Pecan Tree by Ryan McMasters
When I was a kid, I would have night terrors. My screams, the alarm clocks that only the insane or demon-possessed are used to, the cold flop sweat weighing me exhausted rather than cooling me down; sleep did not bring comfort all the time.
One time, I terrified my grandmother with my bellows when I stayed over at her house.
As an adult, I sleep so deeply that I don’t remember my dreams;
I don’t remember much of my past;
I don’t remember her voice; I don’t remember her voice.
I don’t remember her voice.
I remember her love; I don’t remember her voice.
If you say something often enough, you can get so deluded, you think it’s true, like:
“Taking my life is the best option.”
If you say the same thing & expect different results, then that proves that you are crazy; it proves I am insane.
I don’t have any swine flocks close by for Christ to drive my inner demons into, so an audience will do.
They are like Legion; they are many & I will cling to their voices, flickering affirmations & caustic uncertainties, but even with so many voices pinball-bumpering me into dizzy, tumultuous contentedness, I will still have the demon of her voice being muted when I play back any memory of her.
But the most unsettling ones say absolutely nothing, their ethereal breath still snow-etching your spine.
She died due to heart failure;
Her heart never failed our family. Her heart was a life raft & we buoyed on her sacrifice.
As a child, she was a pecan giving tree that I took shade from; as an adult, I can no longer hear the whistling from the gaps in her branches & the breeze I once took comfort in feels frigid on my back like that demon hissing sweet invisibles with his presence alone.
My mom recently told me that my grandmother, my MeMe, read poetry; I’m the only grandchild that it really passed to. I feel comforted to know that I may not hear her voice, but I still have an expressive one like hers.
If I forgot her voice, how long will it take to forget my own?
As a toddler, I couldn’t straightjacket my excuses; I couldn’t exorcise myself when I couldn’t my own shoelaces; naivety & mental safeguarding are examples of sovereign intervention.
As an adult, I am a trapeze artist with no net underneath; naivety is an innate childlike quality that gets wind-whipped like a pecan tree battered by winter gales, beating so hard, the whistling amidst the trees reach a pitch of silence so searing, that I can only hear when the boughs break,
when my brow breaks, when my cradled tears fall & down will come realization, vulnerability & all, letting me know that the scariest of night terrors are the ones you never closed your eyes for & the screams are just the background music you get used to.
