Brother Knows Best, so Carve Some Hearts and Unicorns

Fist full of cancer pills, Vicodin, aspirin; two  empty Merlot bottles on 
the bathroom counter, just smash them against the  bathtub, bleed out, pick 
up that glass of scotch and chase them down the gutter.  The goddamn cell 
keeps ringing as if the disease is celebrating its final  metathesis. Lift it 
up, hoping it’s the ex-wife offering confessions and  condolences. Everybody 
else has. Doctor said it wouldn’t be necessary to make  any more 
appointments.  
“Just take it easy brother, enjoy every moment and  relax,” he said. 
How the hell can a man unwind when he’s out of  time? Made love to the 
emerald irises of the secretary hoping she would pick up  the pencil out of pity 
and schedule something in. She just kept filing her  nails, checking out 
photos of half-naked teenagers on Facebook.   
“It’s a matter of weeks now, at best,” said your  brother; the fancy 
doctor. 
Breaking the bottle against the side of the sink,  carving a shallow heart 
in forearm, blood soaking the hairs, answer the  cell. 
“Hello?” 
“Is this Mr.  Warrenger?” 
“Speaking.” 
Lifting underpants, sculpting a unicorn in thigh,  screwing up the horn 
after the lady on the other end explains about the  accident, the nature of her 
urgency. What kind of man falls on his head in the  bathroom? No time to 
figure it out now. Grab a towel; wipe away the blood,  meticulous like 
changing a dirty diaper, slipping into a fresh pair of Hanes.   
Emergency room swallowing veins like a fancy  vagina--frantic nurses, 
doctors, gurneys with plastic clipboards, starving  homeless panhandle outside; 
the socialist among them sit in the emergency room  reading crumpled 
celebrity magazines stained with coffee.   
“May I help you?” 
“Here to see Dr. James  Warrenger.” 
She clicks her mouse, smells of strawberry,  polished fingers glitter, 
typing her symphony, berries lingers in bushy nostrils  as the hospital makes 
love to an ambulance.  
“Room 428.” 
The elevator is being loaded with equipment. The  air smells like hope, 
heartbreak, everything all mixed into one. A bald girl is  playing cards with 
an elderly nurse. The pulse of the hospital holds the door,  shuffling 
inside, pushing past poker-faced X-ray technician with the mustard  stain on 
scrubs, his breath reeking of hot dogs and marijuana, or maybe that’s  someone 
else, that reflection against the door, those wrinkles so clear they  swallow 
opaque like a rock climber in a rising crevasse. Brother’s words echo in  
idle mind:  
“You will die, but you fought it longer and braver  than any patient in the 
forty years I’ve been doing this.”   
The degenerate carnival aroma of Grateful Dead and  Nathan’s lodges in 
hairy nostrils, two nurses squeeze inside, one of them  voluptuous, her breasts 
brush against terminal flesh for the final time, that  last encounter with 
the majesty of a fine-tit woman.     
“Isn’t this your floor?”   
Technician catches the door with his foot, shadows  in the hallway become 
faces of ghosts of sailors long dead. Brother alive,  clipping toenails. 
Atavistic bastard: bandaged head, amnesia, as the woman said  on the phone he 
has no place to go; the nail from his big toe flicks on top of  the machine 
next to the bed. 
“You were a brave patient, but brother, your  diagnosis was wrong.”  
Pick up the pillow and smother him, just do it,  nobody will notice. Better 
to shut the door, unplug his arm from the needle,  suck the blood, use your 
army knife to carve a heart into his ass, watch the  puddle grow as he 
chews into the cotton, and then it’s done.   
“Lord forgives me.” 
Walk down that hall and take the stairs. Cancer has  its sweaty old man 
balls in someone’s mouth, just keep shaking them, shoving  past that clown with 
the balloons, nothing more than helium and metallic for  babies and birds 
to choke to death in neighboring counties. Brush past the punk  in the Iron 
Maiden t-shirt with the bloody dishtowel, wrapped around his hand,  finger in 
an Igloo cooler of pink ice at the end of a stretcher.   
The door is open and the clouds are magic carpets  that carry the injured 
and incurable back home to their diseases, to that  bathroom and the broken 
bottles and the blood. The Datsun drives itself, parks  in the garage where 
it seems wise to let the engine run and close the door. But  better to enter, 
pour a drink, unplug the phone, take a piss, and carve some  hearts and 
unicorns.   

Degenerate Reckoning 

Palapa shadows suck the marrow from the ant hill that Hitler cannot climb. The mountain is white and the slaves are red and bite through the blood of cocks who made us piss pants, we sigh, with the fountain, as the wine and mescaline begins to pour down the arroyos of yesterday’s debauchery.

Fingers swollen, bumble bees making love to baby crickets in palms beneath the secret waterfall that was, when scarlet begonias raped starfish and Casey Anthony laid her baby in a basket beside the swamp, American capitalism a criminal, the verdict: chinga su madre pinche Gringos.       

The molding crumbles in the rain. The dog is too old to bark. The breakfast has been cold but the birds are born anew. Feeble caricatures fill the house with haunting echoes; shadows chase cockroaches across the floor. The sun sets. The new day begins. The ride is over. The tide is done. 

Though He Had No  Fever 

He began masturbating after the baby was born, like  clockwork, every 
morning at 4:26. He  tried to be silent, but bubbles rising from the bathtub 
could never be contained  by the parameters of his wife’s auditory threshold. It 
was during one of these  trances of euphoric derangement when he realized 
his son was  sick. 
At first the boy didn’t finish his birthday cake,  claiming his stomach 
ached, but when he wouldn’t touch his scrambled eggs or  bacon the next morning 
his mother knew something was out of the ordinary, so the  boy said he was 
sick, though he had no fever. When he refused soup, nachos, and  didn’t 
touch any solid foods for four days, she knew it was time to take him to  the 
doctor.  
She doesn’t need to drag him out of the racecar bed  either, because he is 
strong from the two cartoons of Tropicana orange juice he  swallows each 
day. The dried-up pulps stick to his chin, the corners of his  lips. The boy 
inches through the narrow opening between the rusty chicken fence  and the 
shed where his father sits in his underpants, testes itching, he rubs  himself 
with a shriveled feather that landed on his head the day before the boy  was 
born. 
“It’s a robin’s feather,” the man says.   
He’s told the boy this a thousand times and the  boy’s first word was “feda
” but the man wants the boy to hear it again. The kid  is wearing clean 
underpants, his favorite pair: with the rocket ship and pirate  flag; but the 
father wears Hanes with a huge hole in the middle which grows  larger and 
more frayed every illness. The man never soils himself, but they have  turned 
an awkward shade of yellow, and he refuses to wear any other pair or wash  
them, strangely becoming part of the cold cement which he sits upon sixteen  
hours a day.  
The boy’s fingers are imprinted in the concrete and  he places them over 
the memory now as he’s done a hundred times, but he’s always  amazed at how 
small the engraving is, his hands getting wider, his fingers  taller, the 
etchings disappear within him but he can feel the dent, knows it  will be there 
long after the doctor has died and his bones swallow the fibers of  
undergarments Michael Jordan made famous with his trademark smile. The man looks  
more like Michael Jordan’s father. 
¨I played golf with the greatest athletes ever, ¨  the doctor says.  
He brags about it all the time. The signed  scorecard is thumb tacked in 
the corners, Michael Jordan’s signature centered  perfectly as if by the 
electromagnetic gravity of the sun on a bulletin board  beside a colored map of 
the world. The man always addresses the boy with this  knowledge of his idol 
from Chicago  glory days in the early nineties. The man even lived on  23 
Toros Avenue, in an  affluent suburban house with red shutters before the 
psychosis began to feed off  the wisdom of hairy earlobes.  
The man started shaving his entire body while lying  in the shadows late at 
night, talking to the demons in the porcelain streaks  that the naked eye 
can never see, taunting his five o’clock shadow in the foggy  mirror, the 
ghosts battle until the mumbles become loud enough for the woman to  wake.  
Again, he began masturbating after the baby was  born, like clockwork, 
every morning at 4:26. He tried to be silent, but the bubbles rising from  the 
orifices of all corners of his personality couldn’t be contained by the  
parameters of consciousness. The acoustics in that bathroom are fabulous, the  
echoes from the empty crevasses bounce off the vanity mirror and immaculate  
toilet like magic, a studio 54 secret room similar to the one where the man 
met  his maker.   
“Can we begin our  session?” 
The old man looks at his wrist where the watch used  to be, struggling into 
a praying mantis yoga pose. The boy gets closer so he can  rub the fresh 
scabs on his father’s legs where the man has cut himself with the  rusty 
razor.  
“Criss cross applesauce,” the boy says.   
It’s the first word the woman has heard about food  from her son for days; 
she looks up as the room darkens and drizzle begins to  pelt the tin roof, 
filling the interior of the doctor’s office with a fresh  scent that reminds 
the woman of  California summers.   
¨Why aren’t you  eating?¨ 
The boy has lost weight, the woman understands that  if he does this for 
another couple weeks he could trigger irreversible organ  damage, his heart 
needs the nutrients, the boy is still growing and sudden  cardiac arrest is 
always a possibility in this  family. 
The man scratches his ear, looks at his finger,  licks it, thinking about 
the hole in the ceiling that he never fixed; as always  it begins leaking. 
The boy watches as the cardboard in worn-out spots begins to  darken and 
bubbles form like greedy vultures. Duct tape icicles protrude,  dripping cold 
water from their tips, growing larger by the  minute. 
The boy was born poor, but he notices the family  photos of the early days, 
in the perfect gold frames with the inscriptions about  love and hunger for 
eternity together. The woman always talks about the  revolutions sweeping 
the Middle East, the need for  change. Her Obama Yes We Can t-shirt has too 
many holes to count, so she only  wears it on election nights in foreign 
countries. The photographs of Morocco,  France, the Caribbean; she tells the boy 
all about those places, the strange  fading photos of dark women with 
bananas on their heads, the man with the  machete and the donkey that took the 
woman an hour or more to focus; but the boy  only knows the 7.2 megapixel 
digital camera the doctor gave him for Christmas.   
“Take the world with you always,” the man had  said. 
The boy gets a kick from the lady and then opens up  to the doctor. He 
places his lips inside the secret compartment where he goes  for confession, 
freshly showered arms and legs sucking up dust and grime on the  floor. The old 
man moans and offers the boy the sacrament, the same knowledge  flows 
through him every session. 
“How much are you  drinking?” 
The woman explains the massive juice binge and the  diarrhea, but the boy 
shakes back and forth, unsure of which personality to turn  toward, which 
vortex to enter inside the doctor’s skull. He doesn’t want his  parents to 
know the extent of his disease. The voices inside his mind console  with those 
voices coming from his father’s mouth, the doctor and patient, the  
Hippocratic Oath enforced by a sling on the ground and a drop of blood on a  
feather.  
The water begins to cover the floor and the boy’s  mother gets down on her 
knees, cups her hands, and scoops it up. She begs her  son to drink, does 
the math in her head and counts the broken egg shells on the  hotplate in the 
corner were they tie the voices down on a soiled mattress and  listen to the 
wind as the boy thrashes and the needle feeds him, spoon full of  eggs and 
baking soda beneath a fluorescent lighter.   
“It hurts bad.”  
“Bacon and pancreas and dirty Hanes and an old Dr.  J basketball hoop in 
the corner.” 
Michael Jordan makes his first appearance as the  doctor is placing his 
hand against the boy’s face to wipe away the tears with  the feather. Charles 
Barkley speaks in the background as a sun shower devours  the backyard and 
the boy jumps for the hoop. 
The moon rises higher as the kittens gather at the  door and stick their 
tails beneath the weeping wood. The doctor writes another  prescription and 
sends the boy home. 

Matthew Dexter lives in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Like the nomadic Pericú natives before him, he survives on a hunter-gatherer subsistence diet of shrimp tacos, smoked marlin, cold beer, and warm sunshine.