An Older Story Woman Stung By Jellyfish Succumbs

This was written sometime between 2006 and 2012...

                                                                                                                                               

WOMAN STUNG BY JELLYFISH SUCCUMBS

      “Listen to this! ‘Woman Stung By Jellyfish Succumbs!’  Now isn’t that the craziest headline you’ve ever heard?  Why would they even print such rubbish!”
     “Maybe the woman was someone, you know, important or something," I reply as I continue to stack silver dollar pancakes one on top of the other using butter and syrup as mortar. “Maybe she had a rare allergy to jellyfish bites.”
     “And maybe, just maybe, nobody gives a…”
     “Peter!” Mother says, stopping my father’s runaway verbal train dead against the brick wall of her authoritative tone.  I glance up and catch “the eye” she beams my way.  It glances off my optic nerve like a boomerang as I shift my eyes toward my little brother in his booster seat across from me.  He looks startled by the residual hostility that slams into his awareness, drops his spoonful of soggy cereal with a clatter onto the formica tabletop.  His lower lip curls outward and downward in the very beginnings of a good bawl.  “Joey, pick up that spoon and eat your breakfast!” Mother snaps at him.  He jumps as though he’s been goosed by a bare electrical wire.  I feel pity for him for now he looks both stunned and confused.
     “Stow the tractor in the barn,” I tell him, stabbing a pancake with my fork and stuffing it into my mouth to demonstrate.  I chew with exaggerated viciousness, my eyes locked to his.  “Yum,” I say.
     “Don’t talk with your mouth full!” Mother scolds.
     “All I want to know is how the hell a person can die from a single jellyfish sting!” my father grumbles, rattling his newspaper irritably.
     I resume construction on my pancake tower, thinking I might actually be able to top the twenty-one pancakes I stacked when I was ten.  That was around three years ago.  Joey hadn’t even been born yet.  “Eat your breakfast!  Don’t play with your food!  You’re thirteen years old!  No wonder he doesn’t eat!  What kind of example are you setting for your brother?”
     I want to counter by shooting the last question right back at her, but before I can even open my mouth she slashes her butter knife through my sixteen-pancake tower, toppling it into the liquid remains of my scrambled eggs.  I raise my eyes, glaring at her.  Her eyes are hard as diamonds, cold and bitter.  If she was a season she would be winter.  I hate the smug self-satisfaction she wears like lipstick on her mouth.  Under the table I clench my hands into fists, deliberately digging the ragged nubs of my fingernails into my multi-perforated flesh, giving myself the bittersweet pleasure that pain can provide to the emotionally starved.
     “It’s not like you can’t see the damn things in the water,” my father continues, still hidden behind the protective shield of his paper.
     “Let it go,” my mother says darkly, then, “Jamie, you’re finished!  Leave the table!”
     I am released!  Her wrath is not focused on me this morning after all.  As I carry my plate to the sink I hear the flat smack of flesh on flesh followed by several seconds of tense silence, then the high-pitched shriek of my little brother. “What’d you go and hit him for?” my father asks, sounding merely curious rather than indignant.
     “Jellyfish,” I mutter, my voice concealed by the screech of my knife scraping my plate into the sink under the tap.  "Spineless jellyfish,” I hiss as the garbage disposal growls and grinds up my pancakes.
     “Turn that thing off!”  Mother’s voice, strident as an air raid siren, pierces the noise that fills the kitchen- Joey bawling, my father rustling his newspaper, the garbage disposal grinding and slurping.  I give the switch a pert flip then quickly leave the kitchen, going outside into the chilly November morning.
     A little while later I’m sitting on the back steps retying my shoelace when the back door slams open and Joey is shoved outdoors.  He’s saved from certain physical damage by sheer dumb luck.  His trajectory of expulsion lands him against my back so that he simply falls hard on his knees on the step behind me, his arms thrown wide, his face against my spine.  “Get up!” I say, then shudder, the echo of my mother’s voice in mine.  “Come on, you’re all right.  Quit crying.”
     But Joey’s not all right.  His little nose still leaks blood thinned with mucous.  His cheek is aflame with the imprint of Mother’s hand.  There’s blood on his lip and chin too.  I stand him on the ground in front of me, roll his lip down to assess the extent of damage.  A little tear.  Not like the time she smacked him so hard his tooth came right through the skin just beneath his lower lip.  “It hurz,” he says, sounding funny because I still have a hold of his lip. 
     “Yeah, I know, but it ain’t so bad.  It’ll heal.”  I release his lip, fumble in my coat pocket for some tissues and blot the blood and snot, tears and drool from his face.  “Shake it off, kiddo,” I advise as I look into his big brown eyes, but I can’t look for long or it gives me a real heartache.  None of that Elvis Presley heartbreak crap either.  This is the real deal.  I steer my eyes away, gaze across the littered backyard toward the barn.  The front of a rust dulled John Deere tractor pokes from the door like the nose of an old iron horse.  I have an urge to go pat that cold metal nose, but it passes quickly like most of my urges do.  I have lowered myself into the deep end of the pool of apathy.  There’s no lifeguard on duty.
     “Jellyfish,” Joey says, drooling blood and saliva.
     “Yeah, they’ve got stingers like bees,” I tell him.
     “Why?”
     Joey’s never been to the ocean, but he’s seen it on TV.  “I don’t know.  Self defense, I guess.”  He seems about to grill me by means of an endless series of ‘whys?’, so I maneuver to cut the inquisition short.  “Come on, kiddo.  Time to make ourselves scarce.”  I hate weekends.  I dread weekends.  I wish I lived far away at a very strict private school run by ogres who’d never allow me to go home on weekends and holidays.
     “Jamie!  Wait up!” Joey cries.  He’s got something wrong with his left leg, a birth deformity.  It’s a little shorter than his right leg.  He totters when he runs, his own momentum making him sway dangerously side to side like a bowling pin kissed hard by the ball.  “You go too fast!” he complains.
     I stop and wait for him to catch up.  When he reaches me I bend, grab him under the arms and swing him up onto my hip and carry him the rest of the way to the barn.  We have a secret fort in the hay loft.  Only the mice and barn cats know about it.  It’s where we disappear to every weekend after breakfast.  We don’t go back inside until we hear the dinner bell ring.  That’s the unspoken rule.

“I’m hungry,” Joey whines.  He’s lying in the hay beside me.  I’ve been listening to his stomach growl for the past two hours.  His fat lip warps his speech, gives him a lisp.  I checked earlier to make sure none of his teeth had been prematurely loosened and had noticed one was already gone.  I’d spent all afternoon not turning my thoughts toward how that tooth had come to be missing, but it was an unfair fight.  You just can’t pit raw rage against apathy in a fair fight.  The former’s always a heavyweight, always the winner.
     “God damn it!” I shout, rising up from the hay in the near darkness like a wraith.  “Come on!  I’ll wring her neck if she ain’t got dinner on the table!  I swear to God I will!”
     “Jamie!” Joey yelps, frightened.
     “Come on!  Get up!  I’m cold and I’m hungry and I’m tired of laying here in mouse-piss straw listening to your stomach growl like a dog!”  I bend, grasp his skinny wrists and haul him to his feet.  “When I’m older,” I say, bending down so my face is close to his, “When I’m full grown up we’re getting the hell out of here.”  He nods, staring into my eyes, well aware of my often spoken promise to take him away from the farm as soon as I’m able to.  I hate being thirteen.  I hate being old enough to know something is very wrong in our lives but too young to do anything about it.  “Let’s go eat, kiddo.”
     The house is dark.  There’s no smell of cooking coming from any of the gaps around the windows and door.  The pickup truck sits in the yard same as it was this morning.  I don’t recall hearing my father leave to go get a haircut or to buy some feed or anything.  That in and of itself is unusual, cause to suspect something isn’t quite right.  “Wait here,” I tell Joey, setting him on the ground near the chopping block and pile of kindling.  “Just stay put right there.”  His eyes are like teacups, his swollen lip quivering as I mount the back steps and pull open the screen door.  The hinges squeal like stuck pigs and a shiver runs down my spine.
     I open the back door, my lungs feeling fiery with lack of oxygen in my tight chest.  I can hear the ticking of the wall clock.  For a moment that’s all I hear, but then comes the all-too-familiar rattle and rustle of my father’s newspaper.  But it’s dark in the kitchen and he never reads the paper at dinner time.  I peer toward his shadowy form seated at the table.  “Pa?” I say, my voice as parched and dry as the fields this past summer.  “Pa?  Can I turn on the light?”
     “Sure you can,” he says, his voice almost jovial.  This sends another cold shiver shooting down my spine.
     “We’re hungry,” I explain, cold fingers fumbling for the light switch.  I find it, flip it up and blink as  yellow light blooms in the room.  The first thing I notice are the rest of the breakfast dishes sitting on the table, Joey’s cereal bowl still spewing its meager contents toward the lazy Susan in the middle of the table.  No one has replaced the cap on the syrup bottle or put the cover on the butter dish.  The second thing I notice is the odd odor in the room.  It raises goosebumps all over me for it is an odd but familiar odor.  Blood.  I know the smell of blood from when my father butchers the pigs, and when my mother wrings a chicken’s neck then chops its floppy head off.
     My eyes shift from where my father sits at the table hidden behind his newspaper to the empty seat normally occupied by my mother.  I force myself to keep my eyes moving.  My heart now throbs with trepidation as I slowly take in my mother’s worn shoes, her thin legs, the faded hem of her skirt, the riveted wood handle of the knife that protrudes from her chest, the pool of dark, coagulated blood that she lies in.  Behind me Joey whimpers from cold, hunger, and anxiety at being left out in the dark.  “Jamie, can I come in now?”
     “No, not yet,” I reply tensely.  “Pa,” I say, trying to keep the terror out of my voice.  I don’t want for him to lower his newspaper.  I don’t want to see him- his face, his eyes, the set of his mouth.  “Pa?”
     “Woman stung by jellyfish succumbs,” he says as though reading the same headline he’d read to us this morning, but I know he’s no longer reading aloud.  Another deep shudder rattles down my backbone, sets my teeth to chattering.  Behind his newspaper my father begins to chuckle.  The chuckle quickly swells grotesquely into a laugh that sends me backing out through the kitchen door as silently as I can go.  I pull the door shut, but still I can hear him laughing.  I release my sweaty grip on the doorknob, turn and leap down the steps, grab Joey up into my arms in passing.  “Shh!” I whisper in his cold ear.
     It’s a good three and a half miles to the Barnes’ farm across land flat as a pancake.  I’m dizzy with hunger and adrenalin as I hurry away from the house.  Joey clings to me, crying softly but not knowing exactly why he’s crying.  I have no tears.  That well is long dry.  “Stop your crying, do you hear?” I say. 
     I wonder how many footsteps away we are from freedom.  My ears strain for the sound of the old pickup’s familiar rattle and roar, but my breathing fills my ears.  Joey’s shuddery gasps punctuate my weary huffs.  Freedom seems unattainable, as far away as the white stars that twinkle above us in the ever darkening sky.  But I won’t stop walking toward it.  I can’t stop walking toward it for I have made a promise to my brother and I swear to God I will keep it.  No matter what, I will keep it.