ARCHIVE
Excerpt: from Joe Meno's book of short stories Tender as Hellfire
I shrugged my shoulders. There’s never an easy answer to get you out of a dumb question like that. Pill grinned like a bastard, shaking his head. He was lucky. He was thirteen, too old and too ugly to be hugged by anyone. But not me. Me, I was still kind of short and pudgy. Aunts and old ladies thought it was real goddamn cute to go and squeeze your cheeks or smother you with their lousy lipsticked mouths. I wiped her makeup off my cheek with my sleeve and stepped aside. Two girls stood behind my aunt, staring at us silently.
“Now don’t be bashful. These are your cousins, Dough. This is Hildie. You remember her, don’t you?”
Wow. This girl looked like no cousin I ever had. Her hair was short and blonde and curled loose down around her ears. She had on a white sweater with a nice plaid skirt and black shoes and thigh-high tights. I guess I hadn’t seen Hildie in a few years. Back then, she had been a runny-nosed little goat. Now she was different. Now this cousin of mine was fourteen. Now she was as pretty and clean as a pearl. Her hands were fidgeting behind her back. Kissing cousins. The words popped in my mind. I suddenly couldn’t get the thought of kissing Hildie out of my head.
“And this is Pettina,” my aunt said. My God. Pettina had gotten the short end of the ugly stick. Pettina. Apparently, this poor girl had been named after Richard Petty, number 43, the stock car driver. My Uncle Dirk, Aunt Marie’s husband, was a real Nascar fan, and according to Pill anyway, he’d had an abscess on his penis and had to have it lanced, and so he only had two daughters, no son, and my aunt had to let her husband pick their youngest’s name. Pettina sure was huge. Next to her slender older sister, she looked like some kind of pink pear. She was biting at her nails. Each finger looked like a pork sausage that she kept nibbling at. I began to wonder if, like me, her awful name had led her to all kinds of unhappiness.
“Hello,” Pettina kind of snorted all in a huff, like it cost her a lot just to get that single word out. Pettina wore a white-and-pink dress with yellow ribbons in her hair.
“Here you go, sweetheart,” my Aunt Marie said, pulling a thin present from her huge black purse. “Just a little something for one of my favorite nephews.” This gift looked sad, even wrapped up in its dull yellow paper and lousy silver bow. It was too small and thin to be anything good. She handed it to me and I gnashed my teeth.
French pinched his glasses against his nose as he patted me on the back. “Well, go ahead, pal, open it,” he whispered. My brother, Pill, shook his head. Not another goddamn wallet. Not another goddamn wallet.
I felt the gift in my hands.
No. There was no luck anywhere in the world.
This gift was going to be another goddamn plastic wallet. I knew it. I could tell. It was too thin, too light to be anything else. I peeled off the yellow paper and forced the worst fake smile on my face. Another goddamn plastic wallet. My lousy Aunt Marie had gotten me a goddamn plastic wallet for every birthday ever since I was about three. I never used them. Heck, I didn’t have a thing to put in them. I mean, I was a kid. So they just ended up collecting dust in the bottom drawer of a dresser full of old junk, like shark’s teeth and arrowheads and old holy scapulars I had forgotten how to roll. This year’s wallet was vinyl brown, not even simulated leather, with gold trim. There, embossed in one corner, was the single word Hawaii. I didn’t even bother to sigh.
Copyright © 2007 by Joe Meno. This excerpt originally appeared in Tender as Hellfire. Published by Akashic Books. Reprinted here with permission.
Joe Meno will take part in the event An October Sort of City on Thursday, Oct. 22. Click here for details.