Basement

By Scott Archer Jones

Two middle-aged half brothers kneel in front of the dish-carton as it lies on its side–their mother’s home-made trunk. Instead of paper-wrapped porcelain, it holds photos, clothes, bric-a-brac in its coffin-like maw–their mother’s neutron star having sucked in indiscriminate bits of mass from her decades. Stevie reaches in his brown spider hand, flips out a photo of a ’63 Comet. “What the fuck is this?”

Robert, taking it in a soft white paw, clicks his tongue. “That’s your Dad’s car. Already ten years old when he bought it and ten years older than that when they first dated. They had their first intimacy there in the front seat on a Friday night.” He leans over to bump his muscled shoulder into Stevie’s bony one.

“Get off me, you perv. How come you know this and I don’t?” Stevie flicks the photo into a forty-gallon trash bin.

Robert glances sideways at him. “It’s okay. He didn’t die in that car–it was a Buick.” Kneeling on the cellar floor makes his knees ache. He tugs out a table runner from the maelstrom–edged in green and red, a tree motif. Wax stains run down its center. “She loved Christmas.”

“She hated it. All those holy-holy parishioners visiting. Pastor-wife shit ruined her.” He fishes out a cheese tray and six wax reindeer melted into miniature godzillas. “Never should have married my pop after your dad ran off.” Stevie believes Robert’s invisible dad is better than the one who betrayed him with a funeral. He steadily pitches stuff into the trash.

Robert grabs, snags something in mid-air. “Hey, Joshy and I could use that cheese tray.” He himself has gathered three blouses, two faux-marble candlesticks, and a set of Carling bar coasters. These are too trashy to keep and are headed to his good-will box, six feet away.

“Joshy, Joshy, Joshy. All the time it’s the little J, watching you, sucking up anything you got.” Stevie exhumes a dirty tablecloth wrapped around a dozen automotive ashtrays.

Robert sticks on the phrase, “anything you got.” He coughs. “Those ashtrays are your Dad’s. You might want to keep them–practically a collection.” Robert toys with some newspaper-wrapped globes. “I hate it when you’re nasty about Josh. I’d think you’d like him better, since he’s called Joshy and you’re Stev-EEE.”

“Stevie is like surfer, and Joshy is like so faggot. Those things you got there in newspaper are blue glass snifters from her first marriage, your marriage. She and my Dad used to get toasted with them. ‘Oh, they’re so cute. Have another. Don’t mind if I do.’ ” His voice drips sing-song like Japanese TV.

“Josh was your friend when you were young. You did everything together.”

Stevie crushes a styrofoam-and-cardboard Eiffel tower. “He was my first cousin and we lived in this hell-hole town and he was a jock back then. Before you.”

Robert’s head rocks. With a reflex gesture, he picks out a lime-green Smurf. “You don’t like Joshy and you don’t like their drinking. What do you like?”

“I used those blue glasses sometimes. I’d fill one with brandy after dipping a line on the rim, like a margarita. I’d snort the rim, then throw the booze back.” Stevie chunks a half-dozen Maine postcards into the trash.

Robert sets a faded cardboard box of checkers onto his give-away pile. “After my time. When did you start drugs?”

“Smarter to ask when I quit. I started the night she had the miscarriage in front of my bedroom door. I swallowed four of her Valium. Good thing I puked them all up.”

“You were eleven!” The used cross-word puzzle books drop onto the floor.

“Yeah, well, she did it to me, not me to her. How’d you like to find out how nasty life is, as you cover your mother up with a sheet while she lies there bleeding.” He glances over at this brother of his. He hopes to see shock or disgust. Something besides acceptance.

Robert knits his shoulders together, a white buffalo kneeling beside a brown, manic scarecrow. “It was hard–for you, for her.”

Stevie scoops up three books–his own high school annuals. They hit the trash like thunder. “No–not for her. Or you. ‘Robert would understand. Robert knew how to help out.’ Robert this, Robert that. Well I say, Fuck you, Bob.”

“Screw you too.”

A crypt-like pause. Stevie asks, “How come there isn’t more of your father’s crap in here?”

Robert picks at the box with one hand. “He took it with him. You never married.”

“I’m not the only one. Oklahoma would rather blow-to-bits than let you two marry.” Stevie grins like the entire state has vindicated him.

Robert sidles around on his knees. “Joshy and I have something like family, something I lost with her.”

Stevie asks him, quick and sharp, “What did that feel like? I never had it to feel.”

Robert rocks back on his heels. “Feel like? I was pushed away by my mother, the most godawful thing. And you want to know what it was like when I had her?”

Stevie hurls an old German beer mug across the basement, shattering it against the wall. “Goddamn it. It was an accident. I told you I didn’t mean to.”

“You shouldn’t have told her. It wasn’t your life to tell.” Robert heaves himself off the floor, thrusts his hands on his knees to straighten up. His head bumps the fluorescent light; his blond lank strands revealing his decades-old hair plugs. “Listen, you kept this stuff for ten years. Why don’t you just keep it all.” He lurches towards the cellar stairs.

Stevie snaps to his feet, the jack-in-the-box. “Sure, have it your way. I’ll keep all this, like I care a shit about it.”

From the stairs the voice drifts down. “That’s right. You live with it.”

“Hey. Call me next week. Okay?”

About the author —

Scott Archer Jones currently live in northern New Mexico, after stints in Louisiana, Texas, the Netherlands, Scotland, and Norway. He was on the masthead at the Prague Revue. He launched a novel in 2014 with Southern Yellow Pine, Jupiter and Gilgamesh, a Novel of Sumeria and Texas, and The Big Wheel in 2015 with Southern Yellow Pine. Fomite Books published a rising tide of people swept away in 2016 and published And Throw Away the Skins in 2019. All have won FAPA Silver and Gold President’s Awards, and Jupiter took an IPPY Bronze and was a finalist in two Eric Hoffer Award categories. A rising tide of people swept away was shortlisted for the 2019 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize.

And Throw Away the Skins has won an EVVY in Women’s Fiction from Colorado Independent Publishers Association.

What is more important is that Scott cuts and splits all his own firewood, lives a mile from his nearest neighbor, and writes grants for the community.

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