Offender Call

I’m sitting on the back deck of my mother’s house

with a Coors Light in one hand

and a flyswatter in the other, smashing lantern flies 

and flicking stinkbugs off the banister.

The air is filled with the twittering of birds

punctuated by screams from the roller coaster down the street.

Inside, the land line keeps ringing. 

The caller ID reads Offender Call; my stepbrother

calling from prison. He calls every day

since his mother died and his girlfriend found the cash 

he’d squirreled away before he got locked up again. 

Last week my own number got tangled up in some scam 

and now I receive incessant texts telling me 

my debit card has been restricted, 

or trying to sell me car insurance, though I don’t drive, 

or looking for someone named Nicole.

My mother’s trying to get me to move back here

but most of my old friends are gone

and the places where we ruined our youth have closed.

My dad’s half blind and will sometimes topple over, 

and despite my years of threats, despite my failed attempts, 

for the first time I really see how this ends, 

can catch a whiff of final stink wafting up the cold corridor,

can hear the wheeze of the machines, 

the voices and dings over the intercom. Last night 

I got a message from my friend who works in the covid ward. 

Every one of her patients is dying.

Every one of them refused to get vaccinated. 

Possibly a coincidence. “I show up every day 

with grace and love in my heart,” she writes, 

“and then it all turns to shit.”

It’s been two years and I still picture the love of my life

face down in the grass, flopping like a fish. I do my best 

to push away the image, grab whatever distraction

is closest to hand. Yesterday the family 

piled in the car and drove downtown 

to the rinky-dink museum in the church basement

where the Liberty Bell was hidden from the British. 

My mother nodded and my sister rolled her eyes 

as the guide prattled on, instructing my brother 

to take the looped pole and hook it around the clapper 

and pull it to kiss the bronze rim of the replica.

I can still feel that great peal reverberating in my skull

…or maybe it’s the trilling of the phone

as another insect lands before me, stupid and fearless, 

antennae twitching, orange eyes staring.

I hold the plastic swatter poised 

keeping perfectly still

and I drink in the silence as the phone in the kitchen 

finally stops ringing