Boomerang Children
By Matthew Dexter
Listen to a reading of this story by Matthew:
I lick my mother’s cremains off the sunbaked highway, meticulously, my muddy tongue flickering across the smooth double yellow line, sucking cremains from soggy cigarette butts, kissing kaleidoscopic clumps of muck. Sweaty paramedics scoop me toward their ambulance with the majesty of rainbow sherbet ice-cream into a waffle cone.
My mother lit my head on fire cooking blueberry pancakes when I was seven. Whenever I eat at an IHOP, I inhale singed eyelashes and scorched eyebrows. My husband lost his face in Afghanistan. A humongous roadside bomb ripped through Adam’s blast-proof truck. I stood frozen on fire as my mother smothered the flames and rolled me across the cold linoleum with the frenzied reckoning of a suicide bomber.
Freddy Krueger sleeps in my bed, our children catapulted into conniptions, Adam rarely leaves the house. Reality is creepy enough without seeing a monster in Taco Bell. I whisper lullabies into the deformed hole where Adam’s ear melted off.
“I hit the median. Mom’s urn careened out the sunroof.”
“Why lick her cremains?”
“I always wanted to ride in the back of an ambulance,” I say.
“I’m just happy you’re alive,” Adam says.
Adam’s vision is perfect. Jesus spared his eyeballs. Sometimes, I wish Adam’s eyeballs were burned to dust instead of his gorgeous face. Our boys are passed out in the backseat. They’re old now. Adam no longer petrifies them. They’re monsters. They terrify us. We keep them close to make sure they don’t overdose. Both boys moved back into our basement last winter. Adam says that politicians send teenagers to die in foreign deserts because it makes them feel alive.
“Presidents can’t be shot,” Adam says, “they’re too delicate.”
“This generation is so lazy—nobody assassinates presidents anymore,” I say.
Adam laughs. At least, I think he does. It’s impossible to tell. Adam’s wrong though—presidents can be assassinated. I drill a hole in the trunk of my Kia Telluride and sculpt a sniper’s nest out of sleeping bags and urinate into Gatorade bottles, waiting all weekend in the Walmart parking lot for the president’s limousine. I neither ambush nor fire at the Beast, but I would have failed. Hornet ammunition from Adam’s bolt-fire rifle is a carnival of chicken eggs. The president’s heavily armored vehicle is bulletproof, blast-resistant, sealed to withstand biochemical attacks.
“How was your weekend?” Adam asks.
“Great. Aunt Abigail stopped smoking Marlboro’s out of her tracheotomy hole.”
Adam nods. I smell rancid and alive.
“That’s great, baby.”
Adam emboldens my extramarital affairs. Making love to a burn victim is like struggling to swallow a sparkle of fireflies.
Mucus oozes down the half-empty urn, beachballs bounce with each fat pothole, the plastic beach toys scratch my mosquito bitten ankles; an elderly surfer flicks an ash from a canoeing spliff.
“Nothing worse than sunburns,” a mother warns her toddler.
“Asinine,” Adam says when the woman and little girl vanish out of earshot.
I spray Adam’s face with the Banana Boat 360 Sunscreen Mist ’til it oozes down the craters on the dark side of his cheeks into the scarred bunkers of Jalalabad under his Adam’s Apple.
“Think the kids will be safe?”
“It’s only one afternoon.”
Adam lost his face faster than my virginity in the Burger King parking lot.
“They’ll be fine.”
We build a sandcastle and puncture its moat into the Atlantic Ocean. Juvenile delinquents venture closer to inspect our kingdom—glimpses of Adam daze the younger children and an elderly lady shrinks as if under the energy of a Shia bomb. Adam rolls a spliff and sprinkles Mom’s cremains into a gutted cigar crammed with Granddaddy Purple. I drizzle cremains into a labyrinth of turrets and parapets.
We hold hands, alive, courageous, fearless of whatever combat awaits us in the spacious living room of our house donated by the Wounded Warrior Project. The television spills lies onto our front lawn as Adam pulls my Kia Telluride into the garage. Our children slouch, drooling into their La-Z-Boys.
“They’re still breathing—bring the Narcan!”
We crack our swollen knuckles hard ’til dawn, crying to a bulbous moon washing my mother’s cremains into the ocean. Old America gone forever. I feel its funeral in my bones. A naked America bubbles before bloodshot eyeballs in a carnival of fireflies.
Matthew Dexter lives and breathes in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. His fiction has been published in hundreds of literary journals and dozens of anthologies. Best known for eating shrimp tacos and drinking enough Pacifico to kill six blue marlins, he’s the Lil Wayne of literature. Matthew is the author of the novel The Ritalin Orgy and the story collection, Slumber Party Suicide Pact.