Harmony- Week 3 word prompt. Autobiographical and DISTURBING content ahead. You have been warned.
HARMONY~this week’s word prompt
I have been doing my idea-mining: writing the word HARMONY in bold block print on a 3X5 card, setting it at the base of my monitor, slipping it into my jacket pocket, resting it in the plastic well in my car where the emergency brake waits. Living with HARMONY, letting it steep in the tangled neuron soup of my brain.
Nothing comes, for days and days. One moment, while slipping on a gold bracelet, I remember a girl I knew growing up named Harmony. A girl with the polished luster of a spoiled only child. Harmony, the poor little rich girl who developed a coke and bad boyfriend habit. No, not the idea I want to write about, but the first glimmer I’ve had so far.
I am in a meeting in the shuffling papers/getting coffee/small talk phase, when the psychologist next to me says, “Remember Kanoa Roberts, that kid who got killed by a car a couple months ago? His mom committed suicide this week.”
“No!” I said, clapping my hands on either side of my mouth, a truncated suburban version of The Scream. He leans toward me, imparting the juicy news with relish.
“Yeah. Even worse, she was pregnant. Eight months. Hanged herself.”
I am still sitting there, my mouth still open in an O of horror, my hands still on my face. I realize I look ridiculous and close everything up, but I can’t stop the welling of tears, of vomit prickling the back of my throat. Belatedly, he realizes something is wrong and says, “Did you know them?”
“Yes…” I say.
Pictures flash: Kanoa, 5 years ago, his teeth lighting his brown face, had smuggled a chicken to school in his backpack to show me. I was his school counselor then, and I remembered bracing myself to call his mother. Even back then she was famous for her unpredictability and mood swings.
“Hey, Mrs. Roberts. Just calling to tell you your son brought a chicken to school, and I’m wondering what you want us to do with it.”
“Is it a hen or cock?” I thought this an odd question. What difference did it make?
“I think it’s a rooster. Kanoa says it’s a ‘stag.’” I felt silly saying this, the backpack in my lap, the rooster looking around with his beady orange eye, his feathers a gleaming greenish black. I stroked him with a finger, and his eyes slowly closed in bliss.
“Fucking kid!” she screamed, so loudly I jumped, the rooster squawked, and I almost dropped the phone. “That one valuable fighting cock, we been training him for weeks! I going have to come get him. Wait until I get my hands on that kid!”
Never mind cockfighting is illegal, I thought. Not to mention child abuse. I zipped the backpack further shut so only the rooster’s narrow head with its razored crest was poking out. “Okay. But don’t get Kanoa in too much trouble, he just wanted me to see it, and the rooster’s perfectly fine.”
She arrived shortly after, a large woman in a Hawaiian muumuu that seemed to enhance the great prow of her pregnant belly. “Give me that cock,” she said imperiously. Wordlessly I offered the backpack and she looked in at the rooster. Stroked his head, unzipped the pack to inspect him, all the while crooning to him in a soft warm tone. He stepped out onto my desk, emitting a little “hrmppp!” and rustling feathers into order. He was magnificent, a shining iridescent black bird marked with glowing orange patches on wings and breast.
“He’s gorgeous,” I said. He lifted his head proudly, eyed me, allowed me to touch his glossy shoulder. Mrs. Roberts finally smiled. “He going be one good fighter,” she said. “Kanoa doing a good job training him.”
She bundled the rooster unceremoniously back into the backpack. “Tell that kid go straight home today,” she said, leveling her hard brown eyes on me. “He going get it.”
“Now Mrs. Roberts,” I tried to remonstrate, but she turned and sailed out, the rooster poking his head out of the backpack, looking back at me.
I refocused on the psychologist next to me. “Yes, I knew them,” I said. “When Kanoa was in junior high.”
“Well, they say she always was a little…” he circled his finger beside his ear. Yes, maybe she was. But what despair makes a woman like her, bigger than life, kill herself and her unborn child? She was pregnant the year I knew her, had supposedly had another one as well… maybe too many babies and the recent loss of her oldest son, were simply too much.
I try hard not to picture the hanging scene, her dying baby a great lump. Like tonguing a sore tooth, my mind goes back again and again. I am unsettled, a feeling like the pull of dark currents deep in the ocean while the surface is calm and sparkling. I know the opposite of harmony.