Heat poured through my window and onto my muddy face, forcing me to wake up like it knew that torrential darkness had been roaming throughout the house. I had been dreaming. I was in a vineyard, where a tall and graceful man with a skinny, straw-like neck and a woman in a plastered, prune-colored dress were sitting on a pile of grapes which rose and multiplied, their round and plump faces the size of a veteran’s ankles.

The two had seemed to be acquainted with each other, with a sort of awkward moving of the eyes, like realizing that they were characters, and hence unimportant.  As the grapes burgeoned, they expanded until they burst into an exaggerated ocean. While the woman struggled to keep to the surface, the man paused, then swam away like it hurt to be saved.

And now there was a burning sensation in my eyes, and I decided that it was from all the juice I drank last night.

I was a juice addict, as my father called me.

Back then, we’d get it in the jumbo bottles they sell in Sam’s.  He’d say “Order up!” and I’d pretend to be ordering from one of those pubs on TV.  “A nice and easy,” I’d say, and he’d slide me a glass of juice as it sloshed all over the kitchen table.  I’d drink wildly, getting splotches of purple all over my shirt.

“An art”, he’d say.  “Spontaneous little marks like finger paint.”  He said I was spontaneous, a happy mistake.  Momma would come in, saying “Freaking Fargo,” her lips like a dark and sugary blueberry bubblegum. And with a tired clap, she’d go to her room and not come out until it was time to eat.

I didn’t like when she yelled.  I’d hear my father’s soft tone seeping under the doorway and mellow, spread out under momma’s shrill, but tired and unreasonable voice until finally, at the front door one night, her voice had no room to grow in the wide, space-less world beyond home.

But the house was far from what I’d gotten used to know, the loud back and forth abounding, and rising in the front door. I could hear in momma’s shrill voice, her saying the same thing over and over.  “Just, don’t.  Please, go.”  And each time, a farther reach to a crescendo.  “Just don’t!  Please, GO!”

These were the words I’d hear in the ear game.  It was something my father taught me to do in situations like these, and I can imagine that at the other side of the doorway, he’s pushing the inside flaps of his ears in and out, letting the sound truncate and sprinkle like tiny grains of glass.  A kaleidoscope effect.  I do this every time, half smiling, because I remembered the juice and the sloshing, but I also imagined the way my father would crumble under her words, and I didn’t want to see him so vulnerable.  But I was tired of waiting.  I wanted to see him.

Slipping into the front, where my mother stood, flailing her arms and crying, what I saw and heard had suddenly brought that sour taste on my bottom lip, how the taste of grape had soured.  How the jugs of juice were now fancy, half empty bottles with skinny necks.  She was screaming “Just please, don’t go,” at an empty doorway.

I stepped away, caught in between something of a world too surprising to be real, but too real to be completely true.

“But that’s how it always is. One day, you’re seeing one thing, and the next, something completely different. Life is just unreal like that,” Momma would say when she gave me that squinted eyed look before she hit the table hard with the bottle and sent me to bed with a squig of juice that made the house revolve around me until I went to sleep with my head spinning. I’d asked her why she wouldn’t stop – wouldn’t stop yelling.

“Because I need to fill this house.  I need to fill this room.  I need to fill myself with what I can’t hear if I stopped.”

I’d  felt a lump go down my throat like a large grape to the empty pit of my stomach, like I was supposed to know what this meant, but had nothing to digest it with.

She’d clutch the juice tight.

“Because he won’t come back, no matter how many times I tell him.”  Then, she’d get louder. “He won’t come back!”

That night, I found her rocking and holding a bottle close to her chest like a teddy bear.  “Are you okay, momma?” I asked.  And she wearily nodded.

“Everything’s okay, baby.”

And I’d drink my juice and go to bed, waiting to push my ears in and out the next day – drink the juice – hear momma cry, hear “everything’s okay.” Until eventually, all I’d hear were fragments of my mother’s voice being swept up by the wind coming through the doorway.  I’d come out as the room twirled, saying “Everything’s okay, momma.  Everything’s okay.”

It’s night, and momma’s in her usual place in her room with her back against the door, clutching her juice and humming softly to herself.

I’m holding the bottle, sloshing the red around in my mouth.  It is sour at first, but sweet, filling my stomach with something like a light heaviness I’d never known of. I’m holding it to my chest, thinking of momma, hearing bits of sirens outside like I no longer needed to play the ear game to divide the world into pieces.  I’m watching the stars outside my window start to spin and dazzle.

I hope daddy comes back.