Insurrections

by Rion Amilcar Scott

A week passed and then another week and yet a third without some dramatic incident, so Laura and Walter stopped listening for the end of Rashid’s life.

No other woman had fit in my arms that well. Can you imagine basing the rest of your life on something stupid like that?

Children do that to you. Make you weak and strong at the same time,

When he drank, it didn’t matter that the vague image he had of himself as a bigshot never came into focus. He was a nobody like everyone else he knew. A nobody out in the world but a bigshot in his house, at least in the eyes of Laura and his daughter, Anna. A beer, he found, helped him accept their admiration. Allowed him to accept the world’s ambivalence.

Eternity means someone always digging into your pocket, forever being distracted from your deepest desires, spending all your time doing something you don’t want to do in order to pay a petty light bill.

That’s what this family shit does, it burns you. Sets you on fire. Burns you to a fucking crisp. All my sense is burned from me. Everything. I’m gutted like a burnt-out building. I’m burned. I can’t stand.

There is such a breach I often can’t understand the language of the people here no matter how hard I listen.

When have you ever known God to keep a promise, the bowler-hatted man replied.

What a brief intense dizzying derangement. Slipping from yourself for a few moments. That’s how she described it and little by little, each time, less and less of her returned.

Daddy is in one of his moods, that steady persistent low-level blue. Every word is a bomb filled with cynicism. I’m always surprised by the burn of his napalm.

This broken man, reeling from daily compromise.

Men having fun could sure sound menacing sometimes.

Chess is like real life. The white pieces go first so they got an advantage over the black pieces.

You playing like the game’s done.

I’ve never been a religious man. My mother says that’s why I had such a hard time finding a job.

You a Riverbaby? I prefer Cross Riverian. Course you do, he said. Bougie niggas always prefer Cross Riverian. It’s better than being a baby,

Why do I carry this memory like cross wood on my back?

Certain things cause rivers of shame to well up in your chest whenever you recall them, and no matter where you go or what you do, there’s little chance of escaping those poisonous thoughts, little chance of not having to relive them from time to time. But there you go, trying to fill up your head with enough noise to drown out the insistent hum of shame.

Those we think of as friends, how easily they can be disposed of when it takes even the slightest effort to see them.

took it as I took all his actions in those days: as parts of an extended apology for the rough times.

They were all hand-me-downs my cousins wore in decades past, donated by my aunt when we were poor. To wear this outfit was to not accept our victory over poverty.

Three hard knocks on my door startled me. No one ever knocked. Knocking is nonsense when you own the house, my father said once.

Nowadays a minute is a minute and a day is a day and the ones leading up to something exciting feel no longer than any other minute or day. Perhaps I had experienced so few days and minutes as a young man that my sense of wonder could stretch time until it felt misshapen. Perhaps when I’m old, all of life will feel like little more than an instant, and maybe that’s why God’s day is a thousand years. What’s a minute to the man who has all the time?

I thought about White Jesus feeling the lash of his father’s hand striking him, choking him, whipping him, opening wounds all over his body. What else was the Passion but a cosmic spanking? White Jesus and I shared that in common. Just like White Jesus, I was confused by the bruising, and after my lashing, alone in my room I called out Why? but received no answer.

Did they not hear? Did none of it matter? Did they not know?

That’s according to my wife, who during the Great Hair Crisis of ’05 took it upon herself to become, at my expense and before no audience, the stand-up comedienne she had always dreamt of being.

The week before a haircut I always did enough research to fake my way through a sports conversation.

The most persistent rewards go to those who stay on their feet.