Elegy on Pearl Mountain, Pt. 9
Part Nine of “Elegy on Pearl Mountain,” a series of prose and poetry by Kevin Chesser, featuring tintype photography by Chris Parsons.
Read Pt. 8 of Elegy on Pearl Mountain HERE
I.
The New Me got into a fight at the park and two guys took turns kicking him over and over. He says he thinks it was fun. I think it has lessened the effect of him. One morning, while burying the lawnmower (it killed our favorite skunk), I dream about a family. Pass the biscuits. Happy Easter. I tell the New Me it’s time to go visit mother. He looks into the sun like a man receiving the word of God, and that word is stay. Stay alive long enough to kill him. The next day, we mount up to go surprise mother. Excited as I am, I forgive the New Me for smelling like rotting garbage. And trying to bite me on the face. I’ll tell mother my plan for a new beginning. If she could find her double, we four would make a family. Pass the salmon. Where’s the fire extinguisher? But mother is nothing if not direct. And when she spots me and the New Me exiting the vehicle and coming up the front walk, she steps out onto the porch and delivers two blasts of a shotgun to the New Me’s chest. Frozen, I say the Skate’s Prayer: “I am the skate and I move freely through the water. I am the skate.”
I’m not a salmon
anymore. I’m a plan for
a new beginning.
So high the cost of living,
the cost of staying alive.
II.
“Inside. Now.” I step over the New Me’s dead body and follow her into the kitchen. Mother hands me an onion. “Dice.” Now I have questions about the word of God. She reaches into a high cabinet and pulls down a jar of snakes, preserved in clear liquid. I’m a weed frying in the sun, eyes drying up, ecstatic with terror. Mother selects a snake and hacks it into pieces. It’s always been like this. Anytime a dust-up, out come the snakes. I would like to flop on the floor and scream. But mother is a finer hypnotist than she used to be. “We have to take him to Pearl Mountain. That’s the only way to get rid of him for good. Eat, or you’ll have no sight.” So we eat the sour snake and burnt onions and wait for sight. I step out the back door and look stupidly on the woods. The wind kicks up a little bit of “Mambo Italiano,” and I wonder if Old Best Friend ever had any idea that I might come looking for him the in the first place.
Contain my plump heart
in clear liquid! Now I have
questions. Now I have
the moves for the Dust Mambo.
It dries my eyes. I don’t scream.
III.
I’d imagined a sort of rancid suburban necropolis, but Pearl Mountain’s more shades of amber waves and Thomas Kinkade than my tortured visions could capture. A squeaky white gate opening onto a grassy expanse. No fires, no shit heaps. Just stray dunes of rubbish marking the acres, empty and serene. Had I ever really been here? Mother takes a syringe out of her pocket and jabs herself in the neck. She tosses it on the ground and a rat carts it off in its mouth. What order! Things go in their places, put there by those assigned to put them there. The dirt that fills the paths leading from one dune to the next and from the dunes off into the sun-warmed distance is the brushed dirt of a baseball diamond. I thump on my chest and inhale deeply. At the top of a rise, a unit of deer, grazing, all of their eyes and ears intact. Coming over that same rise, twilight just beginning to let the air out of the day, I see a small timber framed cottage, a positively ancient timber framed cottage, neon OPEN sign blinking in the window. Mother kicks my wagon, the one carrying the body of the New Me. She kicks it, and kicks it again. “That’s the place,” she says. “Did you bring money?”
The rats at baseball,
again. Not a one can throw,
can hit, can catch. But
twilight is a painting they’re
lovely in. Thought of. Put there.
Read Pt. 10 of Elegy on Pearl Mountain HERE
Kevin Chesser is a writer and musician whose poems have appeared in Hobart, Talking Book, Still: The Journal, Rabid Oak, Empty House Press, and elsewhere. He lives in West Virginia.
Chris Parsons is a native of South Carolina, now living in Nashville creating artwork as a portrait and still life photographer.
