Skeegleton Remembers

Oliva Drove with Two Feet

August 15, 1988 my Mom’s 35^th birthday, a memory delivering a valuable lesson;

one can look, but one can’t stare without permission.

Glass splits, metal burns and steel wrinkles hoping to match wet fingers from the pool. Bodies and blood scattered inside my Pa-pa’s Cadillac with something still smelling like concession-stand cheeseburgers. Oliva’s face was broken covering the steering wheel; Mom the only passenger wearing a seatbelt in the car had bruised ribs. My sister with fractured lips and nose sat sandwiched between me and my brother with an unconscious, open head.

The only injuries I endured, (eventually adapting to reward) would be the spectacle in front of my eyes. I didn’t know too much about driving except we were moving too fast to stop ahead of time, and seconds slowed down mistakably fast. I didn’t differentiate or appreciate detail until that moment. My eyelids were powerless, and my mind raced to ingest every force without summarization. Everything was fantastic for 29 seconds.

Reality quickly pitched attention, sirens sang as I sat on the curb abandoned with my sister waiting for someone I knew to arrive. I watched my family strapped, stained and carried. I was angry watching strangers enjoying the i and I without consent. Antagonized resentment fueled fetid emotions. I was once that family sprinkled within a once 14 foot fancy car so I confronted those eyes reflecting behind their own chrome door handles.

Finally, Fred arrived, “How’d they find him!” My sister and I remember it differently, Closing my eyes I see the cigarette lighter and feel the pilly interior which I rubbed my hands from frustration on Fred’s work-truck she thinks it’s the custom Sparkle-Bleu van of our Dads.

My life changed, I learned never to avert my eyes, creating an appreciation for 1/5000 of a second from behind a lens or a single brush stroke that might take ten minutes to think of. You can’t blame a scopophiliac’s propensity of watching substance in a redundant world. From a vicariate’s view, simple gore, boredom, humility, frustration, happiness, they’re all excited; I’ve changed knowing I like real life, not reality television real life, Real Life, but you have to sign up for it.

Memories disappeared until seeing my brother and praying “God save him, I’m sorry for everything I ever asked of you, that stupid baseball game…straight A’s…picked last and on everyone at school. Save him, Oliva, my Mom, and Sister”.