As an experiment, I mentally collect all the pieces of my anger from all of its hiding places inside me and move them all to my abdomen. Treatin’ it like a home base. Now I look at it all down there, the pieces scatter, and I concentrate on them. Focus as hard as I can. They scramble for another minute or two until they form a solid band.
Whoa. It’s a pulsing red-orange glowing thing that enwraps me, but it doesn’t hurt. It feels weird, but not painful. It wants to move so badly, I’m vibrating. I nearly fly off the chair, but I clamp myself down.
I can do this.
I aim the vibrations up to the wall behind me. Up to the clock. As if on a rope and pulley, the clock smoothly disengages from the wall, slides downward, and lands itself in front of me on the table. Instinctually I start to grab it with my hands.
“No,” she says suddenly. “Put your hands down. Now.”
I do as I’m told. I’m gettin’ tired, but I go back into the anger band I’ve just made and let it do what it needs to. I watch the clock wind itself up again, and it starts ticking. It works fine. It’s the bird who’s suffered the most. I point my band toward him, pull him from the wall, and slip him back onto his spring. The spring recoils itself and screws the cuckoo back into his place. This takes a few tries, but I manage to get it in there. The last piece is his left eyeball. The tiny thing snapped off and now sits on the table, mocking me. I honestly don’t know how to fix this part without an adhesive. I can only do so much.
I hear Grammie Atti get up and start putterin’ around behind me. She opens a drawer and sets something down on a surface. Harder than necessary.
“There’s a tube a glue over here. Use it.”
I’m too tired to waste any energy bein’ annoyed so I reach around the kitchen behind me. First touchin’ a bottle a castor oil, then a tube of… paint? What is this?
“Keep movin’,” she orders.
Finally I come to it and bring it to the table in front of me. Opening it and applying it to the ceramic is tedious, but not too hard. I hold the eye to the bird’s head for a good thirty seconds or so, and when my thoughts release it, it stays in place.
I’m so relieved, I almost cry. Sometimes I try to fix somethin’ broke with my own two hands and it don’t seem to work this well. To finish, I glide it gently back up the wall behind me where it’s lived for as long as I can remember. Once it snaps back into place, the deformed cuckoo instantly pops out to announce that it’s now five o’clock.
“What about my wall?” She walks by me and indicates the small hole in the wall the bird created.
Dammit! Will this never end? I search the floor below the hole and gather up all the pieces of wall I can find. They’re too tiny and crumbly to glue.
This is an impossible task! But Grammie Atti won’t let me go unless I do something. I place all the pieces from the floor (including some dirt and shit that wasn’t part of the wall) and cram them into the hole so that it’s sealed, with me holding it all in place. It’s ugly, it’s temporary, but at least the wall is repaired. At this second.
“Good try, but you right. Fixin’ that hole is an impossible task. Let it go,” she says.
I exhale, and all the pieces fall outta the hole back down to the floor. The little hole is the perfect size for an enterprising mouse if she’s willing to climb up the six feet and change to get there.
I take another breath and discover that my red-orange band has faded and that I don’t feel angry anymore. I feel pretty good. Better than I did this morning. Though I’m tired as hell and not proud of how much I’m sweatin’. You’d think I just ran a marathon.
I turn to face Grammie Atti. I’m kinda proud a myself. If you don’t count the hole, the operation was a success.
“So? I did it.”
“Yeah. Good work. Now you just need to learn how to do all that in the blink of an eye instead of a goddamn hour.”
1 Mother of Emmett Till, who was murdered by a lynch mob at age 14 in 1955. Photos of his horrifically disfigured body were famously published in Ebony and Jet magazines.
10
Girlfriend
MY MONTHLY VISITOR CAME THIS morning. I woke up to dried blood on my inner thighs and stains on the sheets. My monthly visitor loves to surprise me. I call her Ambushina.
I run down the hall to the bathroom, and then I get an idea. I reach down low inside me, and for a few glorious seconds… I stop the flow. I block its path as though I’ve done it tons of times before. For a second I’m drunk off the power, but it’s exhausting and I have to let it go.
However… I get another idea. What if I could expel five days worth of bleedin’ right now? I try it, and I start to fill the toilet, but as soon as I do, I feel really, really sick. I slow down the flow to its normal speed, but I collapse on the floor, too weak to pick myself up.
Why did I do that? I close my eyes and count to calm down, ease my breathin’, and keep myself from vomiting. I hear the door open and close, and I sit up so fast, I hit my head on the bottom of the sink.
“Ow!”
Mama starts
