In Tongues

by Thomas Grattan

I tried on Nicola’s expensive sweaters, ate sculptural pieces of chocolate, and found it all boring. I wondered if wealth was a kind of deadening, though when I remembered how little I had in my bank account and the heaviness that had plagued me back in Bay Ridge, I grew angry at my easy forgetting.

There was no single event to point to, no hinge between before and after, though when I tell people about him, it’s sometimes easiest to cite the accident or his unswerving devotion to the Lord rather than what was truer, that like an artery’s blockage, our end was an accumulation. “Yes and no,” I answered. “Very specific,” Janice said. But there was no easy answer to give. I could tell her that my father confounded me, that in moments I’d loved him with a fierceness my young self didn’t know what to do with, that I’d been ashamed of him with that same wild fire, and learned early how loving someone meant to also see the ways they were pathetic and small.

i felt this too deeply

It was strange how little I’d thought of Dad in the two years he’d been gone. I’d never written or called, even on holidays. As we turned into the parking lot in front of his small cinder-block church, its lawn a competition between leggy azaleas and crabgrass, it hit me that I’d hurt him, that I’d woven myself so tightly in my own role as abandoned that I couldn’t consider what lay beyond its knitted pattern.

these flashbacks are progressively ripping me up

we were loved but unworthy, I grew restless and wanted to feel something else, so I opened my mouth and let out a noise. The sermon continued. I stood up, opened my mouth again, hoping for sounds like the others I heard, guttural and ancient-sounding and urgent. But what poured out of me was soft and nasal, packed with pauses and a repeated “Um.” I closed my eyes, hoping that would help, that whatever spirit hovered just above, like a rattled insect, would land. I moved into the aisle, on my knees, and wished I could stop though it didn’t feel like something to bow out of. I opened my mouth again. Different iterations of blah, blah, blah. The spirit might come, show Brian he was right, that if I let it in, I would no longer imagine his dick and ass, the way his breath might feel against my neck. But that was desperate pretending. I shifted into English. “I want the wicked thoughts to leave me,” I said, my shooing motion answered by a few tentative hallelujahs. I cringed at the word wicked, sure I’d never think things through enough before starting them. All eyes were on me. I tried again. Words in Spanish came, followed by the few phrases of Korean an exchange student had taught me, then the nonsense sounds of a Michael Jackson song.

lmaooooo