The View From Scranton

The Big Queasy

I get queasy. Real queasy. Like some sap who can’t handle his sentiment; a cat that can’t stomach its quick. A hollow wells up from my gut and into my throat, craws to a halt, right where they say the frogs dwell.

But this is no frog.

It is reptilian. Where the frog broke off. Something elemental and blooded cold. A snap from evolution’s intermission. This must be what the dinosaurs felt thresheld at the exit, on the verge of no more, when every gasp was the last.

Watching Antione receive his umpteenth of Four Hundred Blows I catch my heart in my head, sneaking like the thief that it is. Poor, brave Antione. Wagoned away in a cage like some safari capture, another beast being led to the slaughterhouse. I know how he feels to know the next many minutes of your life will be handled by handlers who at best have perfunctory interests. I know how it feels to have to kiss the world goodbye.

Or Bernadette or Rose or Margaret sent away to fray with The Magdalene Sisters. Margaret ’cause she was raped by a cousin; Rose for abornin’ out of wedlock; Bernadette simply for talking to boys. How gruesomely ghastly a pogrom it was. Girls exiled in “secure accommodation” so as not to serve as temptation to the worst of Ireland’s men.

Obscene.

posted by John Hood. @ 11:08 AM