Rage
Let’s get into it.
Dad t-bones a Ford in front of your entire fifth grade classroom.
The sound is less like impact and more like something splitting down the middle: an orange, a thought, a damp sweatshirt with the wrong cartoon.
There’s an ancient Korean proverb I half-remember:
A man is a fist with no future.
(Every translation leaves something behind.)
It’s a field trip to the movies and the rain is pouring like the devil mid-divorce.
(Hell is a room constructed by a woman.)
The grill bounces through the Malco parking lot. Mississippi asphalt sighs hot air, then exhales again, as if practicing.
One day, someone will ask you how it felt and you will say: like being peeled.
You will really think: like being bitten.
Right now, a tall white man blooms from the Bronco and all you think is, it doesn’t even look that bad.
Shame follows you back to the theater like a wet dog. Your humiliation has ancestral bones.
Your father says a man is only as good as the pain he can inflict, while he shrinks into the toy version of himself.
(The kind that expand in water and never return to their original form. You wonder if this was the original proverb, the one no one cared to write down).
Before you learned to hate cops, you learned to know them. The way their spittle flies in fat droplets, backlit by the flickering white streetlights so you can see the mist from the theater awning. Their hands on buckles, levers, root systems rippling beneath the concrete.
And your dad, bright red, a few lies over five feet.
Anger ripples beneath his closed mouth like a blister. The cop places him on his tongue.
You remember when he proudly told you he killed someone at twenty three, like a memory for you to hold, like something to be measured. Your classmates laugh, which is to say they shoot.
You think: the world is made of teeth.
You think: some men exist just to chew.
Lies come into life like medicine, clinical, carried by hands you want to trust.
The first is that value is something given out loud.
In movies, rain means something absolute, something terrifying.
In the south, it is something like a prayer, or
just a flash flood.
You surfed it once on a trash can lid, laughing until your voice dissolved into a scream.
The sound your spouse will one day ask you to repeat at your wedding, not for what it says but for what hovers after, and he will nod like he already knows the rhythm.
Then he places you on his tongue.
This is after you learned that rage scales with size.
That strength is measured in the bites on your forearm.
That race is measured in how far the cop leans before asking your father’s name.
Later, twenty-three, you will try to remember the proverb, but all you can hear are the molars of the Bronco grinding against the air.
A chorus of eleven year olds drenched in fear, misremembered as rain.
Your father, porous, misremembered as a puddle.
You think: we are all just being chugged.
And the proverb left on your tongue:
violence is what gets mistaken for love when the mouth is too small to hold it.
Claire Lee is a writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Their published and forthcoming poetry, short stories, and nonfiction can be found in Scapegoat Review, Pictura Journal, Rawhead Journal, Black Sheep Magazine, and others. Find them at ClaireBLee.com.
