 razy
Aunt Carrie is the kindest person you’ll ever meet
— when she’s sober. So kind that she’d
hopscotch on gator heads to nurse a swamp-bound elderly
person. But when she’s drunk, the terror is enough
to make even a Serb shiver.
Mama says her sister Carrie has always felt unloved
and un-needed — going back to the day in 1950 when
their mother abandoned them. It explains why the sober
Carrie buys groceries for poor families and takes in
starving dogs. And it explains her fondness for mind-numbing
pharmaceuticals and Smirnoff.
Carrie sought love through matrimony five times, but
ended up shooting the first four husbands and going
after the last one with a butcher knife. Husband Number
Four’s name was Jessie James. No kidding.
I was eleven when she moved in with us and took over
my fluffy pink bedroom with its posters of Leif Garrett
and Charlie’s Angels. I was now sharing a bathroom
with a woman once jailed for assaulting a police dog.
A woman who kept a fresh pair of underwear in her purse
for those unplanned, late-night liaisons.
It wasn’t long before Carrie was hittin’
the hooch again, and Mama asked her to leave. Carrie
left all right, only to return in the middle of the
night, crawling in through the bedroom window and attacking
Mama in her sleep.
The cheap diamond cocktail rings on her painted claws
made a floral pattern across Mama’s face. Tragically,
she moved only a few apartments away and lingered like
a low-grade fever.
Our phone rang off the hook. It was Carrie calling
over and over, threatening suicide. She said she was
lonelier than a peanut in a boxcar and just couldn’t
take it anymore.
Mama got tired of hearing it and told her to just go
ahead and do it...
I rarely see Aunt Carrie anymore, but I heard she bought
sacks of new clothes and toys for some kids whose house
burned down on Christmas Eve. She gave them so
much that she had to do without... I also heard
she tried to run over Husband Number Five.
| 
