Dirty Laundry_The Brotherhood of the Traveling Jockstrap_Spin cycle_Photo Trauma
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Dirty Laundry
It might as well be a deal with the devil himself. The fallout was going to be torture for sure. Fred was going to hang this over my head for God knows how long but what choice did I have? “What’s it going to take for you to bury the evidence?” I say, knowing whatever it is, won’t be enough. “More than this, that’s for sure.” “It’s all I have right now. I can get more later.” He knows how hard it was to get this much, the jerk. “You got that right.” “So, we have a deal then?” Please, let us have a deal. I can’t believe I’m thinking this right now. My, how the tables have turned. “Yeah…we hav...
The Brotherhood of the Traveling Jockstrap
Friends since childhood, four young men gathered in camaraderie before every competitive sporting event. Wes, the wrestler of the bunch, sat on a bench in the musky locker room with panic in his eyes; tossing items out of his gym bag and mumbling. “Wes, ten minutes till weigh in. Why aren’t you dressed?” Bo, the group’s Tae Kwon Do competitor, checked the time on his phone and frowned a concerned look at his unprepared comrade. Jeb, a skyper, recognized the distress on Wes’s face for what it was: panic over a poorly packed bag. “What’s up, dude? Don’t have all your gear or something?” Je...
Spin cycle
[CW: emotional abuse, implied physical abuse]. .The lingering slap echoes in my ears, stings my cheek. The bathroom mirror reflects a pink flush, a tender swelling, but nothing noticeable, nothing I can see.She’s in the kitchen, assaulting cupboards, derailing drawers, slamming pots on the stove.“MARY PAT KUDwww.onedoor.ccE!” she screams.That’s me. The last name rhymes with moody.Though we have the same last name, she’s not my mother. My birth mother that is. She is married to my Dad. That’s him, relaxing in the orange-and-brown lazy-boy chair, chest hair poking out from the wife-beater stretched over his b...
Photo Trauma
I was eating an orange. No, I wasn’t eating it yet, I was peeling the orange, in the kitchen of the rented Air B & B, just before lunch, when someone in the family shouted “Family Photo time”. My hands were sticky with orange juice and I didn’t want to abandon the orange. “Can it wait,” I yelled through the screen door.“No, it can’t. Derek and John are going fishing, and Susan had to drive into town to get more groceries,” my wife Cathy yelled back. “Later, I’m busy,” I said.“Jake, you come out here. The whole family is here, and I can’t remember when that has happened in years.”“We’ll all b...