I dream I’m standing in the living room in my Grandpa Charlie’s farm house, the house I’d grown up in. My Grandpa Charlie sits on an oak chair at the kitchen table carving an apple. Grandma Kathrine rocks in her favorite chair working white cotton with knitting needles.
I hear a woman singing or talking upstairs. She’s singing I’m sure of it. It’s my mother’s voice. Even though I haven’t seen my mother since I was two, I know it’s my mother’s voice.
I’m excited and rush up the stairs.
Jesus hangs on the bedroom door, positioned as he was on the cross. Crown of thorns, palms and side pierced, he’s been lashed to the point he barely looks human. His blood is smattered all over the door and is dripping into a pool on the floor.
“My mother’s in there. I want to see her.”
I hear her singing more clearly now. Only it’s not singing. It’s moaning. And it’s not just her. There’s a man with her. They’re fucking.
“Is that my father? Jesus, let me in.”
He hangs there and bleeds as a response.
“I haven’t seen them since I was two.”
The moaning increases. Bright light shines through the crack at the bottom of the door. Jesus won’t let me get passed the door.
Then the door quivers to my mother’s orgasms. The light pulses. Blood gushes from Jesus’s wounds. The door shakes. Mother screams. Father grunts. Jesus bleeds.
Father climaxes. The door explodes. A torrent of semen and blood wash me down the stairs back in the living room.
Grandma Kathrine doesn’t look up from the tiny apron she knits for the apple head doll Grandpa Charlie holds. I’m happy she doesn’t see me like this, but maybe she doesn’t look up because she’s seen enough blood and semen in her life that it’s nothing to her.
Laying on the hard wood floor made slick with human fluid, I look toward Grandpa Charlie. He also takes no notice of me. The apple head he carved has dried into what looks like a shrunken human head, a replica of a decrepit old man. The head spins on the stick that Grandpa Charlie has impaled it on. It forrows its spongey dried fruit brow and says, “Get up kid.”
I stand up, washed in blood and semen, holding Jesus’s crown.
The apple head says, “You best learn to care for yourself. Ain’t no one else gonna take care of you.”
