JUSTIN MEZZAPELLI

olive

When I visited the garden, an old woman came up to me and asked if I was in the movie she'd watched last night. I told her no. She refused to believe me, told me that yes, I most definitely was the beautiful actress from the movie. Her name had been Olive - she had a wooden leg. I lifted my skirt to reveal my pale but certainly fleshy legs, both of them. The old lady waved her hand dismissively saying movies can make anything look real these days. 

We were both staring at the oval-shaped rose garden. I felt our brief, yet bizarre conversation had ran its course, but was not comfortable enough to walk away. After some silence the woman told me her name was Lucille, thanked me for my performance, and carried on down the pathway until she disappeared among the green. 

I dreamt that night I had a wooden leg.

scream

Let us scream until our voices shatter. We must not follow the followers. And certainly not the leaders, neither. They are the worst of the lot. Cheats, wolves in sheep’s clothing. Money is everything and yet it is never fully reachable for most. So we have to make up our own system. Let’s monetize screaming. Screams will be our currency. We cannot offer them coins, but what we can offer is sound. Sound is truth; it is a shield; it is a bridge from one place to another. Scream and you will be heard. Scream and you will be rewarded. Scream and all that is meant to be will be.   

mother’s rocking chair

Mr. Ollefson sat hunched in the rocking chair two sizes too small. It was made of wood, and when he moved at all, the pieces, nailed delicately somewhere between 1910 and 1913, creaked and groaned in a way that made him think of hollow bone. At 73, he wondered whether he’d die in this chair, rocking back and forth. The chair had been his mother’s. It was there where he sat listening stiffly to her on the telephone with her sister, his primary aunt, discussing what should be done about him. 

At two thirty-eight that afternoon, she had gone to the toolshed for a pair of gardening gloves, but had only reached the ramshackle doorway when she discovered her son pressed into the arms of the neighbour’s boy. She hadn’t been certain, but as the door swung open, she thought their mouths had been touching. Was it because his father had died so young? Am I over-mothering my own son? his mother asked her sister, gripping the receiver with both hands. Sitting defeated on the couch, his mother had said a great deals of things as if he was not in the room.

For Mr. Ollefson, what remains at the forefront of this memory is the creaking of his mother’s rocking chair.    

dents and scuffs

As the warm air from the vacuum’s little vent blew in her face, she became aware of how rough she’d treated the thing. Dents and scuffs riddled the body and rod like a disease. It was yellow, but one could hardly tell now. She thought about the last few times vacuuming. Not very gentle. The bristled headpiece slipped out of its cradle under the vacuum’s lid. She clicked it onto the rod after yanking off the flathead, not bothering to turn the machine off. 

As she made her way around the house, she found herself searching for the objects and corners that have caused the dents and scuffs. It was strange that nothing was marked up except for the vacuum. She could not see a single thing with visible signs of her abusive vacuuming. No little dents, not even hints of yellow on the edges of her white door frames or baseboards. This bothered her, because how could her vacuum look so bad, yet nothing else reflect the same violence? 

She jammed her heel on the edge of the machine and the hissing died slowly. She could not remember where she stored the vacuum cleaner.   

bleeding for all the wrong reasons

We sit around a table that sits seven. We are not the Apostles. We are, however, made to follow the same man. He tells us that our religious freedoms are determined by our blood. Literally, depending on how much we shed as a group. That was never easy to understand, let alone hear. But at some point, and I cannot pinpoint exactly when, it all just became normal. 

We bleed, we pray, we act. We are redeemed. 

From what? I still don’t know, but questioning these things was never a good idea. Then you run the risk of bleeding for all the wrong reasons. I will make you bleed for all the wrong reasons, He’s been known to say, or rather scream. At this table, we do not scream, however. We say what we feel and raise no more than a finger from its surface. Today is all about the heart, what we do with it, how we ask it to move us along life’s many paths. He turned to me, just moments ago, and grazed my bare foot with His. He was looking me dead in the eyes. As He turned to the gaze of the others, His foot left mine. It felt abandoned and cold afterwards. I wondered if He did that to anyone else. We rotate our seats monthly so we all end up next to Him. The prayers were finished and we rose to leave. 

As I walked down the dark and narrow corridor, I could feel heat between my legs. Luckily, the robes disguised any interruption down there. Back in my room I resisted the urge to touch myself. I folded laundry, organized the dresser drawers, and re-stacked the forms on my desk. I threw myself on the bed, staring at the ceiling. I rubbed my feet together. As the memory of His touch returned, a knock on the door severed it. When I turned the knob, it was Him standing there. I think you have words for me, He said.    

listen close and get ready

I want to talk with you about dying on a park bench. It will not take long and after you can pretend you never heard it. Really, it’s just a very simple explanation. I want to get it through to you that there is no other way to approach this type of subject. It is quite plain. I hope you don’t mind that. Well to be honest, the discussion we are about to have will feel extremely long, difficult even, given the subject matter, the morose subject matter. But again, it’s brief. I want you to understand the importance of what I am about to tell you. There is no other way, and no other time. So, listen close and get ready. By the time it’s over, you will understand greatly. Do not be deterred from my explanation based solely on the fact that it's dark and brief. Time is of the essence, and I must tell you right away. It won’t take long. 

the history of a stone

I want the history of a stone. My body is infantile compared to a stone. Even the bodies of the elderly, nearing one hundred. It’s such a small number compared to the stone. I want the kind of years that cannot be seen all at once. I want to be stretched across time, disappearing from the horizon at either end. Is there a proper reason for this? I wouldn’t know. But yet I crave the history of the stone.    

what I want to see, could see

If the boys from the bathroom knew what I was thinking, they’d hurt me. Or kill me. If the boys from the bathroom knew what I had been looking at, it wouldn’t be ignored. It wouldn’t be nothing. If the boys from the bathroom knew that I secretly wanted to taste them as they were, they’d hurt me. 

Thoughts are a liberty until they are a prison. But I’m also in a stall. Another prison. I am a prisoner imprisoned in a prison within a prison. God, I envy their freedom. Their choice of words and actions, topics and opinions. Never thinking twice about what it all is. They never needed to. They come and go with such ease; I can’t help but wonder...how? Standing at urinals talking about what I want to see, could see, if I just peered over the wall. I want the ease they have. I crave it. And yet I want to be nothing like them. 

Their heavy, unrestrained voices filter out and they are gone. I leave the bathroom thinking about circumcision.          

chosen to be the elf

The parade float was a highly-competitive and completely exhausting ordeal. To work in secret on it for months was like a sentence from the court. And yet, it was a highly coveted position. Because it was a winter parade, the float was designed and constructed in the spring and summer months. That was my part-time (full-time) job. When the parade came, I was chosen to be the elf waving from the little circular window. Cheering and singing, all sounds, were muffled. It was terribly lonely and seemed unjust considering the months of sweat and blood I put into helping build the float. Inside was, of course, nothing but raw wood beams and white, green, and red materials poking through cracks in the plywood particle board. I was sitting on a bucket and pillow. I felt like a hostage in my own creation. However, as we pulled off the street and I got out into the parking lot, all I wanted to do was get back in. 

the lick

Today I screamed as loud as I could. I chose to do that underwater. If any living thing heard me, I wouldn’t know and will not ever know. Agony is a funny thing. It does funny things to you. Inner turmoil. The constant lick of what you’re afraid of. My back is wet and not from the water in which I screamed. It was from the lick. Wet with the saliva of an invisible beast. He exists always behind my neck. 

fire place

From the moment he’d opened the book, its pages wrinkled and bone-dry, I had known the mistake was mine. The antique store in which I’d purchased the object was going out of business, partially the reason I bought the book in the first place. They were trying to sell as much as they could, as quickly as they could. It was only seven dollars. Anyway, the mistake, as I realized, was buying only the one. I should have known that once I opened it, or him, rather, in the comfort of my living room, I would desperately want to satiate the hunger for more antique books – him as well. 

The pages smelt like history. The sound of its brittle spine was enough to send images of oxblood leather armchairs and ceiling-high, wall-to-wall bookshelves into your mind. But the mistake was made, surely, because the store had presented itself in our travels to the country, some miles back, and we had no plans to return for several months. If we were to return, I’d fear it would be done with and gone, and we’d have wasted a trip when petrol was at an all-time high. We spent many days reading passages aloud to each other, trying desperately not to weather the thing any more than necessary. By the time two months had passed, we had read it almost twice over in its entirety, although still not completely certain of its plot, nor its themes. We made them up ourselves, in the end. 

However, given the circumstance I have mentioned, and the familiarity with its words, him and I, one damp night, reached a point in our relationship with the novel that neither of us could longer bear. I am not sure who said it first, but we both seemed to be thinking the same thing. He threw it into the fireplace and we watched it turn to ash for what seemed like hours, into the dawn of the following day. There was little talk between us even into the next evening. Our paper friend had quickly become an acquaintance after a friend, and then a stranger by the end. And the mistake was mine, just two months prior, when the naiveté of inviting something into your life without consideration felt like a fabulous decision, a spur of the moment action that makes you feel spontaneous and anew. 

The remaining months in the country were healing months, and heal we did. By our drive home we’d returned to normalcy, until we reached that antique store, or rather, what was left of it. The old building had evidently burned to the ground, charred wood beams sharp and black, jutting out from ash. We slowed the vehicle but did not get out. Over the remaining time of our journey we debated if the better story was if the flames enveloped the building before its closure, the antiques freed from some other demise, or after they had all been cleared up, and the ashes were of simply the hollow space of architecture left over. We’d ended the conversation before arriving home, and have not returned to it since.