April 23, 1977
Mrs. Shadetree is standing at the kitchen door to Mahalia’s dining room, both swords shining in the jukebox light.
My Uncle Ishmael drops his usually proud gaze to the floor. “When you get out of this mess, don’t worry ‘bout them glasses. Just pick up the pieces and keep them in that bag. Somebody will find you. Thanks for listening to me ramble. Told you I ain’t had a drink in two weeks? Right.” Uncle Ish says, handing over my mop to me. “I wish Scherazade could see me, instead of this.”
Mrs. Shadetree snickers, “Tell your uncle, he’s a Chupacabra.”
He says, “Tell her I say thanks for the soup and watching over me while I did your job.
Here. take these things Nephew. See what I see. I can’t wear them any more. I wasn’t ever supposed to wear’em in the first place.
Give them to the first girl you see reading a book for pleasure.
As soon as you see her, you’ll know what to do.“
And I did.
Uncle Ish was clear and lucid in the last few moments before the Hinx took him away, “This ain’t no gift man. It’s a burden. It’s a legacy, memories of every person that has worn them before you. There’s this long drawn out scientific explanation that will make sense to you one day. Dr. Bell explained it all to me. After I got caught up. When Walter found out these were made for you, he stopped the study in Ann Arbor. To me it just is what it is.
My job was to collect the glasses and take them back to the Sisters like Mrs. Shadetree.
My body recoils with a flash of this sickening pain as the wire temples bite in behind my ears.
Uncle Ish is saying, “Your grandma calls these Hinxs. My momma called them Orixas. White folk call them Cherubs and Putti. They ain’t. But some building have them trapped inside those sculptures. You’ll understand one day.”
My uncle was a purple seven foot tall furless dogman. Back crawling with an army of soft pink lamprey mouthed monsters, under a dull layer of gray crust.
“Anyway nephew, they feed off of decaying psychic energy. I collected them from living people that are dying, but yet to fulfill their purpose. A purpose I still don’t understand.
My friend Patty, you remember Patrice, She was assigned to be your CareGiver.
She would wash these monsters away. When Patrice would sing it washed away the darkness.
You’ll get used to seeing them. You will fight them and kill them and you’ll win, Baby.”
Uncle Ishmael touched my hand one last time, pushed me back through the kitchen door and ran out into the parking lot swinging an old rusted scimitar and a dull boning knife. “My reason for livin’ is gone. It don’t matter why or how, I know where she is. And I’m going to be with her.” My uncle Ishmael was swallowed up in an angry mob of pink faced Hinx. Dressed like raging white boys in beer and blood, catsup and mustard stained hockey jerseys, hockey sticks and torches held high in the dull of a Detroit Sunday Morning.
I took off these glasses and there was only my uncle Ish fighting the falling factory rust and carbon dust blowing down the alley in the acetylene glow and rains of a dying hurricane.
I finished spraying the slime and soapy stench out the restaurant back door and down the alley drain along with the last time I saw my uncle sober.”
When my grandmother saw these glasses, she slapped them off my face and trampled them in her church shoes.
She was reading Johnatan Livingston Seagull when Zambia Signet Singh found me sitting in the Allergy Clinic at Epicenter Hospital. She was thirteen. I was twelve.
That was almost sixty years ago. I’m takin’ my time tellin’ this story.
