Inside the house on Woody Drive
my Great-Aunt Ernie is seated in a rough green armchair
beneath my grandfather’s taxidermied deer
watching The Nature Boy Ric Flair
face off against Sting.
It is 1988.
My two younger brothers, eight and six,
are standing on either side of Ernie
double-lined athletic socks pulled
up to their knees,
flapping their arms like wings,
the way they do when they are excited,
their fleshy bodies sweaty from exertion
as they reach for the boiled green peanuts
and potted meat on Saltines
that Ernie
continues to hand them.
The last time we watched
wrestling with Ernie, she told me to shut up
when I reminded my brothers that wrestling was fake, which
I said only to watch their faces fall.
And when, over breakfast the next morning,
I tattled on Ernie to my grandfather
as he rolled his Prince Albert into paper,
“Oh, Ernie’s about as sour as day old piss,” is all he’d said,
by which I’d understood, “Pay her no mind.”
By age eleven, I’d sorted the six sisters of my grandmothers’ family into
overheard similes of sweetness.
Ernie was sour as piss but Sally was sweet as butterscotch and the rest fell somewhere in between.
I’m 45 now.
This past winter
at another aunt’s funeral
I was seated next to my cousins Joy and Janet
500 feet from where my grandfather and grandmother
are now buried.
I’ll fly away
Oh, glory.
I’ll fly away.
We’d all just sung.
Over egg salad sandwiches after the service, Joy and Janet
tell me about all how my grandmother used to cheat them at Rook,
how when my great aunt Helen got dementia,
and they knew it before Joy did,
they made her Helen’s partner on purpose
so they could watch Joy lose and laugh about it.
My grandmother was not sweet.
Maybe that’s where I get the thing in me
(sour as day old piss)
that wanted to watch my brothers’ faces fall
and know that I had done it.
Joy tells me more.
She tells me that Great Aunt Ernie had three sons who died:
one who fell into a fire, one who died by fever, and one who died by snakebite.
“He loved blackberry brambles, you see,” Joy said of that last dead boy, a cousin she never met.
And I remember Ernie
handing my fleshy flying brothers
their salty foods, saline for preservation.
I remember
their warm young bodies flapping between her and the screen
where that giant man pirouetted with Flair over his head, hurling him to the mat with a sound like a cantaloupe being split.
Theatrics of it all aside,
Ernie knew
what I didn’t yet:
every fruit-loving fleshy boy who takes to flight—
when he falls—
falls for real.
–
Kelly Foster Lundquist directs the AFA in Creative Writing program at North Hennepin Community College in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. Her work has appeared in The Academy Stories, Image, and Good Letters, among other places. She is neck-deep in revisions of her first memoir, Beard.