"Ethel: b. 1992” by Braden Spratt
He watches her eyes flutter open.
“Would you stop looking at me like that, asshole?”
He asks her what he was looking at her like.
“What do you mean like what? You know how you were looking at me.”
He tells her she looks at him the same way.
“No, I absolutely was not. You should be so lucky. It’s weird knowing you were looking at me right before I woke up.”
He tells her he counted five creases in her eyelids before she woke up.
“Five? You counted the creases on my eyelids? That’s some very serious pussy shit right there, sir.”
He apologizes for his pussy shit.
“Consider yourself forgiven. But you have to listen to this story. You’ll appreciate it. Yesterday I was jogging in Central Park. No, don’t interrupt me. If you interrupt me again I’ll put my shirt on and you won’t see these for a while.”
He’s silent.
“I thought so. Anyway, I’m walking through Central Park and I see this leggy woman walking through the park with a friend, and this guy comes out from a bush while they’re taking a selfie. At first I’m thinking she’s was getting attacked. Then I see her get excited. Then, I saw him get down on one knee. And the friend is videotaping the whole thing. Then, right as he is saying ‘Will you marry me?’ a wad of dirt flies in and hits him in the face. They didn’t know what to do. The woman turned. Her emotions hit a brick wall and bounced back in the opposite direction.
He begins to say something.
“What did I say about interrupting? Hand me my shirt.”
He does so, slowly. She asks if she has to put it back on.
“Yes, I have to follow through. If I don’t follow through you can’t learn. So, the woman turns and kneeling there this large black woman, her hair is all greasy and spiraled into springs, obviously homeless. She’s wearing a tattered pink tutu and has dead flowers tied in the knots of her hair. Apparently, she’s been sitting off to the left side of the path throwing a brick of mud at people when they walk by her. The leggy fiancé yelled at the woman with the dead flowers in her hair. ‘Fucking pyscho, this was my moment,’ and shit like that. She yelled a bit more while the man dusted himself off and the lady that had thrown the mud just laughed like she was seeing Louie C.K. do his standup or something.”
He asks why she is laughing.
“It’s funny.”
He asks her if she is a sadist.
“I’m not a sadist; I just appreciate it when things don’t go right. It’s like when I was younger and I would see a spider web. I’d take a stick and pull out a few of the strings until it made a large hole or part of the web collapsed.
He shows sympathy for the many spiders that have lost homes.
“Don’t feel bad for them, it was an improvement on nature.”
He asks again if she is a sadist. He smiles
“Well, if I’m a sadist, then I suppose you’d need some punishing right?”
He becomes excited and begins to fuck her. He finishes after her.
“If you keep this up I might want to see you again.”
He says he’d be okay with it.
“Of course you’re okay with it, you’re a man.”
He warns her of the dangers of putting gender constraints on him. He likes the way her face moves from confused to pissed to mischievous in a fluid moment. He tells her she has a pretty face.
“Wait, trigger words. That reminds me too much of my Aunt Margaret.”
He asks to know why Margaret makes her uncomfortable.
“Let me tell you about this bitch. She was a living absurdity. She was married to my mom’s eldest brother, Elijah. She wasn’t that old but I always felt like she was playing Ping-Pong with death when I saw her. She had this offensively hideous cheetah print dress with a matching shoulder-padded zebra print jacket. You think that’s crazy? She had a hat with plastic fruit on it that she would wear with it. She’d waddle over to me at the synagogue, pinch my cheeks, and say ‘What a lovely shayna punim.’ That’s ‘pretty face’ in Yiddish for you Gentiles. She caked herself with purple lipstick that cracked into lines when she smiled and she’d leave a big print on my cheek. She wore this perfume that smelled like what I would imagine the flowers in the homeless woman’s hair smelled like, and this powder-blue eye shadow that matched her nail polish and made her look like a sex-doll with frostbite. I still believe that I enter the beginning stages of shock when it comes to mind.”
He doesn't believe she was as bad as all that. He says, in fact, that she sounds somewhat sexy.
“No, she was worse than what I can describe. She actually lost a foot to diabetes. Right after she lost a husband, a son, and a cat.”
He asks if the cat died of feline diabetes.
“No, the cat got ran over by a car.”
He sympathizes for Margaret.
“Don’t be sorry, she’s dead now so she can’t worry about it.”
He asks how she died.
“Also ran over by a car.”
He asks to hear her other two favorite moments.
“You’re being awfully interrogative for a guy I met last night and had some casual sex with.”
He tells her he has an inquisitive nature.
“Okay, well, I’ll indulge you. The second favorite moment was when I found out I had been accepted to NYU. And the last one, is, of course, that amazing lay I had from that sexy guy I met when we ran into each other last night, stumbling around drunk in Washington Square Park.”
He laughs but asks her to take it seriously.
“What makes you think I wasn't being serious.”
He tells her that he has an inkling. He is excited again and has sex with her. When finished, he adjust himself to make room for her head on his chest.
“My favorite moment I can remember is the moment my granny gave me the necklace I’m wearing right now. It was on my sixteenth birthday. Well, me and my twin brother’s sixteen birthday. We had Granny out of the nursing home for the day. She called me into a private room right after we’d cut that cake. I brought a piece of red velvet with me to snack on. This was in the time when Granny started tending to have fewer lucent days that she did ‘days off,’ and would go on long speeches about how someone had stolen three coins out of her Silver Dollar collection or the time the boy that had lived on the other side of town had kissed her without asking her, and you never knew how long her stories would go.
“The first thing she did was lean in and give me a kiss on my forehead. Her lips were so dry if I hadn’t seen it I would have believed it was just two pieces of crinkled paper. Then she took my hand. Her hands were so hold and there was so much extra skin on them. I still look at my hands and see flashes of what they’ll be like in ten, twenty, thirty years, bloated and arthritic with purple and blue accents. Would you still want me if I had hand like that?”
He assures her that he would.
“Her hands were so cold I didn't even notice that she’d placed something in them until she moved her hands away. I remember looking down and seeing puddle of silver and knowing that it was an important moment. I stretched out the chain and held it in front of my eyes. A single pink pearl hung on the silver chain. I know this is stupid but my first thought was about geometry. I wanted to take a moment to appreciate how perfectly round the pearl was. It started in some oyster in the Pacific as a collection of sand and ended up on this chain, which currently rests amidst the hairs of your chest.”
He laughs.
“It was a moment I knew was coming but still hadn’t been prepared for. All of the women in my family have a necklace identical to this one. Do you want to hear the story of it?”
He does.
“This necklace didn't just come from the sea. It came through time. Granny was born in what was once Czechoslovakia in 1927. She had five brothers and three sisters. All of them were killed in the Holocaust except her and her little sister Rachel. Rachel is in Israel, now, living on a Kibbutz as far as I know.
“Her dad worked in town at the city hall and was well-known throughout the small town. When the Nazis took over the Sudetenland in 1938 her town fell under their jurisdiction. One day they were told to package all their things and get ready for a move. Her dad had heard rumors about the Nazis and decided they had to do something. He took all of his kids into the woods and they worked together to dig a big hole. My grandma described this to me 100 times. They took the family heirlooms from the house, wrapped them in sheets, and buried them in that ditch--the family menorah, jewelry, everything. The last thing they put in was a large wooden box that held the family china. Inside, there were two sets of china that he’d received as a wedding gift from his uncle who was in banking. One set had thin blue vines running like a web of veins around the tablets of the Ten Commandments, which was sitting in the middle of each plate, side plate, and bowl .The other set had a red vines doing the same. There was a full set of silver with gold accents on the bottom of each utensil.
“In the end, the war took the family and extinguished all but Ethel and Rachel.”
He conveys his sympathy.
“Don’t sympathize too much, they’re all dead. Sometimes things don’t work out right.”
He feels a light wetness on his chest.
“After the war, she came to America. She found a job working in a textile factory, where she met my grandpa. When she was fifty years old she told my grandpa Baruch that she had to go back. He told her she was insane and she told him that she was probably right. She then went on to tell him if he didn't help her make it there she would drive him insane with her.”
He laughs.
“They saved up. In 1980, she made it back to Hungary. My uncle Elijah, Margaret’s husband, went with her. She was afraid to fly so they had to sail across.
“The area had changed since my granny had been there but she walked right to the spot. She made my uncle dig, and dig, and dig. He thought she was insane too and she thought he was a whiner. She promised him the whole was deep. They’d had to make sure it was deep so no one else would find it. My uncle would talk about her drilling him to dig faster and harder at every family gathering until he die. Then Granny began to cry. She said, ‘I heard the tap of the shovel against metal and I felt my family. I heard the laughs, songs, and chants of the Chanukahs of years and years gone by when he unsheathed the silver menorah.’ It was all there—including this necklace. They bought three suitcases and traveled back across the Atlantic. Granny took the long strand of pink pearls that had belonged to her mother and put them around her neck.
“I’m named after her—Ethel.”
He tells her it is a pretty name. He tells her it is the prettiest name he has heard in a long, long, time.
“They brought it all back here. I remember most of it. I would get to use the china on my birthday and we would gather around the menorah on Chanukah together. I felt like all of Granny’s brothers and sisters inhabited the various artifacts brought back here.”
He asks if he could see the menorah sometime. He tells her it sounds too beautiful not to see.
“You couldn't find most of it now. Only God knows where it is. My cousin Carmen went off the deep end a couple of years ago. She had a heroin addiction, a marijuana addiction, a sex addiction, and evidently an addiction addiction. She stole most of it. She did it right in front of her too. Granny had just started slipping in her dementia. She thought it was her little sister moving things around to clean up because the rabbi was coming over. Carmen told her she was right. She probably would have tried to take the necklace if Granny hadn’t been wearing it. Only the necklace and two bowls survived the ransacking. It was after that we moved Granny into the home and Carmen into the psych ward. Granny decided to unstring the pearls and make a necklace for each of the women on the family to have.”
He moves his hand in soft strokes across her hair, and feels her breath on his chest. Her breathing has begun to match his.
“Sorry, yeah, that was a bit bleak wasn’t it? I meant to stop sooner. I meant to just tell you about my necklace. When she gave it to me she smiled. I think it says something that she could smile. I feel like I’m carrying them with me. All of it is inside. It came out of the ditch and it made it here. I think that’s really something.”
They lay there for an amount of time that does not matter outside of the aspect of them spending it together. He tells her it is probably many different somethings—each of them as important and wonderful as the last. He feels her smile against his chest.
He watches her eyes flutter open.
“Would you stop looking at me like that, asshole?”
He asks her what he was looking at her like.
“What do you mean like what? You know how you were looking at me.”
He tells her she looks at him the same way.
“No, I absolutely was not. You should be so lucky. It’s weird knowing you were looking at me right before I woke up.”
He tells her he counted five creases in her eyelids before she woke up.
“Five? You counted the creases on my eyelids? That’s some very serious pussy shit right there, sir.”
He apologizes for his pussy shit.
“Consider yourself forgiven. But you have to listen to this story. You’ll appreciate it. Yesterday I was jogging in Central Park. No, don’t interrupt me. If you interrupt me again I’ll put my shirt on and you won’t see these for a while.”
He’s silent.
“I thought so. Anyway, I’m walking through Central Park and I see this leggy woman walking through the park with a friend, and this guy comes out from a bush while they’re taking a selfie. At first I’m thinking she’s was getting attacked. Then I see her get excited. Then, I saw him get down on one knee. And the friend is videotaping the whole thing. Then, right as he is saying ‘Will you marry me?’ a wad of dirt flies in and hits him in the face. They didn’t know what to do. The woman turned. Her emotions hit a brick wall and bounced back in the opposite direction.
He begins to say something.
“What did I say about interrupting? Hand me my shirt.”
He does so, slowly. She asks if she has to put it back on.
“Yes, I have to follow through. If I don’t follow through you can’t learn. So, the woman turns and kneeling there this large black woman, her hair is all greasy and spiraled into springs, obviously homeless. She’s wearing a tattered pink tutu and has dead flowers tied in the knots of her hair. Apparently, she’s been sitting off to the left side of the path throwing a brick of mud at people when they walk by her. The leggy fiancé yelled at the woman with the dead flowers in her hair. ‘Fucking pyscho, this was my moment,’ and shit like that. She yelled a bit more while the man dusted himself off and the lady that had thrown the mud just laughed like she was seeing Louie C.K. do his standup or something.”
He asks why she is laughing.
“It’s funny.”
He asks her if she is a sadist.
“I’m not a sadist; I just appreciate it when things don’t go right. It’s like when I was younger and I would see a spider web. I’d take a stick and pull out a few of the strings until it made a large hole or part of the web collapsed.
He shows sympathy for the many spiders that have lost homes.
“Don’t feel bad for them, it was an improvement on nature.”
He asks again if she is a sadist. He smiles
“Well, if I’m a sadist, then I suppose you’d need some punishing right?”
He becomes excited and begins to fuck her. He finishes after her.
“If you keep this up I might want to see you again.”
He says he’d be okay with it.
“Of course you’re okay with it, you’re a man.”
He warns her of the dangers of putting gender constraints on him. He likes the way her face moves from confused to pissed to mischievous in a fluid moment. He tells her she has a pretty face.
“Wait, trigger words. That reminds me too much of my Aunt Margaret.”
He asks to know why Margaret makes her uncomfortable.
“Let me tell you about this bitch. She was a living absurdity. She was married to my mom’s eldest brother, Elijah. She wasn’t that old but I always felt like she was playing Ping-Pong with death when I saw her. She had this offensively hideous cheetah print dress with a matching shoulder-padded zebra print jacket. You think that’s crazy? She had a hat with plastic fruit on it that she would wear with it. She’d waddle over to me at the synagogue, pinch my cheeks, and say ‘What a lovely shayna punim.’ That’s ‘pretty face’ in Yiddish for you Gentiles. She caked herself with purple lipstick that cracked into lines when she smiled and she’d leave a big print on my cheek. She wore this perfume that smelled like what I would imagine the flowers in the homeless woman’s hair smelled like, and this powder-blue eye shadow that matched her nail polish and made her look like a sex-doll with frostbite. I still believe that I enter the beginning stages of shock when it comes to mind.”
He doesn't believe she was as bad as all that. He says, in fact, that she sounds somewhat sexy.
“No, she was worse than what I can describe. She actually lost a foot to diabetes. Right after she lost a husband, a son, and a cat.”
He asks if the cat died of feline diabetes.
“No, the cat got ran over by a car.”
He sympathizes for Margaret.
“Don’t be sorry, she’s dead now so she can’t worry about it.”
He asks how she died.
“Also ran over by a car.”
He asks to hear her other two favorite moments.
“You’re being awfully interrogative for a guy I met last night and had some casual sex with.”
He tells her he has an inquisitive nature.
“Okay, well, I’ll indulge you. The second favorite moment was when I found out I had been accepted to NYU. And the last one, is, of course, that amazing lay I had from that sexy guy I met when we ran into each other last night, stumbling around drunk in Washington Square Park.”
He laughs but asks her to take it seriously.
“What makes you think I wasn't being serious.”
He tells her that he has an inkling. He is excited again and has sex with her. When finished, he adjust himself to make room for her head on his chest.
“My favorite moment I can remember is the moment my granny gave me the necklace I’m wearing right now. It was on my sixteenth birthday. Well, me and my twin brother’s sixteen birthday. We had Granny out of the nursing home for the day. She called me into a private room right after we’d cut that cake. I brought a piece of red velvet with me to snack on. This was in the time when Granny started tending to have fewer lucent days that she did ‘days off,’ and would go on long speeches about how someone had stolen three coins out of her Silver Dollar collection or the time the boy that had lived on the other side of town had kissed her without asking her, and you never knew how long her stories would go.
“The first thing she did was lean in and give me a kiss on my forehead. Her lips were so dry if I hadn’t seen it I would have believed it was just two pieces of crinkled paper. Then she took my hand. Her hands were so hold and there was so much extra skin on them. I still look at my hands and see flashes of what they’ll be like in ten, twenty, thirty years, bloated and arthritic with purple and blue accents. Would you still want me if I had hand like that?”
He assures her that he would.
“Her hands were so cold I didn't even notice that she’d placed something in them until she moved her hands away. I remember looking down and seeing puddle of silver and knowing that it was an important moment. I stretched out the chain and held it in front of my eyes. A single pink pearl hung on the silver chain. I know this is stupid but my first thought was about geometry. I wanted to take a moment to appreciate how perfectly round the pearl was. It started in some oyster in the Pacific as a collection of sand and ended up on this chain, which currently rests amidst the hairs of your chest.”
He laughs.
“It was a moment I knew was coming but still hadn’t been prepared for. All of the women in my family have a necklace identical to this one. Do you want to hear the story of it?”
He does.
“This necklace didn't just come from the sea. It came through time. Granny was born in what was once Czechoslovakia in 1927. She had five brothers and three sisters. All of them were killed in the Holocaust except her and her little sister Rachel. Rachel is in Israel, now, living on a Kibbutz as far as I know.
“Her dad worked in town at the city hall and was well-known throughout the small town. When the Nazis took over the Sudetenland in 1938 her town fell under their jurisdiction. One day they were told to package all their things and get ready for a move. Her dad had heard rumors about the Nazis and decided they had to do something. He took all of his kids into the woods and they worked together to dig a big hole. My grandma described this to me 100 times. They took the family heirlooms from the house, wrapped them in sheets, and buried them in that ditch--the family menorah, jewelry, everything. The last thing they put in was a large wooden box that held the family china. Inside, there were two sets of china that he’d received as a wedding gift from his uncle who was in banking. One set had thin blue vines running like a web of veins around the tablets of the Ten Commandments, which was sitting in the middle of each plate, side plate, and bowl .The other set had a red vines doing the same. There was a full set of silver with gold accents on the bottom of each utensil.
“In the end, the war took the family and extinguished all but Ethel and Rachel.”
He conveys his sympathy.
“Don’t sympathize too much, they’re all dead. Sometimes things don’t work out right.”
He feels a light wetness on his chest.
“After the war, she came to America. She found a job working in a textile factory, where she met my grandpa. When she was fifty years old she told my grandpa Baruch that she had to go back. He told her she was insane and she told him that she was probably right. She then went on to tell him if he didn't help her make it there she would drive him insane with her.”
He laughs.
“They saved up. In 1980, she made it back to Hungary. My uncle Elijah, Margaret’s husband, went with her. She was afraid to fly so they had to sail across.
“The area had changed since my granny had been there but she walked right to the spot. She made my uncle dig, and dig, and dig. He thought she was insane too and she thought he was a whiner. She promised him the whole was deep. They’d had to make sure it was deep so no one else would find it. My uncle would talk about her drilling him to dig faster and harder at every family gathering until he die. Then Granny began to cry. She said, ‘I heard the tap of the shovel against metal and I felt my family. I heard the laughs, songs, and chants of the Chanukahs of years and years gone by when he unsheathed the silver menorah.’ It was all there—including this necklace. They bought three suitcases and traveled back across the Atlantic. Granny took the long strand of pink pearls that had belonged to her mother and put them around her neck.
“I’m named after her—Ethel.”
He tells her it is a pretty name. He tells her it is the prettiest name he has heard in a long, long, time.
“They brought it all back here. I remember most of it. I would get to use the china on my birthday and we would gather around the menorah on Chanukah together. I felt like all of Granny’s brothers and sisters inhabited the various artifacts brought back here.”
He asks if he could see the menorah sometime. He tells her it sounds too beautiful not to see.
“You couldn't find most of it now. Only God knows where it is. My cousin Carmen went off the deep end a couple of years ago. She had a heroin addiction, a marijuana addiction, a sex addiction, and evidently an addiction addiction. She stole most of it. She did it right in front of her too. Granny had just started slipping in her dementia. She thought it was her little sister moving things around to clean up because the rabbi was coming over. Carmen told her she was right. She probably would have tried to take the necklace if Granny hadn’t been wearing it. Only the necklace and two bowls survived the ransacking. It was after that we moved Granny into the home and Carmen into the psych ward. Granny decided to unstring the pearls and make a necklace for each of the women on the family to have.”
He moves his hand in soft strokes across her hair, and feels her breath on his chest. Her breathing has begun to match his.
“Sorry, yeah, that was a bit bleak wasn’t it? I meant to stop sooner. I meant to just tell you about my necklace. When she gave it to me she smiled. I think it says something that she could smile. I feel like I’m carrying them with me. All of it is inside. It came out of the ditch and it made it here. I think that’s really something.”
They lay there for an amount of time that does not matter outside of the aspect of them spending it together. He tells her it is probably many different somethings—each of them as important and wonderful as the last. He feels her smile against his chest.