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Table for Two

Raphael Bastek

    Should’ve anticipated a bad day the moment he nicked himself shaving but he had only been clotting the blood for a few seconds when he heard his younger brother crying down the hall; now it all collapses like a scornful child kicking over the dominos. Pointing to a wood-etched image of a gothic symbol of Death, complete with scythe and every other trope from the mythos, the younger brother sobs, “I don’t want him to take me, I don’t want—” and the older brother still padding his own neck hoists his sibling up under his other arm, carrying him to the window.
    “Look here, out into the stars. No one is coming; Death is the tiny dot you can’t see, it’s the television network satellite that turns your brain to rubber from a thousand miles away. You will never see the blade fall,” he whispers hurriedly, the sibling staring glossy-eyed. They wrestle playfully—I’m getting too old for this! amidst jubilant laughter—before the big brother leaves, the book of Death and other folklore shelved and soon forgotten.
    Just as a hand needs to be burned before it’ll learn to avoid the stove, the young sibling assuredly finds his way to the lounge, a throne of blankets and pillows soon erected before an electronic altar.
    He never believed in the appetite of electricity until he tumbled headfirst into the maw of his television.
    Serrated teeth of static hooked into the vulnerable flesh of his frontal lobe—sinking in, tearing, and releasing, the ceaseless gnawing of gray matter, chewed in tandem with the pulse of white noise—until he finally passed beyond the mandible, gliding over the cathode-blanketed tongue of daytime programming, plunging beyond the gullet and into a Technicolor gut that neighbors this century’s heart of darkness.
    Salvation sounds like a door bursting open when an older brother forgets their wallet on the kitchen counter, but sometimes the volume is too loud to hear what’s important. Brief parting words of Fix The Damn TV Because It’s Acting Up Again are lost amidst the buzz of monochromatic gnats, their Gaussian hum of static indicative of a broken signal.
    There the sibling sat, counting pixels on the walls, his senses continuing to consume the senseless. Like the excerpts from siren songs, concertos caught between the passing of channels, theme songs to hum when distracted at school. Like the digital images reminding the child of a faint memory as the walls of the stomach around him buckle from the sting of indigestion—firing synapses were an unexpected spice in the entrée. The channels may change but the pattern stays the same.
    When the older brother or parent or other caretaker eventually arrives, they may take a moment to grace the child’s throne, seeking a similar refuge. Sadly, they all realize that they’ve seen this episode before.
    At least dinner is served.

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