Trailed by a Curse

He remembered he had left some weed in his glasses case & smoked it by the open window as he read the book without a name. Chapter 7. The son is taken into custody. His father refuses to pay the bail & sends the mother to visit him in his jail cell. The son stays in his cot in the corner as his mother cries & tells him that she knew from the moment of his birth that he would be a curse on their name. Till the day we die, she screamed. First drive us to hell, then haunt us there with your rotten memory! He had a bruised eye from fighting with the police who found him crouched half-asleep beside a shed some 10 miles outside the wired stakes of his father's land. No son of mine. As she screamed from beyond the bars, he peered into her mouth, lost in its darkness for a moment, in the silence that awaited him there in the cell, the silence he knew he must coerce & tame or be swiftly dismantled by it. A guard led her by the arm into the lighted hallway before the door was clasped shut. He started dozing off & put the book down. He spread out his blankets on the dusty floor & curled up inside them, listening to the leaves scratch together. Their shadows wresting loose from a gaunt tree. He closed his eyes & felt like he was sinking into a bed of them, not struggling against the descent, dizzied by their sharp musk, buried by what has fallen. In the middle of the night, he heard singing. A group of drunk Russians in the street. High-heels clacking off the stones. As the chorus grew fainter he heard a pair of voices against the wall beside his window, a man & woman trading breathless sentences. Her heels strayed away only a few steps. Rustling jewelry. His coarse voice urging from the sidewalk as she stumbled across the street. He lit a smoke & stood there awhile before following after her.