---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 108-page perfect-bound ISSN#/ISBN# issue/paperback book “Down and Inside” cc&d, v315 (the November 2021 issue) Order the 6"x9" paperback book:

Order this writing in the book The World Outside the cc&d Sep.-Dec. 2021 magazine issues collection book		get the 424 page Sep.-Dec. 2021 cc&d magazine 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

T.H. Barlow’s Dying Wish

Perry Genovesi

    The grenadine tissue paper flickered from the open jewelry box. Inside, the peach pit appeared to bob in the crinkles. This was the funeral of T.H. Barlow, of the Battery Elevator Company. The peach pit was the last thing he’d choked on.
    Two rose-red plastic cups wheeled on a reception table. The table stood next to four aisles dotted with people.
    Mrs. Barlow, widowed, scowled at the jewelry box, at the pit sitting upright in a tissue sea. She smoothed her black dress over her knees and picked off cat hair. She turned to her 30-year old grandson, Marlson. She cupped her hands over his fist. With her thumbnails she massaged the skin over his knuckles.
    Marlson said, “When you’re out walking and you come to a river, that’s another path you can take.”
    “What did you say?”
    That’s something Pop-Pop always said.”
    Mrs. Barlow said, “Ridiculous spectacle of a funeral. Looks more like a shop party with those...red...cups.”

    Pastor Blaine had slicked his hair back with a wide-toothed comb. The ridges in his hair resembled sand tracks. His pink oval head shone underneath.
    He strode up the three steps to the podium. As he drifted under the boney ceiling fan, his white cassock’s bottom hems swished.
    “Brothers and Sisters,” he said. He raised his arms and his cuffs fell back to his elbows. “We’re gathered here today to remember the late Thaddeus Henry, T.H. Barlow. Or, Hen, for those of us who knew him personally.” He lowered his arms. “But I’m sure if you’re here you did know Hen. Hard not to. He was more a brother to me than friend. Inspired my path. Fostered my love of nature. When we were boys we’d stroll in his woods together. Wouldn’t you know Hen picked the first tick off me, a sucker right on my wrist.”
    The air conditioner’s roar cut off. It exposed an ambience of chairlegs scraping and rainjackets rustling in seats.

    Mrs. Barlow thought Pastor Blaine’s sermons always sounded cold. She allowed her eyes to close and saw startling, vivid chartreuse-green. She whipped up her head. It felt as how a candle can pass its fame beyond the shut-eye seal. But there was nothing chartreuse in this white room.
    She picked up her purse, brushing its base before seating it in her lap. She dug out a wadded tissue, blotted her forehead and took off her glasses. She dabbed at her nose, the impression left by the glasses’ pads. Then she crushed the tissue into her purse.
    She still couldn’t shake the impression the color left. Every time she blinked it burned behind her eyelids. To steady herself, she placed her right hand onto Marlson’s shoulder. At her vision’s fringe, sidetracked by nausea, her hand appeared to blend into his blazer. Then something zipped across her palm; it seared like a rope burn. She turned. A mysterious black leather glove now bound her right hand.
    Four holes beamed over her exposed knuckles. Two more rows of smaller studded vents, ringed by metal grommets, extended. They ceased at the storm of blue veins at her wrist.
    The shock of this glove jolted her from the green wall behind her eyes. She slid her forefinger past the cuff and tried worming it into the mitt. Her cuticle bulged under the leather. Feet pushed off the floor, Mrs. Barlow slid back into the seat, heels palpitating across tile. Both hands twisted in her lap.
    “Grandma,” whispered Marlson. “What’s that?” He pointed to the glove. Even at age 30 he lived in his own insulated world.
    “This is my funeral glove,” she said. She pet her wrist with her other hand. It felt soggy. “Grown-ups wear them when they’re doing...important things,” she said.
    She wedged her fist into her purse.
    Marlson laced his arm between hers and rested his head on her shoulder.

    Pastor Blaine’s voice boomed now. Still strolling, hands behind his back, he pulled on his arm and his elbow audibly popped. He withdrew his head into his chin’s ripples. “Hen always used to say when you’re out walking - he was a man of nature, a man devoted to the solitude of being alone in nature. He used to say that when you’re walking and you come to a river, you’ve actually come to another path. That that’s another path you can take.”
    Mrs. Barlow clawed at her wrist. She tore at the glove. As she struggled, a roll of quarters rattled into a thick key ring and a small corn-yellow boxcutter. A Lifesavers log lay hollow, its wrapper corkscrewed. “Not now...” she groaned.
    Pastor Blaine said, “Hen was one of the few men who understood how the world works. I can’t count myself among that sprinkling. No: I can’t.” And he bowed.
    Marlson whispered into her sleeve, “How does the world work, Grandma?”
    Her chin pressed against her necklace. She was up to her elbows in tan, woven, wobbling purse. She said, “Money. That’s how it works.” And with that, the glove slipped off and from inside it a gush of water drained and settled. The Lifesavers wrapper fattened. The tissue grayed. The boxcutter gleamed. She said, “Son of a bitch.”

    After a miserable receiving line, Marlson and Mrs. Barlow stood outside the church and waited for Pastor Blaine. Someone had jammed a rubber orange doorstop under the black doorframe. But those at the heads of the meager line still reached to hold the door open.
    Marlson watched a young boy stick his palm against the door’s glass. The peach skin puckered. Next to the second set of doors someone had stationed an overflowing can of cigarettes. One full cigarette rolled in the wind; blue wisps pulsed toward the parking lot.
    Finally, Pastor Blaine ambled out with his hand on the shoulder of a man with a hare-white beard. The older man seized the stair’s handrail and staggered down the five stone steps.
    “Ah, Mrs. Barlow!” said Pastor Blaine, patting her frail shoulder. His breath smelled like garlic. He turned to Marlson. “Hello, Mr. Marlson.”
    “Hello, Priest,” said Marlson.
    Pastor Blaine drew his fist from his cassock and spread his fingers. In his palm sat the peach pit in the open jewelry box. He shut it with a snap.
    “Now, I am entrusting this to you, Mrs. Barlow, right?” said Pastor Blaine.
    “Yeah.”
    “And we know there’s a fair amount of trust in entrust? Trust to refrain from...the things the Lord’s not meant for us to do. The things he has in fact forbidden us...yes?”
    “Give it here,” she said.
    Mrs. Barlow released her grip on the chestnut-brown strap that kept her purse at her rib. It swung toward her stomach. She took the box in both hands - he failed to resist. She eased it into her wet purse and tightened the cords.
    Rain sheeted down and glossed the concrete.

    Marlson and Mrs. Barlow drove home in the burgundy Ford Taurus. Marlson’s fingers laced in the steering wheel. He lurched forward in his seat. Turn signals twinkled through the window. When he glanced over at his Grandmother, her eyes were closed. She looked like she was enjoying a wonderful dream.
    Now at home, Marlson, who was tall enough, took the jewelry box from his Grandmother’s icy hands. He set it on the mantle, hidden behind an ornamental brown jug.

‚

    The late Thaddeus Henry Barlow’s garden faced his treasured woods and river. It was a mossy, fenced-in pocket behind the house. At its western boundary stood a black fence and Marlson’s basketball hoop. The net’s strings had long ago stained green.
    Marlson laid a teal spade next to the jewelry box. He knelt in dirt-creased denim shorts. Soil lodged inside the handle’s ornamental clefts and caked the blade’s edge.
    He was ecstatic that his Grandmother was finally showing him how to garden. “We should...start to plant his pit?” he said, gazing at her. Mrs. Barlow nodded to the sky. It was a foreboding green - the same chartreuse that had blazed behind her eyelids the day before.
    “Can’t’ imagine why Priest didn’t want us to do this,” said Marlson as he dug. He wondered about his Grandmother’s resulting silence; he hunted for something non-offensive to talk about. “Leaves are staying wet,” he said. “Even though it hasn’t really rained since last night.”
    “They are,” she said.
    He popped open the jewelry box and plucked out the pit and dropped it into the hole. He caught the tissue paper before it blew away. Then his hand combed across the soil, burying the pit. Over it he crossed two twigs. Dirt crescents lined his fingernails.
    “When will Pop-Pop be back?” said Marlson.
    “Soon I hope now,” she said. “He’ll grow in a kind of peapod. Then we’ll have to worry about the smell.”
    “I don’t understand why people have to die,” said Marlson.
    “Then, if he makes it through without any molestation we’ll get a thin, thin membrane.”
    “Then what?”
    “Then we’ll have to worry about the squirrels and starlings who want to...masticate him.”

‚

    The sun rose the color of orange juice. Marlson sprung from bed too fast and the periwinkle sheets snagged his ankle. He tumbled onto the linoleum.
    She snored with crimson curlers in her hair. He found her wet purse lying upside-down, its contents splayed across the dresser. He lifted the corn-colored box cutter. He analyzed his wrists. Two paths when you come to a river, he mouthed the words. There would be a moment of great pain. But this was what Pop-Pop had told him.
    He couldn’t bring himself to do it. So he looked at his sleeping Grandmother. No, not her either.
    He retracted the blade and set it on the dresser. He raced down the stairs and through the garage. In the garden he found Pastor Blaine standing in a washed-black cassock. Globular dirt circles stained his knees.
    In garden gloves, Pastor Blaine pinched the peach pit between thumb and index. His other hand grasped a shovel. He’d cratered the plot Marlson filled and tossed aside its twigs.
    “Can’t let you do this, Marlson,” he crowed. “And I know what you’re thinking: that it’s my right. ...that Pastor Blaine has no authority to do this.” He slipped the pit under his cassock, released the shovel and it tipped into the dirt.
    He hooked his finger into the garden glove’s cuff and pulled it off. Sutured to his skin was another glove. “What the hell?” he cried. The glove’s cloth, if one could call it cloth, was a ragged jigsaw of fishscale scraps. A crenelated blue and white trout belly flayed around his wrist like a shackle. A strip of rust-brown eel skin shone. A single blood-red tentacle writhed between and under the strips of marine crust. It acted as a kind of demented stitching, holding the butcherwork altogether. Pastor Blaine rolled his cassock’s cuff further to reveal a mucusy, petrified, shad-gray sleeve with kelp strung across it. “I’m...I’m going to take this to the rectory now!”, his shoulder wilted; he nursed his arm. “For safekeeping. If you...” he winced, “if you two are using it so disgracefully.” Rotting fish smell rushed to his throat’s back.
    Mrs. Barlow pushed her head outside the window and glared down. The curlers thorned her hair. “Blaine!” she shouted. “We’re free to do with him whatever we choose. It’s ours to say!” The treetops swayed as she spoke. From the leaves two clots of cardinals burst out and swarmed.
    Pastor Blaine stuck his hands inside his robe and slunk out through the fence. He threw himself into an idling plum-colored Crown Victoria. He reversed down the driveway.
    Marlson raised the shovel and cupped one hand to his lips. “Now what?” he called.
    Mrs. Barlow leaned her chin on her wrist and tweaked her focus to the treetops. “Now...now I don’t know what we do.”

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...