noedit / 7.12.26 / mother death

I once met a woman in Goodland, Kansas, who killed a man with her bare hands. She was a big woman working the register of an anonymous convenience shack off I-70 and I was almost to the Colorado border. I really can’t say how it came up. Maybe I mentioned seeing a prison not far off.

I used to be a prison guard, she said.

Oh? I said.

Yep, she said, scanning my Gatorade. Killed a man with my bare hands.

Really, I said.

Yep, she said, scanning my Snickers bar.

What happened? I asked.

I could tell she wanted to tell me. I could see she was proud of what she had done.

Apparently she had been transferring this inmate from one place to another, and when they were briefly alone, without any other guards around, he attacked her. Well she grabbed hold of him and with her big arms wrapped him up in such a tight hug that his rib snapped and went right through his heart.

Bled out, she said. That’ll be four eighty-seven.

I think about that woman a lot. About the scene—the prisoner burbling blood in a fluorescent room and her watching him die like a Bavarian beer carrier watching a man pass out in the grass like he had done it all to himself.

He’d asked for it, hadn’t he?

Maybe.

Or maybe she made it all up.

I can imagine how dull it would get in a convenience store in Goodland, Kansas. I can imagine telling people all sorts of stories. Maybe even getting good at it, getting to the point where you were watching for the curiosity in their eyes, for the doubt, for the lines that landed and those that failed. Maybe one day you’d talk about killing a man. About a rib through the heart. And the look of surprise and distant fear would appear in the customer’s face, and you’d understand that you’d finally done it. You’d unlocked the combination. You’d told a true tale, no matter how fictional it might be.

Because the best storytellers and liars—who have more in common than the former would like to admit—know that conviction (and I don’t mean realism here, which is more superficial than mechanical)—is in the details, ideally just left of center, the more unusual but incidental the better. In her case, instead of saying she broke his neck, or strangled him, or any of the other common ways of killing a man with your bare hands, she went with the hug. Death by love. The mother’s death. Mother Death.

Unlikely, yes, but possible, and so surely it must be true.

I think of her often—that big woman in the gas station years ago—demonstrating how it is done. Real storytelling.

I thought of her when I was writing The Whirlpool of Lebanon, when I created the Do-All, that sad and dusty convenience store that May McGillicuddy transformed into a miracle of inventory straight out of Arabian nights, a physical resistance to the banality of everyday life, to the dull truth of reality, which any of us can puncture with a tilt of the imagination, and perhaps, tilting far enough, lose ourselves, rather than admitting what and where we really are.