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Wanton Soup

Genkin's Funeral Home and Aunt Margie's demise.

by Staff | 2004.02.29

It was Sunday afternoon and inside Genkin’s Retirement home a flurry of failing organs and fatal coronaries made the maze of cream-colored hallways feel like Riyadh’s bustling Kalashnikov shopping district. A woefully understaffed nurse squadron frantically commandeered limp corpses on moveable beds out of the guest rooms and shoved them into the trunks of waiting hearses in the back parking lot. Genkin’s is the final pit stop before death, and this afternoon, like every other afternoon, was a busy one for the flabby-armed nurses. It was not an issue of saving lives that exhausted the women, but a matter of trashing the dead and moving in the dying.

My great aunt had been strapped to a bed in Genkin’s for over three months and the staff members’ inkling eyes revealed their growing suspicion that little old Margie’s ailing heart might keep pumping through the summer. But crippled and senile, she was visibly demoralized each morning another Iowa sunrise passed by her grimy window. Sun hadn’t been an ally since she last hit the links and collapsed face down in a sandpit from a brain hemorrhage.

I had been drunk since noon. I had joined Steve to shotgun Schlitz’s in the park across the street from his duplex. We were fed up with the suburbia lifestyle, and getting bombed before heading off to Genkin’s seemed to be the logical move for stirring up some small town trouble. We strapped on our Baur blades and skated over to Genkins, which rested behind our main mall on a wasted pasture. The security officer, a hunchback dressed in a blue Civil War union replica security uniform, mumbled something about visitor passes and stumbled in front of the entrance. Steve threw me a wink and then smashed the old man in his shins. He folded and we skated off down the hallway.

The hallways were packed with cold corpses, the lion’s share bloated. Steve and I looked at each other and howled with laughter. He tossed me his one-hitter and I took one of the biggest hits in my twenty-eight years. I felt fast on my blades now. I whipped by the dead strapped to their backs and cornered tight turns like Olympic speed skater Cathy Turner. I understood why that butch dike loved skating so much.

I had left Steve in my wake but he buzzed my Nextel and said he was off to find Genkin’s codeine and morphine stash and then would fuck up the old security guard again. He still had the backpack with Schlitz and the one hitter, and now he would have the codeine and morphine too. It kind of sucked and my skating was getting sloppy. I decided to stop by Aunt Margie’s and see if she was still warm and breathing. When I hockey-stopped in front of her dirty and cramped room, I half expected to catch a nurse looming over Margie, stuffing a mound of cotton balls down her toothless mouth. But Margie was alone, breathing heavy and wrapped in her floral jammies.

I rolled close to her cot. Drunk and high, a tide pool of sorrow swept over me. Maybe Margie had tried her best to be a good aunt. She always baked hard and scolded fiercely. She always maintained a quiet dignity even that time she staggered out of the hospital after the sandpit collapse. My eyes swelled with tears and I hunched over her head. An extensive network of tubes ran across her face and then dived into her arms, stomach and chest. Nearby, a plump colostomy bag rested.

For the official record, I never saw or heard Steve tearing down the hallway. I never felt the wind from his blades on my back and I never heard the rattle of the codeine pills. Steve estimated that he was closing in on twenty miles an hour when he careened into Margie’s room. He had built up speed from a steep handicap ramp in the paraplegic wing and was riding on a wave of adrenaline from leaving the security guard bloody and crying.

Steve smashed me head first into Aunt Margie. My elbow crunched into her left eye socket and my forearm crippled her chest. I was splayed out over her upper body, caving it all in. But it was Steve who killed her. His blades had shot high when he lost his balance and they burrowed deep into her torso and pelvic area. His left blade sliced open her colostomy, spraying the room with feces and tearing the bag out from her left side. Margie’s remaining organs attached to the embedded bag were strewn across the floor like ringlets of spoiled sausage. She never saw it coming.

- Jessie (via e-mail)

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