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Nonfiction

Nate Kenny

1 

It will be the razor’s edge of spring that bleeds out onto you the first dribbles of summer when you crouch in the grass with your friends to make fairy houses. The brilliant flaking playground equipment will stretch above you like Gothic vaulted ceilings ribbed in primary colors and consecrate the recesses of your fingernails with paint chips as you smell the heat coming off of the asphalt. This flat stone will be their bed, this bottlecap their stool, these twigs the picket fence. 

After the fairy houses are done, you will make what you will call cootie catchers; others will make them into little lion’s maws by scribbling the inside red. Teeth will gnash as your fingers open and close. Mouths of such totalizing red will only ever exist in children’s artwork, where the muddled polychromatism of the real world is stratified and exaggerated into its most basic wavelengths by the prism of childhood. It is in this that the lion’s maw and the cootie catcher will come to foretell the future—elementary school, pre-science becomes prescience—from under little flaps in folded construction paper.  

8

The first track from the 1972 Elton John album Honky Château, “Honky Cat,” will be the first thing that floats out of your first record player, and

you will nearly float with it. Music will have never bestowed upon you such a lightness of being and it will never again, never in quite the same way. But, of course, someone else, your aunt, will be sitting near you as “Honky Cat” plays, and all the euphoria that the needle will dig up from the record’s grooves and eject outwards upon your soul will be made invisible on your face. How embarrassing it will be to be moved. How embarrassing it will be to call anything your own. 

You and your family will then take the record player down to the lake with an extension cord, and you will listen to Dark Side of the Moon by the water all the way through, flipping it, of course, halfway. This will launch you into the future, in a ruthless vision: You will play this for your father when his body begins to fade, having lugged that very record player into the hospital elevator and past the nurses and their watching eyes, having carefully taken the record from its now-time-worn sleeve with that ubiquitous cover art, and you will both remember that time by the lake when you listened to it together for the first time as Clare Torry tattoos her voice across “The Great Gig in the Sky.” Your firsts, as it will happen, will always contain your lasts.  

4

You will be sitting in the breakfast nook at home when your father decides to tell you about killing in self-defense. You won’t be able to remember how the conversation began, or how it ended, but you will know it was late spring or summer, as per the shorts you will remember wearing, accompanied by the last memories of your pink smooth legs that the shorts revealed in contrast with your father’s trunks of thatch. You should keep in mind that your father will have not had to teach a child before; you will be his first. You will remember the glance up at the air, the pause to gather words, his confusion as to how one could ever attempt to desublimate the young buzzing atoms before him into a moral being, before he finds some words and thrusts them back out: “If I were to try and hurt you and Mama, you would have the right to kill me.” 

Your first thought will be of your father’s hand gasping towards you in the dark, in slow-motion, not the completion of harm but the chilling suggestion of it. It will be the first time you will have thought of a real person, a person you know, in such a way. In the future, you will think of the myriad ways you had been primed for violence—the cops drifting past your classroom, the neighborless white suburbia that wreathed you, the porn on your iPad, which are of course the ways you will always be primed, like it or not—that may have had their knots loosened by your father’s collapse of the Other into the Self. It will seem to you that one of the first steps in shaping the male authoritarian impulse is making sure that the first dangers are perceived as bursting into the home, not from it (along with a shaping of the definition of “the home”). You will look back, inflected with social constructionism and tabula rasa psychology, and wonder if the difference of a few words—“I” to “someone,” “me” to some other pronoun—would have had the power to draw another’s—an Other’s—blood in the future. You will depress your index finger and surge lead into someone’s fleeing back—if your father had not failed to turn the masculinizing key. But you will also wonder what power the words he did choose had, on what gene they have been etched, of what scenes they have been subtext. 

He will apologize, and console you, and say it was a bad example, but the examples will not end there. 

5

The story you will tell to claw at masculine capital throughout middle and high school will be of a so-called brush with death on a North Carolina beach. You were swimming with your mother, so it will go, with inflatables around your toddler biceps when she spotted a threatening mass not much farther from the shore than you were. She quickly grabbed you, as you will tell it, and began dragging you out of the ocean, tendrils snapping at your heels. You will remember the lifeguard that wrested the jellyfish from the ocean and how his taut clay-tinted calves lanced away from the quickly greying invertebrate that deflated in the wet beige sand. Every time you will tell the story the jellyfish will get closer, and closer, and closer, and not just in the story. 

2

“John Wayne Gacy Jr.” by Sufjan Stevens will be playing in your headphones as you look up on YouTube how to make a paper fortune teller. The idea will come like a defibrillator to your biological memory, a yellow highlighter shot across the stanzas of your DNA—you will have spent the last hour writing the intro to a presumably nonfictional piece that you could not render without some pretentious reflexivity, complete with musings on phenomenology and the autofictional pact, a piece that will have been more about your solipsistic inner life than the world in which you have come to be—although not with a shock or vibrance strong enough for you to remember how to actually make the thing.  

The closest thing to you with which you will be able make the fortune teller will be a certificate, an award you will have won for a poem, upon which they will have misspelled your name. You will take scissors and your colored pens and go to warping the certificate, folding over the faux filigreed edges, the signature of the chair of the writing board, the insignia of SUNY New Paltz, and you will not realize that an Elton John song has replaced Sufjan and is fighting with the preschool xylophone music of the tutorial video until the ink has dried on the paper. It will feel new, and fresh, yet so old. Elementary school, here in your dorm room, born again. Then, all that will be left are the fortunes.  

3

A poster, the crinkled image of a woman in a red bikini, will be where you start. You will look up at it through splayed fingers as you lay down in a booth, pretending to be asleep, in the bar by your uncle’s house. You will soon look up drawings, comics. You will then find a woman on a black leather couch, with a man’s hand snaking down her as her head bucks back. You will turn it off, because a lump will form in your throat, but you will return. 

6

You will be taking pictures from your window when the police arrive. They will look like action figures, just plastic skeletons under snap-on armor accessories, contrasted with the animality of the dogs that will be leashed by their feet. Hung on twine between the trees will be a painting of that flag with its simple block colors, the red triangle that only then, straining out of teenagedom, will make you think of pooling blood with a body, or bodies, mountains of bodies, just out of frame, and you will not know if this tarnishing of the symbol of the flag is the world’s fault or your mind’s. You will remember seeing people lift up the twine to carry in cases of water or snacks and set up a little book cart inside that people could borrow from as they please. You will only ever skirt the edges of the twine, and the myriad other painted messages hung across it that will be torn. 

The police will move only perhaps an inch a minute as you watch them, but you will apprehend it all again the day after, in a delirium, from images on your phone, which will haphazardly graft themselves around the hole in your understanding in a violent noetic collage. You will see the bulldozer scrape everything from the site, and how the police marched across the parking lots to reach the quad, and the blown-up lip split by an officer’s boot, and the squad car guarding the dumpster with the backpacks and laptops and sleeping bags inside, and the ones that morning who spoke there across the twine to the president of the university as he reduced their claims to bullet points on a little pad of paper, and people, your peers and others, being wrested from a human chain and disappeared behind a black curtain of riot gear. The site will be grassless the next morning, a brown patch of guilty dirt. You will only skirt its edge. 

7

A plant will be dying in your room as you write. You will swear that you gave it water every Wednesday, and you will place it right by the window so it can get sunlight, but its leaves will nonetheless meet the linoleum, one by one. You will leave it there, for a time; you will look past the word processor open on your laptop in one of those habits that are supposed to reduce eye strain, and your eyes will always find the leaves, the black scraps, before returning to the screen. However, your mother will eventually visit you and bring the plant back with her. You will both decide that it must have been shocked by the cold in that initial journey it made from the car to the building, just enough time for early February to sink in its fangs. The plant will leave, and you will write. Then, you will spend a weekend at home, and your mother will drive you back to your dorm. You will mention the plant, and that you’re writing about the plant. She will say it’s alive, that it’s by her desk, in a room you walked in and out of the whole weekend. You will not have noticed. You have to notice.