THE CATS AT THE END OF THE CORRIDOR

The automobile idles under her organs. It is parked in a gravel lot halfway back from the beach. This car is white. It was purchased for her by her younger brother, whose name we’re not permitted to hear. Our odds of ever getting to know him aren’t looking good. This white automobile was empty when it was purchased. She was not in it. Her brother, who might as well have no name, bought it for her seventy-fifth birthday.

He also pays adolescent men to choke him as he masturbates, though she is entirely unaware of this, much as we’re entirely unaware of his name. We only know that he is younger than seventy-five, he is her brother, he buys automobiles as birthday surprises, and he has larger problems than an unsubstantiated first name.

The seventy-five year old woman hasn’t bothered to bathe for two months, one week, four days. Anyone within sight of her comprehends this. Perhaps they won’t realize that it’s been two months, one week, four days on the dot since she’s bathed, but their approximations as to the tenure of her unseemliness will be strikingly accurate.

When she drinks too much cognac, she retrieves her collection of photographs, as to lick each one up and then down, on her own private quest for sweat. Her favorite one to tongue is the shot of a youthful Rudolph Valentino, one arm held over his head as if he’s trying to get someone’s attention, as if he’s calling for help. She imagines her mouth pregnant with him, his semen rolling off her double-chin.

In this way she keeps hold of herself, chases away the places where all good things lay down and heave themselves dry.

* * *

If you were to enter the seventy-five year old woman’s apartment and study her kitchen, you would grasp that years do not float on her dishwater. That the glasses and bowls mold over in the sink, in the hue of a meadow. Her dwelling has yellow walls due to the cigarettes she has come to smoke. Your eyes would catch the significant white gaps upon these walls where paintings and photos had once hung.

She has eight cats, two of them knocked-up and meowing incessantly. The nine-year-old boy who lives down the hall from her secretly plays with paper dolls after Sunday school. On one occasion he tried to kiss his best friend, Cliff, and wore a black-eye for one week, three days, seventeen hours as punishment. He is lonely without Cliff, as we are all lonesome throughout childhood. That desolate space where we grow tiny seething whirlpools from despondency, we craft storm-fronts and galaxies in each puddle observed.

His mother prepares meatloaf in their kitchen, attempting to block out the eternal whining call from the cats at the end of the corridor. She has registered a series of complaints with the Housing Committee, petitioning them to evict the seventy-five year old woman in Apartment 41C. All to no avail. This woman’s husband left her and the boy in order to fuck a girl he’d met on the internet in a Dog Lovers chat-room. He likes having his penis bit during oral sex, sometimes until he goes completely limp from the pain associated with such a traditionally horrendous act. He is as good as gone.

We’re allowed to know the boy’s mother’s name. It is Irene.

Irene hasn’t ever had anal sex because she believes that it spreads disease. For the most part she’s correct. Disease was also the main argument against her husband’s desire to have a dog. She believes that her refusal of said house pet was the sole reason behind her husband’s departure. She is incorrect. She is frigid. She knows her son is gay, but is convinced that this will change if she offers him pornographic magazines. She is also incorrect on this count.

The seventy-five year old woman in Apartment 41C is named Terrie-Anne. She has never liked the freckles on her face, chest, and stomach. She’s always been displeased with the size of her breasts, which are large to the point of hilarity. These biases against her own structure eventually lead her to breast-feed only two of her three children. The third child, whose name we’re also not permitted to know, was fed formula in place of his mother’s milk. This child was set upon by a milk truck when he was seven years old and Terrie-Anne charges his death on her decision to pull him away from her body, to keep him at arm’s length due to her own inoperable and echoed anxiety.

All of these people are falling in two, slipping in mud as they hold onto their confusions with religious deliberation and fervor.

It’s sad, really.

* * *

soft rock music pours out of the bar’s door as one patron exits and another enters, a nightly drinker here named Gunther who has the habit of calling me Gubba though I’ve never been positive if Gunther is his first or last name and my interest in learning any more about him don’t really exist, but here we sit Gunther and Gubba, the both of us with names of no accord or origin and I’ve assumed he gave me this nickname due to my body which lays in heavy expanses of flesh that compromise my mobility and also in turn compromise my stomach and torso and if I’m thirsty Gunther offers to buy me a beer which comes lukewarm out of the tap and well on its way to going bad. He knows I only need two beers maybe three and I’m fall-down grade-school wasted and I feel so sorry for myself that he starts to harass me due to what he’s told me he sees as a weakness of will, though when he said it he was quite inebriated and unaware that he was letting any cat out of any bag, which he was because he also told me he’d like for me to suck his cock – he said it in just those words – “suck my cock” – and his beard was stuck full of cigar ash and it covers quite the collection of pockmarks which lead down to his chest which is connected to the rest of his body which, as he told me what he’d liked to do, was sitting angrily on a barstool, his head rested below a dartboard and the jukebox burping up Sam Cooke in the corner as I tell him “Okay. I'll suck it. Just this one time.”

* * *

It has been three months, zero weeks, three days since she last bathed.

Terrie-Anne is shopping for cabbage and turnip, for almonds and prune juice. Her cart is full of bland, honest food. She purchases a copy of People magazine and the local newspaper. She tells the girl behind the check-out counter that her granddaughter is in the paper for being on the honor roll. The clerk, this skinny pimpled girl about sixteen, ignores her and thinks about what it would feel like to go down on her stepfather, a man named Randy. That’s the only time Randy’s is mentioned in any of this. Terrie-Anne’s brother’s name will not be mentioned. There are certain things we’re simply not fit to hear, so we’ll just have to close our eyes tight enough they break in order to learn our way around.

She stares through the girl. The girl is looking back. Terrie-Anne wasn’t telling the truth, anyway. She doesn’t have any grandchildren. Not that it matters. A seventy-five year old woman knows when she is being ignored. She looks at the wall clock. It’s nearly time.

She imagines crushing the sixteen-year-old clerk’s head with a mallet. This brings a smile to her lips. “Have a nice day, sweetie,” she says.