It’s that violation all over again, older than ancient, the rendering of a sacrifice impure, marking it as illegitimate, a sanctuary defiled, Jerusalem forsaken and the Temple in ruins: her ovum being a Holy of Holies…and, inside her, tailspun moments after, she’s slumped, elbowkneed on the honeymoon suite’s tremendous toilet, he’s sprawled already halfway to the somatic Edenic, that’s when the encounter occurred, the illicit approach, solicitation repine, wormy rape: a burrowing, a burial if only of hope; when the sperm, always lazy, fat, and most probably Polish in origin, meets the smart, moral, and altogether perfect perfectionist egg. How it happens, hymn…he knocks on her door, of the house she’d lived in as a girl, this someone he’s selling something and she doesn’t know from what how would she, innocent as she is, she’s not even home, she’s away with her parents down the Shore, themepark Florida, or Jerusalem; or maybe she is home, and there locked in her room — a fantastic instance that most assuredly must remain Apocryphal — and she’s unable to move, to react, as this who does he think he is, whoever the gehenna, however he was raised — and it’s most definitely a he, she knows by how he knocks paw, then tries the bell, the key under the mat he thinks for once and for once the schmuck’s right, the knob, he lets himself in, and this putz, he makes himself mamzer at home: feet up on the furniture, drinking wholemilk, from where, not in my house, straight from the gallon, the sofatuber, he watches the screen until late, later than her parents ever let her watch, and unspeakable shows she’d never been allowed to know existed; and then what does he do, he stays, and she in her locked room can’t help it, she falls asleep, how long, 12:00blink12:00blinkclockradioalarm then the frontdoor, slam, wakes her up, someone’s leaving but it’s not the same someone expected; no, it’s someone else, someone who looks, acts, talks, and thinks, and everything else — though she has no way of knowing this — exactly halfway between the first someone and herself, and there’s this Thing, this odd weirdness between us, like what’s the weight, the word that it weighs on your tongue,
Tell us another story, just one more.
You want another, sighing phlegmish pudding, an urge to smoke — don’t you know they’re all the same?
PopPop, Grandpaw Senior, whoever you are, one more…
Alright, then you sleep, just one last:
This Is The Story, says PopPop in a yuck yuck yabber, impersonating a foreign voice, as if that of Benjamin’s grandfather, His other whom neither of them knew, Hanna’s father Senior who’d died so long ago, of which war’s cancer forgotten — with MomMom’s crucifix swaying from his neck on a chain of seaweed, him the already caricature consanguine doing this goofy goy impression (perfected against the imagined model of all his late wife’s late forefathers), applauding his hands in mock frothy excitement, as he says, Of The Lumbering Dumb Sperm, & The Intelligent Petite Ovum: