What happened before this, I will have to fill in later. For now, I cannot begin to write it.<\/p>\n
What followed was an intensive and emotionally distressing period wherein we laid down a bargain. By that, I mean my father established that either he held the scalpel, or I did. I could pick which of us held it.<\/p>\n
My room, where we\u2014he\u2014 had taken this situation by now: it looked to be liquefying around us, crushed and oozing like the larvae, before me, of insects, which I loved dearly and continue to love. My very line of vision tilted in tandem with my stomach.<\/p>\n
In the end, it was myself I chose to hold the scalpel. I understood by now that the real object was to keep it away from him.<\/p>\n
In retrospect, it does unnerve me how I was able to stay upright and continue, with the blade, flattening flies in their infant stage.<\/p>\n
When I was an infant, I was prone to ear infections. So was my mother. She was born with numerous small defects, actually, for which she underwent swift surgical correction. She\u2019s seemed to feel gentle about it since I\u2019ve known her.<\/p>\n
As for my father, I cannot count the illnesses and injuries he has sustained. But they drove him partly deaf, too, like my mother was at birth.<\/p>\n
I retained a good, and accurate, sense of hearing.<\/p>\n
The maggots crackled, and beneath them, the hollowed-out garden snake. It was very dead, but its body had still had cause to move.<\/p>\n
Up to my nose tilted a wave of stench. Even then, I knew this meant that somehow, the molecules were fusing to my ol-fact-ory<\/em> organs.<\/p>\n My blood screeched in its vessels. Even as I knew that I was untouched, my head felt cracked open, like stories my father would tell me about his high school friends.<\/p>\n At this point there faltered\u2014 or falters\u2014 much of my perception, or my memory now, or both. For sure, I can tell you: this is the most disgusting thing I have done.<\/p>\n The last maggot lay there to the side of the snake, I can also tell you now. It, meaning the maggot, and its siblings were brought to their deaths swiftly and deliberately by myself, the writer of this letter. No unnecessary delays were made between the turning of the blade, its application, and its bearing down.<\/p>\n Something large and wet punched me from inside my throat: probably bile, tears, or both. I\u2019ll never forget this. My father had just asked me if I wanted to keep them.<\/p>\n I told him no\u2014 at least I could say that. He had never made me feel lower, given me a lower choice, than this. I had no flesh of his on top of myself to irritate. This whole time, he did not touch me.<\/p>\n In that moment, my father then expressed to me that he wanted to keep the snake and the maggots.<\/p>\n Where was he going to keep them? In the back of my sock drawer.<\/p>\n He said this: \u201cYou have two minutes to push all of your socks out of the way, as much as you want. It\u2019s nice that you have so many socks. I\u2019m even going to get a Ziploc bag to make it clean for you.\u201d<\/p>\n When he spoke to me telling me what he was about to do, he enunciated clearly and used what I knew were his best grammatical conventions.<\/p>\n That seemed powerful to me. Until just now, writing this to you, but really also to myself: I couldn\u2019t have fully understood.<\/p>\n I pushed my socks out of the way. He slid the fly babies, the snake, and the scant remainder of its contents into the plastic bag. Then, as promised, my father deposited into the back of my sock drawer the cut and decaying flesh.<\/p>\n Reminiscent of other times, my father informed me that I was \u201cgoing to keep it in there\u201d until the smell got to be too much for me. At that point, he informed me, it would have to be my responsibility to figure out what to do with it next.<\/p>\n He wasn\u2019t going to touch the snake again.<\/p>\n I remember asking\u2014 \u201cOr the maggots?\u201d\u2014 using the word for them that I had unfortunately just learned that day.<\/p>\n My father confirmed this: \u201cOr the maggots.\u201d<\/p>\n I don\u2019t remember how I handled the scalpel afterward\u2014 only that it ended up back with him and that he said it had returned to its place in the washroom. It would not be used again that day, he informed me.<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t try to steal it,\u201d he mentioned to me. \u201cIf you do, I\u2019ll know.\u201d<\/p>\n I knew better, too. I\u2019d had enough.<\/p>\n My father stepped over to my doorway so that he blocked the light outside it. He flicked my own light switch to the off position.<\/p>\n \u201cStay in here,\u201d he said, \u201cand don\u2019t come out unless I say so.\u201d<\/p>\n He took another step back. The door\u2014 which, thank God I had it by now\u2014 it closed.<\/p>\n That night, through the crack between the door and its frame, my father and I found something on which we could agree.<\/p>\n It was this. I would not be setting foot outside my room, or eating, until noon the next day.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n What happened before this, I will have to fill in later. For now, I cannot begin to write it. What followed was an intensive and emotionally distressing period wherein we laid down a bargain. By that, I mean my father established that either he held the scalpel, or I did. I could pick which of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":647,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[56],"tags":[24],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-3Nm","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14592"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/647"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14592"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14713,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14592\/revisions\/14713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Mackenzie Dwyer<\/a><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"