Doomed

^{DECEMBER 21, 9:17 A.M. CST} Toilet Ambush, the Aftermath

Gentle Tweeter,

As an actor my mother hates sitting for still photographers. Fashion models, she says, are able to communicate themselves in a fixed expression, but an actor needs to use the pitch and volume of her voice, the motion of her gestures. Limiting an actor to a still, silent image is a reduction, as flavorless and aroma-free as a perfect snapshot of the most delicious mesquite-roasted, Cajun-rubbed tofu. That’s how absurd this feels: reducing Papadaddy Ben’s death to a blog entry. Mere words. To make you experience the scene fully I’d need to smear his warm dying blood on your hands. Instead of just reading this, you’d have to sit next to him on that concrete paved with dirt until his fingers felt nothing but cold. You’d need to take the biggest chunk surviving from my busted eyeglasses and hold it over his gaped-open lips while you prayed to see the glass fog even a little bit. Not that my parents ever taught me how to pray. Spurred by your gigantic panic, your feet would launch you out through the brown-painted bathroom door, sprinting down pathways across soft steps of dead grass, your soles slapping parking lot until you were waving for somebody’s attention from the edge of freeway traffic. Crying all the way. Hearing nothing except the loud sound of your lungs yelling air in and out. Without thinking twice you’d do jumping jacks between lanes of air-horning, headlight-flashing trucks and cars, and you’d perform all these verbs without seeing anything clearly. You’d be fluttering your blood-painted hands like red flags for some grown-up to please stop.

You’d need to go back, defeated, and see a warped scratched reflection of yourself in that belt buckle given to him by my mom in an earlier life, from back before she was a movie star. To really appreciate that long afternoon you’d need to see the dried flowers wicking up his blood. No longer faded, now flushed. Those daisies and carnations, reviving decades after they’d been picked, you’d watch them come back to life, blooming again in various shades of red and pink. Tiny vampires.

Even if my nana only boiled water in a pan, she’d scrub the pan before putting it away in the cupboard. That’s my Nana Minnie in a word: fragile. I couldn’t tell her the truth about anything.

Imagine being an expert witness to something you could never, ever tell anyone about. Especially not anyone you loved. I was going to hell. It’s why I know I’m evil. That’s the secret I’ve kept hidden from God.