Aloha

Michael Karpinski
Email: Mikarr785@aol.com
Previous Publications: Stirring V1:E2

ALOHA
"There, you see?" Maria presses her hear to the door, listens. "Yep, there he goes. Going… going… gone. The fucker."
I begin to breathe again.
"Real sorry 'bout that," Maria says, lighting up a new cigarette with those same thick lips she'd been using before. "My boyfriend - he's one violent jealous motherfuck, let me tell you. Smacks me around just for the fun. Without even proof. You see these bruises under my eyes?"
"No," I say. Because I don't.
"Well, they're there all right," she says. "And lots more where those came from - in places I'm still too much a stranger to you to acquaint you with."
I find myself imagining Maria's bruises as great purple tattoos, sketched rough and unsubtle into the sinister, swastikated shapes of scorpions and skulls; bones and black widows. In dusk's diminishing light, she is becoming prettier - almost pretty - in a prime street corner sort of way. Her hair is long, unwashed, and past-due for a tinting. Her breasts are flatter, less flabby than mine. Her make-up: not quite Kabuki, but close.
Suddenly, I am aware that Maria has spoken to me.
"Beg your pardon?" I say.
"I said, 'How would you feel about saving my life tonight?'."
"Beg your pardon?" I say.
"Well, I couldn't help noticing this nice cushy couch you got here." Maria drops onto the couch and starts bouncing up and down. Her legs are spotted with the scars of savagely scratched-at bug bites, and, frankly, could use a shave. "Goshdamn if this isn't one of the cushiest couches I've ever come across. I bet even a queen could sleep on this couch."
I can hear my mother's "Ha!" all the way from Hell, followed by the unmistakable, unshakable sound of one of her coughing fits beginning to kick in. This was the sound I had lived with almost constantly at the end, as though my mother's lungs had been packed with shattered glass.
"So hey what do you say neighbor?" Maria says.
"Beg your pardon?"
"I was just saying what a super-great favor it would be if you could see fit to let me sleep on this nice cushy couch you got here tonight - what with my boyfriend being of such an unforgiving frame-of-mind and all."
"I'd love you to stay," I say. And I mean it. I mean it more than anything I've ever said.

That night, sleeping fully-stretched in my mother's bed, I dream of Maria. We are in a church with my mother, the minister, and the two stunned teenagers I'd watched cover my mother with dirt not twenty-four hours before. They had worked without shirts, and I had watched them, cowering behind a convenient tree, as the naked blades of their backs had rippled in their skins with every dip and pitch of their rusting shovels. It was as though they had sharks inside them. Baby sharks. Young; indestructible.
But in the dream, in the church, these boys appear fully-clothed and somehow savagely unattractive. My mother walks me past them, down the aisle to where my Maria awaits me in a baggy black bikini, a tender reminder of our genesis in lightning.
To the minister's delighted surprise, I replace "I do" with "I am."
To my blind, smiling face, Maria - my messiah - sighs, "Aloha."
And, thus, we are one, standing together in the bright, grainy shade of stained glass, our perversions purged, our sights set on assuming our predestined positions in the factory of family.
"Congratulations," the minister intones to me, symbolically drawing a cross on my chest with one holy hand. "You are poet no more."
I turn to find my mother in tears.
But they are happy tears.
I have made my mother happy.

Morning arrives with sunny bright promises of moonlit honeymoons and set-aside rooms painted pale baby blue; of station wagons with shanks emblazoned with balsa wood; of Tooth Fairies, Easter Bunnies, and Santa Clauses - all of childhood's lies made believable again.
I bound from my mother's bedroom, intent upon bestowing a sweet good-morning buss on my bride-to-be's cheek.
But my myth of her has shattered in the night, like stained glass trapped within a sliver of thunder.
Our Eden has been stripped to bare walls and carpet. Where diamonds once shined, there are now only troubling open spaces, distressingly free of dust. My sockets have been stripped to naked, gaping cunts. Unfucked; juiceless. Me; my mother. Me and my dead, dead mother and the Comet and the mops and maybe - just maybe - enough pills left to polish off the job.

Queer word, "Aloha."
It goes both ways.
It has no end.