Blood Marks by Tristan Steffe

                ​Otto Phokus CC


​

                                                                                                                          Blood Marks

         I am an impartial scribe from space. There is nothing, nothing, that wakes me. I am a little boy in this tale, once upon years ago when this voice hadn’t developed. This isn’t, won’t, be mine. Observe, relay, spill, spill.

                                                                                                             The marriage and the squirrel

         There is a moment somewhere when Joyce marries Jamie. She has to tell the minister to speak a little louder because of Jamie’s hearing.
         “He said, will you take my hand, Jamie?”
         On the flight to Hawaii, Joyce helps him learn signs and prepare for the worst, a partner, a teammate, a friend. Joyce is fun, she makes a game. A kiss for a completed lesson. A massage for whoever finishes first. Joyce is thoughtful. She thinks Jamie is passionate.
         On their first honeymoon excursion, Jamie beats a squirrel with a golf club. They are on some hole and the thing is barely breathing. Maybe it fell, or was dropped, or was hit, or had a sickness, or was in labor. In mercy, Jamie pulls out a long driver and crushes the body. But it keeps breathing and he keeps whacking, and it looks like an angry man is taking his anger out.
         Joyce thinks they are a team. And I can imagine that they were—are a team. They work at the same office and eat at the same places. There’s a fish stand by the biker motel, there’s a bakery by the water.

                                                                                                                  The great “explosion”

         There is a moment, long ago, when Jamie is a high school quarterback. He starts his junior, not his senior year. And there is a moment, long after, when Joyce says something or other about this.
         They are in a great big house with red shutters, with a red room, with a mortgage that will not be discussed. It might be late, when three children are asleep. It might be twilight, when silver moon phantoms stretch out to cover the earth. It might be early, when some rooster wakes. It might be dawn, when glints streak through bare trees. Or it could be day, when the dog thumps his tail. It could be noon, when the air is silent in winter. 
         But this is when Joyce says something or other.
         And this is when Jamie ignites. He is my son. He won’t fail like me. He’s got to be tougher on the court. I didn’t play, I didn’t start. Stop babying them. My dad was too soft. You’re not a good parent. You’re not a good mother. My son is not a pussy. My daughters are not stupid. Don’t baby them because your parents fucked up.
         This is, of course, exaggeration. Jamie is a lawyer, not an abuser. And his passion, his toughness, ends up helping his son. It isn’t as bad as Joyce thinks, because I am not as sensitive as she is. But this is how Joyce hears it in the kitchen, that one night, morning, or day. She yells back a bit but is afraid to say too much. She doesn’t know this side of Jamie. They don’t feel like a team anymore. I think it’s too bad she can’t understand. I think it’s—no. I am asleep.

                                                                                                                       The piano lady

         This isn’t, won’t, be mine.
         Joyce is a self-made woman. She has been a maid, a fitness instructor, a flight attendant, and a legal secretary. But Joyce has kids, and Joyce stays home with her kids. She feeds, drives, reads, waits, scolds, and tries to love, most of all. It is a far cry from her old life, and she is afraid. Gentle, looming, crawling fear. Creeping into her house at 8pm every night. Following at a closer distance, closing on bodies and words, eating away at skulls to reach brains to reach hearts. Fear is coming through time, trekking black plains and white oceans, winding around the corner to be seen, lurking away. She is a mother. She is a mother. She is self-made and now feels wholly made. Dissatisfying completeness. Complete dissatisfaction. There is one moment when she apologizes for cursing in front of her son because she drives into a brick mailbox on the way to school. There is another moment when the world is falling apart, and she feels purposeless.
         Joyce walks across the little pond-path of her friend Molly the Piano Lady. Spotty toads hop from the shadows of her rain boots and into the pools. Molly the Piano Lady has a little house off the main road where she lives with her husband Charles the Guitar Guy. Molly teaches snotty kids and giddy adults the words on clefs and sheets. She has a Steinway next to a Yamaha. There are several CDs on the CD rack with her face on them. She has soft hair. There is a gnome hut in her backyard. She has no kids and several bottles of wine on the counter. “Music is the key to your soul,” she might often say.
         Joyce sits on the couch. “What if this is it?”
         Molly chuckles.
         Joyce hesitates. “This can’t be forever.”
         Molly sits down next to her and places a teacup in her hands.
         “Music is the key to your soul,” she says.
         At 8pm Jamie walks through the red door. The kids are crying for food which is funny because the youngest will barely touch her plate. Traffic is bad. Work is bad because there is another asshole lawyer. Jamie is quiet and fuming. The dinner is quiet but hearty. There is salmon with pesto pasta. There is a salad. There are buttered noodles in one bowl, being twirled with a fork.
         Jamie sees this and says something to his youngest daughter. She’s not going to take it well and neither will Joyce. The dinner will end as it often does. Several chairs and several victims.
         Joyce looks at her kids, her husband. Everyone’s dejected shoulders, sunken cheeks. This is that other moment. It’s going to be like this forever. It was like that forever to me.
         Joyce walks over to the phone, calls up Molly the Piano Lady, and asks for a lesson.
                                                         
                                                                                                                       The lonely trip

         Joyce is in therapy. During the span of this tale, she is never not.
         Therapy because her own parents are divorced. Therapy because her mother is a selfish, broken woman. Therapy because her father is a devilish, horrid, hateful, crumbling piece of shit. Therapy because she doesn’t know how to love because she doesn’t know what it feels like to be loved. Joyce has seen many therapists over many layers of time. They have had their own children and they have had multiple husbands. They have had large homes and they have had ASL. Joyce has talked for entire meetings and cried for half-meetings. Joyce has listened and lived by advice, and Joyce has ignored every word just to vent. Joyce has gone to couple’s therapy once. In my opinion, this was--
         —Once upon years ago, Joyce asks Jamie to go on a date in the middle of the day.
         I have work. Jamie laughs.
         Joyce smiles. “It’s been five years.”
         They drive to Alexandria. They passed—pass their first apartment. They park in the lot reserved for patients. Jamie realizes it isn’t a date, and it takes Joyce ten minutes to get him out of the car.
         Inside, everything is gray. The walls and desks and picture frames are painted like stone. The smell is thin but murky. The water tastes grainy. The chairs feel hardened but not splintered. Everything is between. The counselor is wearing a cheap suit.
         They all sit in her office, one couch facing a lounge chair, and no one begins. No one speaks, not even the counselor. She is just taking notes on their silence, while Jamie looks out the window.
         “Well,” Joyce says, “I’m glad we came.” She really was—is trying.
         But Jamie can’t help himself. We love each other, right? The therapist takes her notes. We don’t need to be here. The therapist raises her eyebrows. We aren’t there yet. This is sad because they are there. They had been there for so many damn—for so many years.
         Jamie sits back down, because he had actually stood in his ignorance. He rests his cheek on his palm. Yes, ignorance. Such denial. Such worthless resistance.
         They both begin to cry, and Joyce says something heartbreaking. I wish I knew what it was.
         The counselor looks up and frowns. “Well, you were good to come.” She closes her notebook. “Divorce is the right choice.”
         Joyce and Jamie look at each other, wiping their tears. I hated seeing them cry.
         My hearing is bad. Did you say divorce?
         “Yes,” the counselor states. “With my help, this will be quick.”
         Joyce stammers. “We—we are happ—we are married.”
         The counselor sighs as if this has happened before. “You do know that I am a divorce counselor?”
         They did not.
         She sighs again and walks out. “Please pay up front.”
         Joyce and Jamie never went back to therapy, even for a proper session. But wouldn’t it have been nice to hold the other in sobs that revealed something real? They could’ve walked into a little room. This was for the sake of an entire family, after all. They could’ve sat on a different couch across a different chair. The lives of five whole people. They could’ve driven in the same car every-other Tuesday. Three fucking children. No. It doesn’t matter. No, I am asleep. I am an impartial scribe from space.

                                                                                                                         The dough

         Observe, relay, spill, spill.
         There is a moment when Joyce throws a ball of dough at Jamie and hits the microwave instead. We were all watching—all her kids are watching.
         Earlier, Joyce is researching how to start a business. It is Friday but Jamie will not be home for hours. He will be exhausted for the weekend and Joyce will have to drive her son to his tournament. She won’t see her husband or daughters until Sunday night. She will be watching, waiting, cooking, calling, and yelling. I remember these weekends--no, I don’t.
         She is researching how to start a business.
         Piano teaching? Who would get the kids to school and all that? Jamie is eating his dinner alone at 9pm. He got home fifteen minutes before.
         “I want things to change.”
         Would we hire a sitter?
         “I’ve been miserable for 10 years.”
         Miserable?
         “Discontent.” Mom—Joyce was always softly unhappy.
         We aren’t your parents, Joyce.
         That night one of their daughters dumps mayonnaise in the neighbor’s backyard. It is a funny joke to her, but not to Jamie. The entire family is standing in the kitchen, spreading flour and swirling dough. I was—their son is hiding as if under an umbrella, shielding the raining ingredients that gave stinging wounds.
         Joyce explodes sometime after Jamie mentions his daughter’s eating habits and her general wastefulness of food. Joyce takes a clump of rough dough, dough with too many oats, with not enough milk, and flings it towards Jamie’s head.
         No one touched—touches the dough for days. It hung—hangs up on the blackened microwave glass as a reminder for this happy, happy family that lasted too long and felt too much and left too often and forgot too many important things. We were broken. We were left to dry, we were angry, we were thin, we were bloody. My family. I can’t return without coming back down. We weren’t a family. These moments aren’t present, they are my history, my story. This mark is etched in feelings.
         There was a moment when Jamie started sleeping in the basement.
         I can’t forget myself.
         There was a moment when Joyce and Jamie got a divorce.
         I am awake.
         The divorce comes much later. They waited until it was nothing.
         I am somewhere in this story.
         When Mom—Joyce—Mom threw the dough, she had to have thought, “this is over.” She had to have gone straight to the phone and called up the divorce counselor. But she waited, they both waited, four, maybe five years to do it. There are so many moments in those last few years. Many I felt, and feel. Many I think of, and deeply. I don’t remember when Mom threw the dough exactly. I don’t remember if I was helping her bake, and I don’t think it actually stuck to the microwave. But I remember ducking under rain and seeping into sorrow. I try to extract these moments from my place in the past. I try to be an impartial scribe from space. I try to observe from the present. But I was there, somewhere under an umbrella.
         I asked Mom why they waited. Why did they stay together for so long?
         She said, “It was all I had.”
         My voice shuttered after that.

        


​Tristan Steffe is a senior at Franklin & Marshall College majoring in Creative-Writing. He has published several works in undergraduate magazines, and most notably in Volume 26 of Glass Mountain Magazine (for his fiction piece titled "Tethys"). He has a particular passion for writing intimate fiction and the personal essay. He is currently in the application process for MFA programs.