The Anatomy of God

I love the fury that leaks through the prose. 

            Sam kept flicking the radio between two stations that were both ads and if Louis had to hear the same ads one more time he was going to carve his initials in Sam’s corpse.

            “Eric, tell him to quit.” Louis snarled. Sam sniggered and flipped the radio back to the first channel.

            “—where prices are lower than ever! Parnell’s furniture, just south of—“ then the radio flipped and Louis nearly lost his mind.

            “Sam, stop irritating your brother.” Eric, their stepfather, had existed in that choked up emotional smog for the last two weeks. Mom was in her jar in the back seat, the lid on the urn taped down with hunting camouflage duct tape which struck Louis as classless because mom hated the country. She hated everything about it. The trees, the accents, the things you couldn’t buy and the places you couldn’t go. She’d grown up twenty minutes from Millennium Park in Chicago, after a birth in a town the size of a NASCAR pit stop just outside of Walton, Kansas. Louis hadn’t ever heard of Walton, Kansas but it sounded like perdition.

            “It’s still awfully damn selfish of grandma to put mom in Kansas,” Louis tried. It was far too late to even attempt something like this. They all knew it.

            “Lou. Shut up.” Eric’s eyes didn’t even leave the road. Louis felt heat flush through his face and neck and his hands shook as he gripped the handle on the back of the driver’s seat and stared out at the endless steppe of braes and trees that fleshed Missouri.

            One month before the tumor subsuming their mother’s brain had claimed her Eric had converted suddenly, joyously, to Mormonism at the hands of two Mormon elders too young to grow beards. He was a small and fussy little man that Louis didn’t have the energy to properly hate due to the ubiquity of his presence. He wore slender bolo ties the thickness of a pencil March through November and ironed all of his clothing poorly except for the stained, ancient denim jacket he constantly wore. It had a bullet hole in the hem, and was a story that for some reason Eric would only allude to as “the incident” as though he’d been captured by pirates or met the prime minister of Canada instead of being a victim of a desperation moped-hijacking by a felon who had recently robbed a pawn shop. The bullet was fired, surprisingly, by a police officer that did not realize Eric was not a willing passenger on the moped. You couldn’t even tell it was a bullet hole. It looked like a determined moth had had its way with the jacket during the summer, not a poorly aimed attack from a marshal while riding bitch on a vespa.

            Unable to find a temple in the immediate area Eric had taken to forcing them to go to a Baptist church. Their mother, even in her weakened state, had laughed at them, which made Eric the particular kind of angry where he nearly whispered and his voice shook a little and he firmly asked Mom to please not mock things she didn’t understand. Mom, in her infinite patience, forced Louis and Sam to go to the Baptist church though she was too weak herself to leave the hospital bed in their home. Flint River Missionary Baptist was where Louis found himself that vivid Sunday his mother passed to wherever she was going. Eric grew pale as she was and his hand trembled when he called the hospital.

            “I hate Missouri,” Sam announced. Sam was seven and Louis’ half-brother. Eric’s son. He spent much of his time honing his skills for infuriation. Louis had anger problems, the psychologist had said. He was “probably a sufferer of Antisocial Personality Disorder,” but it was “too early to tell”. Louis had heard his mother and the psychologist murmuring to each other. Louis wasn’t crazy, he knew he wasn’t. That was what he told himself when he found himself speechless with rage, white-faced and trembling and clutching some implement that had lain nearby.

            There was a sudden thundering sound and the car began to make a horrible grinding noise. Eric cursed briefly and passionately as he maneuvered the car to the shoulder. They’d left the trees behind some time ago. The earth was flat and spread like a picnic blanket for leagues in every direction. A little concrete smear stood on the horizon, some town or the other.

            Eric turned around to address Louis. Louis, specifically. “Stay in the car.”

            The hood choked out cloudy gray smoke when Eric lifted it. He returned to the window with the sort of sad dismay a priest might have had at the advent of astronomy.