| ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM |
| ***BIO*** George Sparling: George’s work has been published in many literary magazines including Tears in the Fence, Lynx Eye, Snake Nation Review, Hunger, Red Rock Review, Rattle, and Chiron Review, and on the sites Paumanok Review, Slow Trains, Prose Toad, nthposition, Pittsburgh Quarterly and Word Riot. Previous jobs include welfare caseworker in East Harlem, counsellor in the Baltimore City jail, lumber yard laborer, and crab butcher. He has scuba dived for placer gold in the remote, northern wilderness of California for a year. It's no cliche: one can go mad living in isolation too long. He has spent most of his working life in bookstores. |
| The Blamer |
| by George Sparling |
| The intruder sat in my favorite chair, grinning, scratching his crotch. I walked closer,
pissed that I couldn’t flop into the chair, sickened yet drawn to his peculiar stench. I bent down, smelling garden flowers, urine, beer and dirt. He never moved as I sniffed him. His mouth opened wider as he laughed quietly at first, then boomed a yawp through my house. Fear never edged through me as it had every day of my life. In fact, I was relieved, knowing he’d finally arrived to snatch me from my cartoon balloon of grief, those filthy squiggles above my white hair. In fairy tales, all those stepmothers, causing trouble for unrelated broods they are responsible for when their husband’s away---are they really so awful and conniving? I speak truth always, too frightened of lies, how they eat your reptilian core until you’re no longer human. She slung those big legs around my thighs too many times to count while Dad jetted around the world on business trips. One night he found her on top of me as I squealed like a pig. The annulment soon followed. “I never knew my dad until I spent reading letters you saved from mother,” he said, rubbing his shaggy mustache, looking at me with eyes the color of mine. “I guess you saw those photos, too,” I said. “Did you smell my sperm stains on them?” “No, only mine when I saw her naked,” he said. “Who took that one with you beneath her?” It was my mother, not his, getting kicks. She used to lightly graze my crotch with her hand, always the ring fingered one, as we shopped for pants. “There’s enough room,” she’d say to the sales woman. “She raped me. Anyway, stepmothers don’t count. It isn’t incest.” I wanted to put on Mahler, transcendence I badly needed. “It’s hard, living in shelters, lining up for showers, living on stamps, hitchhiking, dirty sweat from the place before, never getting clean. Gets tiring.” “I expected you sooner or later. You’re welcome to stay here.” “You wouldn’t want me. I’m a blamer,” he said, “and you know that means?” He stood up, taller than I was, stronger, too. When his brawny hands squeezed my neck, harder and harder until I’d no breath left, until he released me and I fell on the carpet, until his knife gleamed in my eye, I knew what that meant. |
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| Nov. 2009 |
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