Slog
©September 17th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
Jonah stood at the window, and looked out at the harvest moon. Tears glittered in his eyes, and he brushed them away absently.
“Come back,” he whispered into the night. No one answered. A night bird called somewhere. A breeze ruffled his hair, made him look vulnerable and younger than his thirty-three years.
Jonah hadn’t expected to live that long.
Nothing was ever easy for Jonah. He burned with an incandescent rage, and anyone who came close to him shied away from the sheer force of it.
As a young teen in a body crippled by spina bifida, he saw the handsome, strapping teenage boys around him, and wanted to strike out at something, anything to rid himself of the rage and sorrow, and bitterness that ate away at his base of his soul, which was raw like the tip of his spine.
It didn’t matter to him that he was capable of great humor, or talent in art, or eloquent in his use of words. He didn’t see the value in what he had, and craved what he couldn’t have. Looking at the beautiful, nymph-like girls in school made him want to spit. They would never look at him, would they? No, they’d go for tall, blond David, or muscular Jonathan, whose cool gaze made the girls giggle in high school. He didn’t consider his pale, haunted face, with the piercing hazel eyes, the slim cheekbones, the sharp chin, the mop of unruly hair to be attractive.
He would gaze up at the ceiling of his bedroom at night, trying to quench his desire for what he could not have, throttling his urges with contempt and curses.
His mother had grieved when he was born, and grew steadily distant from him as he turned into a mulish and angry teenager. His father, grieving equally, didn’t give up on him. Instead, having read about how marijuana could ease certain kinds of pain, he introduced his son to the joys of dope.
Jonah took to it instantly. Somehow, he passed his eighth grade, scraping by, giving his female teachers the finger and much grief, because they knew he could do so much better than that.
Jonah spent his high school years in a haze of smoke. His glassy gaze alerted his teachers to his drug use, and he was repeatedly called into the main office, and had his locker searched. He was too bright for them. They never saw where he hid his stash.
Time marched on, as it does. Somehow, he passed high school, went to community college, then to art college, and landed a job in a copy shop, all of this in a haze of pain and smoke. Then, he met Nina. Grey-eyed and dark-haired, she combined talent and beauty and was kind to him. Against all expectations they fell in love, and he loved her with a passion that scared both of them, but was exciting for her. Then, his rages began.
And now, the one woman he had ever loved had handed him the ring he’d given her, and told him she would never see him again, and that he didn’t know what it meant to have respect for women. The bruises on her face had stood out starkly in the harsh overhead light right outside the door, while she’d made harsh remarks about his grotesque body with the tears running down her face, slurring her mascara, and making her look garish and racoon-ish. He was tempted to tell her so, to hurt her. Before he could, she turned, and was gone.
Jonah thought she would return. He waited in his dark living room. He called her cell phone. He dragged himself to the window on his crutches. He looked out at the harvest moon from his second floor window. The moon seemed to beckon to him. A river of milk flowed from the sky. Inexplicably, he thought of his mother. “Mom,” he whispered, and wept.
Then, he pulled himself up on the table near the window, and stood on the narrow sill, swaying a little. It wasn’t easy.
He stood, moon-silhouetted against the darkness.
I want to jump, he thought. And waited. Many minutes passed.
After an eternity, he climbed back down, slowly and painfully. Then, he slid to the floor, and passed out, amongst the bottles of beer that were strewn around him.
Rage had seen him through thirty-three years. Perhaps, sadness would see him through the next three decades.
A long slog awaited him. Nothing had ever been easy for Jonah. Nothing would ever be so.
As he dozed in a beer-haze, the moon poured down her milk over him.
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