?”

“That’s between you and your father, dear.”  The last word came as afterword.

“Come on, Mom. This is last great ritual of childhood, a coda to my twenty-two years of school, a celebration to your loving and patient care…”Her eyes scaled up to meet his, quizzically. “Mom…”

“Will see if I’m up to it.”  She turned, almost yawing too far too one side as she tried to open a drawer.  “You and Frank painted the town red last night?”

It was sounded like an attack more than a nosy inquiry. Alex learned early on never to lie about these things. Secrecy manufactured her twittering machines of questions.