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Personal Narrative-Grandmother

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Damnation By Firelight

After roasting marshmallows, the sticky sweet on my sons' fingers, my father stares into the coals, starts talking about his mother, my grandmother, my sons' great-grandmother. He tells of how she fought her death to the end, even under the morphine drip. Nonverbal tantrums on her bed.

She must have been staring at the approaching gates of Hell,

he says, in front of my children. His new wife nods solemnly in agreement, though she is too new to have ever met my grandmother. She offers a platitude....something about how horrible my grandmother was, something supportive to my father, but I cannot hear it at all...no matter how still I try to stay, no matter how still my sons try to stay. The blood is firing in …show more content…

Barrage....the sound each scripture makes against the trailer when it lands....like the beating of an empty trash can. Enough. I show myself, and bellow "Behold!" like some Old Testament prophet, like that woman in curlers inhaling her whole cigarette in one breath. Behooooooooold, You think you have the high ground!?...My father's big cartoon eyes, another barrage of arrows....they pass right through me, and trumpets sound above his head. The opening of the clouds....gold and light, like Sunday School, like a flannel board bitch-slap Jesus. The trumpets, the …show more content…

All is quiet, we are both on equal ground. I am wearing the bathrobe I wore in church; the skit about Joseph, dreamer of dreams... Facing off, my father and me, Spaghetti Western, Rage Fu Hustle, we are samurai pilgrims at the edge of war. We are still....apart from the wind blowing my bathrobe as well as terry cloth can blow....apart from my father's serene white comb-over wind-socking with the falling leaves...we are still. We are stone. Slow motion.....I begin, from the deep core from below my navel, a bellow......the wind shifts, follows the force of the bellowed leaves, hair, robes blown in the direction of my voice.....
My father's ears pin back like a dog about to be beaten...a dog's sad wince in a stiff wind.....Have mercy. Lord have mercy upon my father.

The dream goes on.... The harder I try to remember what happens, the tape ends...bubbles...melts away into light, but a voice, the narrator's voice, says, "if you understand the beauty in this, you understand the beauty of your father." (What was it? What was it!?)

This. My father, fat fish in both hands, almost bigger than he is, straining under the weight of his trophy, and to the camera, his young, self-conscious face.

The Trapper’s

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