( tommy martinez . cis man . he / him ) . ⸻ laureano ‘laurie’ de andrade, a thirty-three year old , has survived another day in red creek where they have lived for his whole life. the exposed nerve is known for being unyielding and stoic and is often associated with passing to collect a stick of mint chewing gum and a loose gauloise from the velvet lined depths of a door checked coat, still perfumed with moth eaten musk and dusted in pocket lint when he steps outside to light it up on his break. the embroidery of a le cordon bleu chef's jacket unraveling into a frayed wisp of a memory against the wood of an antiquated armoire: only several more years away from being timeworn back into a state of blank and mundane decay. the slack insouciance of a fire alarm twining through the melancholic blues crackling through the turntable in the next room over for a moment, or three, too long before someone finally deigns to put out the stove fire. in a small town where they work as the head chef at lakeside grill word travels fast. it’s hard to keep a secret, and it looks like the boogeyman knows that ████████.
tw: mentions of alcoholism.
what do you name an unreckoned prayer actualized years too late other than what it is ? an afterthought.
his mother, with all her curls tied at the top of her head with nacreous pearls of rosary beads and an our lady of coromoto shrine collecting dust at the kitchen table, thought him to be a holy relic. a tinge of sacrilege always woven through the gossamer weft of all her piety. his father, with his bottles clattering against the rust stained porcelain of the toilet tank, beneath the bathroom sink and the kitchen sink, or half full and seeping out beneath his son's bed like a promise he wouldn't keep, thought him a cruelty. how often had he dropped to his knees to pray over that baby swollen belly ? how often had they brought home another bobbling bauble of precocious femininity ? and fifteen years after their forth and final daughter, with his seven fingers that didn't fit quite right into the cowhide sleeve of his baseball glove and ceramic knees and asphyxiated dreams, god granted him the boy.
he grows up in that derelict imitation of a dollhouse : buttercream yellow and trellised in the cloying rot and floret of bougainvillea and red climber roses. something sickly sweet to sate suburbia. it didn't matter that the pipes groaned in the night or that the faucets leaked rust into the water. no one seemed to mind one bit that the softened wallpaper sloughed off the walls like the skin from that first third degree burn to the palm of his hand, nor when all those daughters, all those lovely and loved girls, slipped, one by one, from their second floor windows quiet and delicate as a puff of sugar frosted breath that extinguished the flame of eighteen candles. not so much tyrannized as they were stifled, suffocated slow as ivy moldering itself to a brick wall.
their father was kind, a retired major league baseball player who ruddied himself each day playing stick ball with the boys in the neighborhood. his father was a carapace of a man, or perhaps a ghost haunting the hallways in a flannel robe : a body that survived a mishap but a psyche that could not.
the only way to bide was to assimilate.
pride, he thinks with the severed tip of his finger on a scarred cutting board, is a curse within their threshold. but even so, he does not scream, no, he just bleeds and bleeds and bleeds until someone finds him with what he thought to be a talisman of protection cradled in his hand. no one wanting to get away ever makes it out whole — he'd only been young and fool enough to believe a sliver of flesh to be sacrifice enough.
the kitchen, with all of his mother's gilded iconography and prayer cards written over with an antiquated birthright of recipes and stereos playing a horrible cacophony of stations, was his salvation. the anatomical heart of that atrophying house still pumping life through that latticework of clotted arteries, and he couldn't possibly endure being anywhere but. he wove himself like spiderwebbing through her legs as she moved from linoleum counter to gas stovetop, he stirred and garnished and chopped until his already mangled hands burnt and blistered from the cutlery and pans, and once, he'd brought his quilt and pillow down the stairs and slept there beneath their rising loaf like a little imitation of a shepherd protecting his flock of sourdough from the fruit fly on the windowsill. survival guised as a nascent talent growing into itself.
he wasn't searching for anything, really, but a sort of deliverance from that fetid cloud of rot and reclusion that choked his house like disease when he all but begged on two knees to be hired at dolly's diner the very day he turned sixteen. arrogant and irreverent as he was, thinking himself above flipping pancakes and watching the fat sizzle off strips of bacon with all the boredom of someone watching paint dry, he loved that job.
and callous as it may sound, it was the one thing that gave him pause as he scrawled his mother a goodbye note at the bottom of the next day's grocery list. he wanted to be something. he wanted to be somebody. and he might never have become anything other than a cheap imitation of his father should he have stayed there much longer.
such a forgotten child more oft than not metamorphoses into an adult who never can glut himself on enough.
but even with all his accolades and baubles and spoils from a twelve year education and career in the midst of new york city's restaurant industry, he's still back where he started. something just a hair's breadth shy of being wanted in the crumbling midst of his childhood home.
