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| (visual by fernand0 via this license) |
dispatch eleven
Oikos by Adam Moorad
debuted 1 September 2009 | kept 1053 times | click to keep
behind-the-scenes footage 
“How do you know?” Lamb asked his father.
“I know,” his father said. “She would want me to be happy.”
Lamb had asked his father the question weeks before, in their garage. His father said, “Do you ever think about how you will feel when you’re my age?” Lamb felt a strange sensation. He cleared his throat. Pretended to cough. He never felt comfortable alone with his father. He shrugged his shoulders. Said he did. Lamb’s father turned around. Moved a paint can from one shelf to another. Stared at the shelf. Closed his eyes. “Well. People feel tired sometimes,” he said. Lamb’s father turned around. Looked at Lamb. Lamb did not move. His father yawned, looked at the Webber grill in the corner of the garage. Yawned again. Looked at a chainsaw hanging beside a dormant refrigerator. Smiled half-heartedly. His father thought everything made sense.
At the Easter wedding, Lamb’s outfit matched his brother’s. A black tuxedo. Yellow bow-tie. Yellow cummerbund. They always matched. Several years later, Lamb still had the tuxedo. He kept it in his closet with the rest of his dress clothes. When Lamb moved in with his girlfriend, Amy, he took the tuxedo to a secondhand store for twenty-five dollars. Spent it somewhere.
The new wife, Cynthia, was frail with a vague, waterlogged beauty. She taught Sunday School. After Lamb went to college, his father was alone. Cynthia would come over during the holidays. Bake pies. Apple. Pumpkin. Key lime. Every holiday. Another pie. One Christmas Eve, Cynthia drank too much eggnog and fell out of her chair at the dinner table. She laughed and didn’t seem embarrassed. Lamb thought she looked at home on a floor, laughing. Lamb knelt down to help her up. “Did your mother like to drink eggnog?” Cynthia asked. “I don’t know,” Lamb said. Michael looked on, not speaking. He never said anything. Lamb’s father folded his arms. Looked around. Looked tired.
Lamb never knew his mother. She died before he was born—technically—at thirty-one, at the Baptist hospital downtown. Induced childbirth. There was a car accident. Lamb arrived ahead of schedule. His whole life is lived ahead of schedule. He wishes he had memories of his mother’s life. Sometimes he closes his eyes and pictures what it was like in the womb, inside her. Tangled in umbilical miasma. A zygote. Blind. Eating what she ate. Feeling what she felt. Sleeping. Dreaming.