Livy again again

I never left though. I didn’t. She did.
She didn’t.
Her mum took her out of the state first, then out further west to the great lakes where they made cheese and stuffed meat into animal casings, then out to the Rockies, and then they ended up on an island in the middle of the Pacific where snakes ate chickens and sometimes even Boonie Dogs.
I never left. I stayed. In the same flat even. I stagnated. I stopped everything that had legs. That moved. I drank. I woke up on bathroom floors with blankets upon me, dry vomit at the corners of my lips. Once, they even wedged a pillow in between the tile and the base of the toilet so I could be comfortable.
I had no right. That’s who I was. And I had no right.
—Livy?
Dad.
–Livy.
Why didn’t you send letters. Dad, why didn’t you at least send letters?
I don’t know. Because I thought she wouldn’t get them. Because I made horrible decisions in the years after.
—Because you drank, dad.
If enough people feel sorry for you, you start to believe it yourself. You start.
To believe it yourself.
—Where are you working now? Livy. Can I come see you. Livy?
On the street, downstairs, they have a bank of these old public telephones with rotary dials. The coin drops after your time is up, and if you still want to talk, some operator lady voice comes on and tells you how much more you have to add to continue.

the old ceremony

jesus what a big fuss they made over this man who was lying dead shrivelling on a table in the middle of the musty parlour. they had stacked make-up on his face which made him look like a foreshortened monarch or an ogre from a Grimm Brothers’ faerie tale. they let the mourners in and immediately two women dressed in black collapsed on the body wailing and weeping and beating with their fists on their own temples.
jesus what a shit of an embarassing spectacle.
when i go i want you to bury me in a goddamn ditch on the outskirts of the city and be done with it, Marian said. i don’t care what happens to me. i don’t want any of this.
the women were wailing but eyeing the wine table and moving around the body in their grief closer to the booze and the food.
goddamn moochers, Marian said.
and he went outside and lit a cigarette.
and what do you want on your epitaph i said.
he spat into the dusty road and covered it up with his boot.
he said.
someone ought to tie fishing gut to one of his wrists and play a fucking practical joke on these mystical grieving zombies. i ever tell you how me and Cezar did that once at a viewing? scared the shit out of the believers when we raised the lady’s arm out of the coffin.
he spat again. and laughed. and took a long drag of the Kent, burning it down by a third.
this is shit. all of it. everyone dies like everyone else has ever died. and then they’re dead.
Marian was the son of a peasant tractor driver who was assigned to a salt mine when he tried forming a union in the village of Buhusi. Marian spoke english and drank Johnnie Walker stolen from foreigners and tourists who brought the booze in order to bribe border officials and other bureaucrats ensconced into the fabric of the country.
fucking bedbugs, all of them, he said.
i didn’t know how to answer that.
let’s go back inside. they have feta and tomatoes and bread and sarmale, he said. let’s get it overwith.
the body lying in state was his father’s. they had found the tractor driver face down on an embankment by the train tracks. his feet and hands had been cut off.