|
Here
is an excerpt from Joey Pinkney's short story "Like Father, Like Son"
featured in Peace In The Storm Publishing's The Soul of a Man: A
Triumph of My Soul Anthology:
Speaking of scrambled
eggs, there was something that I always heard after the trains came
through: a mixture of clanking, sloshing, and scraping. Like clockwork,
the sound of the eggs scrambling was one that would await me on the far
end of the house, each and every morning. It got to the point where I
could tell which fork and which bowl Mary was using. On this particular
morning, she was furiously fusing the yolk with the white using the
plastic fork with the three prongs one of our porcelain bowls. I
guessed that it was the white bowl with the brown trim around the edge.
I paused and thanked
God for waking me up that morning. I relieved myself, washed my face
and mentally prepared for battle. This gave the cliche 'I hate Mondays'
a new significance.
"Good morning." I figured I would enter the room and break the ice. I
slid my chair out, sat down and accidentally shifted the table.
"Morning..." Mary
barely said. She sounded like she was asking me a question. I silently
watched. Mary solemnly turned from the stove, looked at the table,
squinted at me, and paused to look back to the table. She stared at the
table for only a split second, but it felt like a whole minute. She
turned back around to finish scrambling my eggs. "You hurt my feelings
last night..." I could barely hear her over the sizzling grease. She
pulled out a spatula from the squeaky drawer.
And there it was…the
beginning all over again.
"I hurt your
feelings? By wanting to protect the safety of this household?" I
figured that if I'm going to go in, I'm going to go all in.
Her body stiffened as she turned around and pointed that old, melted
spatula at me.
"No! You don't love
Andre, and it shows!" I could see a mist of spittle spray the message
out of her mouth like a shotgun blast.
"Calm down. And stop
pointing that spatula at me. You know that ain't cool." I hated being
pointed at. It always reminded me of the time a cop pointed his gun in
my face for nothing more than chuckles and to impress his partner. I
was eleven and vowed to never be in that situation again. I told her
that story a million times, but she never stopped pointing things at me.
"You hate him...
Don't you..." She wasn't asking me. Mary was telling me. My world
stopped spinning. My face felt flushed with anger as her question
forced its way into my mind.
"Yeah, I hate him," I
said with anger lacing my every word. She gasped like a roach had
jumped out from my mouth. Before she could jump in and say anything, I
finished my statement. "I hate him so much that I call him my son, even
though he has always refused to call me anything but Terrence in the
eight years we've been a family."
Mary triggered a
strange spirit within me. I couldn't stop talking. "I hate him so much
that I sit down with him after I get home from work. Even though I'm
tired, I make sure he does all of his homework. Even though I'm tired,
I make sure he understands the lessons he should have learned in class
since the teachers have him all day."
Mary tried to jump in
the argument, but I rambled on. "I hate him so much that I take time
off of work during the day...to run up to the school with you...to
plead with the principal...to not expel him for smoking weed in the
girl's bathroom! The! Girl's! Bathroom!"
At this point Mary
was screaming at the top of her lungs, but I couldn't hear her. I only
heard my own words. "I hate him so much that I make it a point to talk
to him about being a Black man in America even though he strives to be
a low-life nobody."
With that last
statement, Mary dropped the burnt spatula on the floor in utter shock.
Chunks of scrambled eggs splattered on her feet and her eyes welled up
bitter tears. When I saw her lips trembling, I tried to tell her I was
sorry, but I couldn't get the words out. She ran out of the kitchen
shrieking, "Why God?!!"
After she slammed the
bedroom door shut, she cried at the top of her lungs and from the
bottom of her soul. I wasn't sorrowful. I was satiated. My soul was
serene. I felt like I just had superb sex, and I was spent.
I sighed as I scooped
the spatula off of the floor and rinsed it in the sink. I cleaned the
mess off of the floor that I had caused. I rinsed out the bowl she used
to prepare the eggs. That's when I noticed that she had used the white
porcelain bowl with the brown border. I dumped some eggs on a plate and
sat down at the table with my hot sauce. I clutched the fork with the
plastic handle and the three big prongs and bowed my head to pray over
my food. I was in peace as the storm caused by Hurricane Andre
surrounded me.
Pre-Order
your autographed copy of The Soul of a Man Anthology with FREE shipping
and handling! (If you order more than one book, all books will be
shipped to the same address.)
©
Copyright 2009 and beyond by Joey Pinkney. All Rights Reserved.
JoeyIsInIt.com
is a JoeyPinkney.com
website
|
