Page 32 - WTP Vol. V #4

saw it as her brush with pornography, and it Dieter just stood there with his mouth unhinged always made him a little nauseous and red around and his mother hanging about his neck like some the ears. epileptic chimpanzee. “Wait...you are actually
“Now, mom, everyone at work says my stuff has
never been better. Besides, I don’t need some She playfully swung back and forth on his neck. random auditory hallucination to give me in- “What are you kidding? This changes everything!” spiration.”
“That’s Emily’s voice, but I don’t see the strings,” she sighed.
“Everything?” he cautiously asked. “Everything,” she squealed.
Dieter took her hand in his and prepared for the worst. His mother had always detested Emily, to the point that she wore black to his wedding and threw the rice directly at his wife’s face. In fact, at their rehearsal dinner, she pulled him outside and started screaming about how Emily was going to distract him from his art, spend up all his money, and then eventually, leave him for a paint jockey, which was what his mother affectionately called a “real” artist.
She spent the rest of the day mapping out the poor zygote’s career in modeling, directing, and fashion design. For the first time in his life he felt like a used-up game cartridge, and he des- perately wanted somebody to save him or at least press pause.
“She’s going to ruin everything!” She screamed repeatedly, as Emily’s husky bridesmaids wres- tled her into a taxi, after being so loud that the entire dining hall emerged to see the source of the shrieking. He could never see his mother loving
It took three hours to make it to Pompano Beach, but he hadn’t even been on the road for more than twenty minutes before he saw them float- ing near an underpass. To him they were God’s snaggletoothed turds and they definitely did not disappoint. He thought of his mother gushing over his scaly Egyptian villains in his first big project, The Lost Son—basically men covered in golden armor, sporting alligator facial features and nasty cases of green psoriasis. Every time the undead hero ventured near the Nile they would rise out of the digital blue and snap at Isis’s for- gotten son. When they were inevitably defeated, their bodies would evaporate into a beautiful mist ranging from sea foam to forest green. His mother always looked so beautiful in green.
a child that had any level of Emily present in the genetic mix. She still blamed her for Dieter mov- ing out of the house, after he returned from col- lege, and canceling their long-awaited renesting phase. Four years had made her cling to him even more, and he was afraid she was going to claw at him over the thought of Emily giving him another “distraction.”
“Mom, Emily’s pregnant.” He had brought her to the zoo to drum up some happy childhood memo- ries, and if his mother did flip out, Dieter could al- ways count on the shit-flinging monkeys to make her look pretty sane by comparison.
“Are you seeing this?” Dieter screamed at the box in the backseat. It jarred a little when he brushed the car up against the guard rail.
Dieter watched as her face turned twenty differ- ent shades of pink. She flung her arms around him. “Oh, my God! I take back everything I ever said about the girl. She’s finally giving me some grandbabies.”
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“Shit...I almost lost a life,” he shouted, steadying the car. His cell phone rattled off the theme to Three’s Company.
happy for us?”
~
He hummed along and let it go to voicemail. The white noise started to filter in, taking the form of a busy signal overlaid with that same incessant screaming. This time it made his heart not only