Three Fates

 

Nigella 60 x 50 cm acryl on canvas

THREE FATES

A woman speaks French

to her husband then slaps his face.

He understands nothing. How do you reason

with hurricanes, the fury of natural calamity?

Their three sons grow up strange in a handful

of provincial cities. They move out. One is

barely employed; a stalled novelist who keeps writing

or half-writing the same story: a large

peasant woman in garden clogs storms into a rustic kitchen

angry about something no male in the family can fathom.

Soup dribbles down Papa’s unshaven chin, he stutters—

and that’s as far as it goes. A novel about inarticulate fear?

The occasional obscurity of rage? Okay, his girlfriend asks,

what about the plot, conflict, point of fucking view? WHAT

HAPPENS ON PAGE TWO, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE? His brother Marcel,

a flamenco artiste at a casino in Atlantic City, is secretly

vain about his ass; Jean, the third and youngest brother, is a

pipe fitter in Toledo, Spain, and has backed into a passion

for gothic cathedrals, wondering what plumbing was like back then.

One day they return home to mother, whose hand’s still aching

from twenty-years back, her French as opaque as ever. On the occasion 

of her death she leaves each of her sons an extremely long, gorgeous

knitted scarf, her life’s work. They wear the scarves

everywhere. Until they start to choke. Then they understand.