by John Kendall Hawkins
I.
Jeff and Laura stood in the graveyard with their Irish Setters, Ginger Rogers and Freud Austere, the bitches steaming after a long trot down, then back up Hathorne Hill, on a late autumn afternoon in Danvers, the dying trees full of majestic color exploded all around them, carping. Always carping and carrying on, scratching-and-sniffing at each other all day long, like they couldn't wait to get to The Seven Year Itch, the anticipated scent of new feral moans seemingly driving them forward together and apart. They were in year six of their marriage, the same age as their twin daughters, Laura (I), named after her mother, and Anne, named after their Dad's paternal grandmother. And therein was the Rub: Who would get the kids in the split-up ahead? Laura wanted Jeff to take them; Jeff preferred the traditional alimony and child-support route instead. They were discussing this situation now.
"You're so selfish sometimes, Jeff," said Laura, haughty from the left. "Why can't you take them? I'm so busy. You work from home. You can have the condo if you keep the kids."
"Busy? You spend your time protesting and occupying and giving the finger to The Man," he replied. "Couldn't you do that at home with the kids? You know, Zoom?"
"F*ck you, Jeff."
"F*ck you, too."
The couple were in the pauper's grave out back of Avalon Apartments, the converted Danvers Lunatic Asylum (a.k.a., Danvers State Hospital), where they lived in a massive condo. Ginger and Freud, as though inured to the riffs of their masters, were facing each other on separate graves, straining shits that came out, as it seemed to Jeff, like soft serve pyramids at McDonald's at the base of numbered, nameless graves. Today, Grace was honoring 521, while Freud composted at 32. Reminders of the days before the great deinstitutionalization of lost souls, when humans were belted down and gurneyed in to the Gothic horror house of psychiatric screams and left to languish forever, their stories mere compiled files in a folder never re-read, except by the occasional nursing student from nearby Salem State College looking to amp up a thesis with some grisly case studies of madness and neglect, only seen in street people now. Laura called the simple grave obelisks "the unread pages of history," lefty bloviant which made Jeff cringe (he'd made a gagging gesture the first time he heard it) and ache for the new start ahead.
Laura knelt beside a willow tree where she'd planted some magic mushrooms. "Did you know willow trees is where we get aspirin from?" she asked, just making convo.
"Who gives a sh*t?" he snipped. Ginger and Freud were frolicking with another dog in some wind-whisked leaves. "Why don't we each take one? And by the way, what are you doing dealing drugs?"
"Oh, Jeff, grow up. It's just some magic mushrooms. I do sell some, and I could grow more and sell more, but I'm mostly after helping people achieve --"
"--F*ck!" went Jeff, looking down at his heel full of dog turd. "F*ck. F*ck me." You could tell from the way he scrunched up his nose he was smelling it.
"Ha-ha, maybe you should try a hallucinogen," she laughed. She harvested some shrooms, placing them into a ziploc baggie, and got up and began strolling toward the apartments. "You always were so wound up tight. Even in Troy--"
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