madsviande

i.

God speaks to you out of the maelstrom and I am the stormcloud and I am the thunder and I am the Word and the Word was with God to say:

Sometimes, for no reason, bad things do not happen. The sky does not fall. The earth does not tremble. Your wife does not leave you. You do not lose your livelihood. You do not lose touch with your adult children.

ii.

Come June's third Sunday I pull out the sackcloth, put on my ashes, gnash my teeth, wail my grief

for a ne'er-do-well's daughter who chastised her own inborn disappointments, chided her own endless failures, sabotaged her own success to punish her own insolence, taught herself to soothe and make scarce on tiptoe, terrified herself with her own senseless aggression,

squeezed her own face in her own vise-like grip, choked herself with her bare hands in her own bed, screamed herself scarlet in her own voice— spittle pelting her own eyes— drove herself recklessly into a wreck— the impact on the passenger side where she sat— riddled her own memory with holes and flimsy fictions—

all this to pretend she had a father to well-meaning strangers, teachers, friends; all this to excuse the beast beneath her bed.

A monster is no-one’s father.

iii.

It is like this: Yes, the blood on the teeth of my house is mine, but who among us has not been fodder to a home? What is a house that does not hunger?

There is only so long you can keep making stock of the same bones. These remains crumble to the touch. It is time to throw them out.

iv.

Does the money trail lead always back into the arms of our father — his straining sinews, creaking floorboards—?

Then this I know of the house that money built: Thither will I not go.

The buttresses burdened by my father's house groan under the weight of so many cells, lightless, divided, multiplied, fit to lyse. The buttress— that is, me— stews, dreams of flight; hollows her belly, stewards her wall with only the most distant, phalangeal tips of her fingers; holds at arms' length, imagines letting go. The buttress, that is, dreams of collapse.

i.

The Adversary has begged me to dismantle your house from foundation to rafters with my bare hands and the knowledge of what you did with yours, and I have not. But I spare you not for mercy, not for you. Were I to bring your life down tumbling around your ears —

what would your wife eat? Where, then, should I live?

iii.

The problem with this house is mostly meals that were not cleaned up in time, blood left unscrubbed to clot and scab, cud chewed for years and decades on end. It is time now to root for fresh blood, and slaughter the truffle-hogs next. Who among us does not make a hollow home? What is a hunger that goes unfilled?

ii.

Oh, but you must not blame the monster! He had his own monster to excuse, his own pain, his own side of your story! If his claws were fearsome, well, you cannot deny he came by them honestly.

Oh, but you must not deny the monster! Carry on his claws, or bear them on your back! Damned if I'd neither, I scratch my own skin to threads.

i.

Sometimes, the Word is tied up in the maelstrom, kept on leash by a world too large and too full and too noisy to be just. A shackle binds my throat to silence now that your hands cannot do it for you, a cord spun in hair from people that love you, the people that I love.