Jerry pretends he’s his dead mother. He wears her dress shoes and marches around the house slamming cabinets. He drinks coffee from mugs and smokes cigarettes until he coughs into the garbage.
What should I make for dinner? he asks the microwave. The kids are sick and I’m sick.
Jerry eats ice cream from the carton and stands over his mother’s bed wishing for her to come back. He drinks soda from 2-liter bottles with names like Dad’s Rootbeer and Dr. Buzz.
At night he wets the bed and in the morning confronts his shame in the mirror. I am not a wetty bed boy. I am not a wetty bed boy. I’m a man! With a bank account!
He can hear the voice of his mother telling him not to be ashamed. Some boys wet the bed, she says. It’s part of being human.
He slams the medicine cabinet and yells. I’m not human!
Jerry hides behind the sofa and imagines he’s a monster. He bares claws and sharp teeth and horns that protrude from his head. He roars at the coffee table and stomps on the area rug.
He watches bluebirds out the window and imagines squeezing them in his claws and eating them in one bite. The birds don’t notice him, even when he bangs the glass.
On Thursday he talks to the garbage man and the garbage man says, “shouldn’t you be in school?”
“There’s no one here to make me,” Jerry tells him.
“Where’s your mom?”
“She’s away.”
“What about your dad?”
“I never had a dad.”
“Me either.”
Jerry watches a butterfly land on a pile of trash with the grace of a shadow.
“Is that why you’re a garbage man?”
But the garbage man is already gone and won’t be back for a week.
Jerry walks around the backyard in a square, tracing the property line. Along the bushes, around the shed, imagining he’s a monster. His teeth bared, fingers curled like claws, horns protruding from his head. He roars and spits and yells at the sky and growls at the grass.
He eats the food in the fridge that is old and spoiled. The bread, the cheese, the milk. He makes coffee and imagines he’s his mother, hand on hip, looking out the window. He looks at his wrist which has no watch. He rolls his eyes and sighs loudly and shakes his head.
On TV, a man eats an airplane piece-by-piece. It’s a marathon on the unusual and strange.
Jerry stuffs a pillow under his shirt and imagines he’s his mother, who is pregnant with him.
He rubs his stomach and whispers, “It’s okay little Jerry, you’ll be out soon enough.” He drinks more coffee and eats more food, even though he isn’t hungry.
On TV, there’s a woman who has never cut her nails. They hang from her fingers like the skins of dead snakes.
Jerry walks the property line over and over. He gets to the water meter and throws up even though he isn’t sick. He’s only sick in the stomach.
On TV, a man has tattooed his entire body orange with black stripes. He has surgically implanted whiskers and his contacts make his pupils catlike and strange. He tells the camera he wishes for a tail. Until then, the cat man says, he can never feel whole.
Jerry eats all the food left in the house, even the pickles and the mustard and jar of olives. Today he is his dad. He stomps loudly around the house and the China rattles in the curio cabinet. He yells Bullshit into the basement and slams the bathroom door. He opens a beer and drinks it. It’s worse than the pickles but better than the olives. He wipes his mouth with the back of his arm and sighs loudly.
“Well,” he announces to the house, “I’m off to work.”
And he walks out to the driveway, where he’ll wait to join the garbage man.
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Kevin Sterne is an artist and writer living in Kingston, NY. He works in landscaping.
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image: “Friendlies” by Kevin Sterne
Rejection Letters 