The First and Last God-Damned Stupid Birthday Present - An excerpt from The Pupils of an Inflated Giraffe
For his mother's forty-fifth birthday, Elevator, age nine, had picked
out a pair of twin black mollies- the best two fishies in the whole
world, he'd declared, after examining the entire store's inventory one
by one. Along with these he'd purchased a little tank and a sack of neon
red rocks, and then paid for it all with his
own money, money he'd saved
up from his allowances for the better part of a year, accruing a little
extra by digging between the sofa cushions and in the cup next to the
dryer for change that had fallen from pockets. He'd even fashioned a
little coupon for his mother's choice of two additional fish using
crayons and yellow construction paper, and a little note that said,
simply, Mommy I love you. His only motivation had been to make
her
smile on her special birthday night, just once. She didn't smile often.
On the big night Hershey had taken a single look at the gift, peering in
at the two dark finned creatures wandering obliviously throughout the
water, while Elevator stood in his overalls beside her, his toes
tingling inside their socks at the joy of finally getting to give what
he'd picked out months before. After a second she took a final drag off
of her cigarette, dropped the butt into the fish tank, and muttered in a
smoke-laden voice just loud enough to be audible, I wanted
chocolate. She then took immediate leave of the table and went to
lock herself in her bedroom for the rest of the night, as well as most
of the next day, while her birthday cake, handmade by her two boys under
the watchful eye of their father, Archibald, had gone uneaten, and was
finally given to the neighborhood trash men two days later.
Archibald, whose concrete-sealed fate lay only eighteen days in the
future, had consoled Elevator by suggesting that he take the pets in as
his own, which at first seemed like a paltry commiseration after his
mother's disappointment. But later, after sitting at the kitchen table
for a solid hour, watching two floating bodies wiggle around inside the
their transparent universe, appearing so set off from the rest of the
world, so simple and perfect, Elevator had figured maybe it wasn't so
bad that his mom didn't like the gift; he'd get his own use out of it.
That realization had allowed him enough breathing room to go to bed
without bursting into tears in front of his brother, who was in his own
fit of disappointment due to the fact that his own gift, a mail-order
handkerchief monogrammed with the initials H.K., hadn't arrived on
time, and thus he had no sympathy to dole out; he'd given up on trying
to make his younger brother feel better about being let down by an
manic-depressive, OCD, chain-smoking mother who had God knows what going
on inside her head, who treated everyone around her as if they were
personally responsible for the degradation of the world, the disease,
the traffic jams, the sold-out boxes of favorite ice-cream at the
grocery, and anything else that had ever gone wrong in the history of
recorded time. Elevator went to sleep that night knowing that the fish
at least would always be there, gaping at him in awe, not judging him
for weighing a bit more, well, a lot more, than the other kids his age.
But when he woke the next morning and ran sleepy-headed into the kitchen
to give a pinch of flake food to his friends, the aquarium was empty,
sitting upside-down next to the sink, dripping dry. For a second
Elevator was lit up with the belief that his mother had changed her
mind, that maybe she liked the fishies after all, and had decided to
move them to a larger bowl. He became overexcited to go find her, to ask
what their names were going to be, to feel better about it all. First,
though, he rushed to the bathroom to wash his hands and comb his hair;
he had to clean himself before he'd be allowed to speak to her, as she
refused to hold communion with unsightly brats who can't keep themselves
clean, and also to pee out all that had built up in his kidneys
throughout the night. There, in front of the toilet with his undeveloped
manhood in his little fingers, he froze, in horror at the sight that lay
before him: his two tiny pets, floating bottom-up in the toilet bowl,
surrounded by a cloud of bright yellow urine and a death shroud swab of
soaked toilet paper. He stood there, not knowing what to do with
himself, his breath wrapped somewhere inside his intestines, until his
mother passed by the door dressed in her Sunday best, evidentially
heading out with friends for birthday shopping at the outlet malls, and
stopped to say,You won't play with yourself in my house, little
mister. Put that dirty thing away, then flushed the toilet for him,
and continued on.
Blake Butler edits for Lamination Colony. His other work, which has been published at Eyeshot, Haypenny, Word Riot and so forth, can be found at Deadwinter.com.