Pew

by Catherine Lacey

Jack brought a hand down and threw his brother to the gravel. You better—you better say you’re sorry, the boy said from the ground. You better tell Jesus or I’ll tell him myself. It don’t work like that, Jack said.

I felt this gentle urgency around her, a bruised kindness, as if something had been threatening to destroy her every day of her life and her only defense, somehow, was to remain so torn open.

But first we need to know these things. Do you understand? These are just how the rules work. I didn’t make them, but I do think it’s best that we follow them, don’t you? So that everything can be fair and orderly? You know, we treat everyone the same here—it’s what we believe. Everyone gets the same kind of respect. I stared out into the dark and still hot night and I listened to a thousand bugs singing the same note and I listened to the grass remaining still in the dark and humid air. There were many kinds of insects, I knew—I had seen many of them—but how many kinds of respect existed?

Did everyone feel this vacillating, animal loneliness after removing clothes? How could I still be in this thing, answering to its endless needs and betrayals? The room was all white and gray and the air was warm and the air hung on me and I hung in this flesh that all those unknown centuries of blood that had brought into being. I had to tend to this flesh as if it were an honest gift, as if it had all been worth it. Why did living feel so invisibly brief and unbearably long at once?

If you ask me, they shouldn’t ever put a picture of one of these durn politicians on the television. We shouldn’t know they durn names or they faces. He sounded both angry and happy, pleased with himself and displeased with the world. It’s what makes the whole thing a mess—they ain’t supposed to be looked at—they supposed to work. Same people that want the power want the fame, too, but I say we should never know them by sight or name—don’t you think that’d work out better? We should just know what they can do and what they’ve ever done for other people and what they believe, what they think of things.

Why did we use them against one another? Why did we think the content of a body meant anything? Why did we draw our conclusions with our bodies when the body is so inconclusive, so mercurial?

When someone says they heard something you did not hear, and they know you did not hear it, then you cannot tell them they did not hear what they believe they heard. They have heard their desire to hear something, and desire always speaks the loudest. It is the loudest and most confounding emotion—wanting.

Sometimes I think that nobody is just one person, that actually we’re a bunch of different people and we have to figure out how to get them all to cooperate and fool everyone else into thinking that we’re just one person, even though everybody else is doing the same thing.

Nobody’s mother should ever not be there, but my mother told me all mothers eventually are not there. I can’t understand it. I don’t even want to.

Through the crowd, in profile, I saw Hilda in a white dress. Her face looked smaller and softer and less clear than I remembered. I wondered what she would say, but I didn’t want to hear her say it. Did she feel she’d wronged or been wronged more in her life? Did anyone ever know which was true? How much harm did we cause without knowing it? How much harm did we cause when we were certain we were doing such good?