Teachers Who Require Family History Assignments Should go Fuck Themselves

after Ollie Schminkey

Still no one told me how my grandpa died. He and all his boys had names with the letter “T.” Like they’re all semblance of variation to him and I’m wondering how I can get even smaller. How tiny can I make my eyes without shutting them? My mother doesn’t even acknowledge my father’s family until they seem to intrude with kindness. She ask me whyI’d want to vacation up north where they live. There’s nothing there. Sure, trees. Their economy so bad. No jobs. She tell me without telling me I’m wrong. Next answer.

Everything is bipolar when you scrounge deep enough. My mother sells my father’s and my sister’s artwork under her own name. My father used to throw his own shit at cars with his brothers. Beatings were a routine like brushing teeth before bed. He never touched me. Maybe that’s fear. He tells me stories of Cold War Germany and how the Czechs would moon them across the border on their walls. He tells me how he smashed a man’s face in with the bronze sheen of a beer bottle because he was harassing every woman and military man in the bar.

He tells me never to salt a man’s coffee. He lives on it the way I shoulder social anxiety and depression with cheap college backpack and a one eyed glance at doorways. I don’t speak to my aunt who has onset dementia and a failing nervous system anymore. She used to give me CDs and books and movies. My uncle hasn’t changed a day.

My mom speaks groundhog day 20 questions to me. My sternum knots itself with her inborn smoking habits 25 years in the making. She still thinks it’s a secret. We hold onto addictions like the want of eye contact and smiles when in love. I hold onto my already dead sister after her stroke and brush her hair like we’re ten and seven again. Grandma’s dead at 88 and the house sold too cheap and no one has Thanksgiving together anymore. We are not together. I fail at suicide ten days later. Everyone still asks me the same questions or not at all. Nothing has changed. Funny how temporary death really is.

Internal heart, meet wind. Be gone. Love like wave always returning to smother kiss on beach.

Nothing ever changes.