After your parents’ jet crash, you’re called home from mission work to hunt down photo albums for the funeral slideshow. Not much in Boston, the house you grew up in, so you search the attic at the Stockbridge place, find a wooden box made of unfinished boards, covered with your baby blankets.
Inside, there are all these napkins, folded cocktail napkins. Some Fridays, after your lacrosse games, you would all go to Woodman’s, or maybe Union Oysters, where they’d scribble on napkins, pass them back and forth, giggling and poking each other like kids. Love notes you figured, and thought your folks were cute dorks. You’d get embarrassed, say, “Stop!” And, they’ve kept them all these years, which aches. They read stuff like, “This little shit’s driving me crazy,” and, “That dress makes you look fat,” and, “There’s nothing but hell below.”
At, “Upon the end of the Circle we’ll suck pudding from the teats of [illegible],” you stop reading, dig deeper.
There’s a layer of polaroids of your parents at what looks like costume parties. In one, your dad’s got his arm around your mom and some other lady, all wearing phallus-nosed masks, sequined capes, and plaid, flannel pajamas—your Church of Christ parents. They descend into a torch lit cave. When you go for the next one, you see writing on the back in neat golden ink: ”Syphilis in ‘66!” Another is of your mom crouched between Acacia trees in some red sand desert, her limp and sweat-soaked hair spills from a safari helmet. She wears a khaki shirt and shorts, and grips an enormous rifle, a look of vicious concentration pulling her face rictus. The back reads: “Got the fucker ‘70.” The last one you check shows them naked and frolicking in a circular pit set in the stone floor of some old cathedral. The pit’s filled with pocket change and cash. Your mom splashes an armful of quarters, flinging them in an arc toward your dad. They’re fanned by shawled, topless women holding these enormous black feathers. They look hysterically happy. The back reads “Hail Mammon ‘59.”
Under all these pictures are two purple Crown Royal bags, full of fake IDs and bogus passports
Two Hallmark birthday cards you got your dad in elementary school.
A jewelry box that’s empty, save for a glass, gas station animal—a turtle—you bought your mom for Mother’s Day.
