This is the Story Tea Told
Kevin Lichty My grandmother once told my father just before marrying my mother that he would be remarried someday. She said the tea leaves told her this would happen. This was her roundabout way of telling him she didn't t like him. When I was four, my mother stood outside of an airport and sold her wedding ring to a man wearing a long leather coat dimpled and dark like coffee grounds. My brother was in her arms. I stood to the side and watched the planes take off. My mother said she was tired of being cold. We moved in with my grandmother. My grandmother sat at the kitchen table all day and ashed her cigarette into her coffee. She said the ashes told her stories. She said the coffee gave her visions. She said I'd die one day and come back. She said the ashes told her this story. I asked her how and she said the ashes were vague about details. At my grandmothers house I don't remember ever wearing a pair of long pants voluntarily. There was hail the size of houses. There was a Volkswagen Bug where my sitter and I chanted rubber baby buggy bumpers. There was an Asteroids game at the Stop and Go. There was an unchained dog who lay in a neighbor's front yard and chased me whenever I passed. The neighbor's hedge would tell me to start running. One day, my grandfather saw me, saw me running, saw the dog, saw the dog chasing me and came out of his study with his rifle to shoot the dog. My grandfather raised his rifle, aimed, and hit me instead. I don't remember what a rifle sounds like. I do remember how it smells—sharp, bitter, acidic in the air. My grandmother's house had a ditch in front of the yard. She said it was there so we could hide during a tornado warning "if we couldn't get inside fast enough." There was always water running through the ditch, a kind of brown ooze of grass and sediment and waste. I remember adding myself to ooze, how bright I was against the brown of the Earth. This did not kill me. Nor the lightning, nor the snakebite, nor the fall, nor the glass impaling my skin, nor the food poisoning in California, nor the cancer, nor the overdose. None of these things killed me. All of them did. Little deaths. Tiny deaths. They say sometimes the body forgets to breathe, especially when sedated, and sometimes it just needs to be reminded. A friend told me that once. I lay on his bed breathless, holding my breath. He held my big toe in his hand, wiggled it a little bit. They call it apneic breathing, when your body just forgets. My daughter had that problem in the beginning. The doctors told me it was because when she was born her brain wasn't wired yet for breathing, that her brain thought she was still inside of the womb, swimming, and so it had to be reminded sometimes. We spent hours watching her breathe, her body womblike, under lights, the beep beep beep of every saturation dip. We watched the color of her upper lip, for when it turned blue. I would grab her under her arms and wiggle her a little bit so she could remember. We placed a stone on the table where her bassinet lay. Breathe was etched into it. Apneic breathing occurs most often when you are asleep, the weight of your body at rest. I remember sharing hotel rooms with my father as a child, his snore rhythmic, sonorous, punctuating in the bed beside mine. Sometimes the sound would stop and I would count the seconds until it started again. Sometimes the absence would last a minute and I wondered if he'd ever breathe again. The therapy for this is called continuous positive airway pressure, a means to force the body to remember, even when it is hard. You just need a strong cup of coffee, my friend told me. |
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About the Author: Kevin Lichty is currently living in Tempe, Arizona, with his wife and two daughters. Before that, he lived in Miami, Florida where he was a copywriter for the National YoungArts Foundation; and Annapolis, Maryland, where he was a high school English teacher at a small private school outside of Washington, D.C. His work has previously appeared in Green Briar Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Four Chambers, Palooka, and elsewhere.