Flash Nonfiction by Misha Tentser
MEMOIR
If I told you about my self-anesthetization in young adulthood via all varietals of downer, especially whiskey that made me bray like a ghost donkey pinned between realms, uncertain of my relationship to grieving—the undertaking that began two months after my ninth birthday, when my mom’s sister died alone in a hospital in Moscow, rendering my mom unable to speak her sister’s name for months, until my mom’s mom died, then my mom’s dad, after which my mom didn’t speak at all, just wandered the house trimming succulents while I ticced, ticked, twitched, counted breaths, throat clears, blinks, heartbeats, trying to satisfy a god that claimed one third of my family in two years but spared me unceremoniously, leading me to the doorstep of a hippy couple who treated me for Tourette’s and acts of mischief, like stealing from my parents’ neighbors who called my dad a kike when he failed to return oranges from their orange tree that had fallen into our yard, neighbors whose demise I wished for nightly in my bedroom after I finished homework and memorized the label on the bottle of sugary placebos that the hippies gave me, which convinced my parents I’d shed my tics and grow into a boy unafraid of living, uninclined to sneak into the bigoted neighbors’ garage left open one summer evening and paw through boxes labeled eBay, December, and grandma—a woman I witnessed amble out of a blue Cadillac on our street, then spit mucus onto the neighbors’ gravel yard before entering their house, a house I wanted to glitter bomb, though this wasn’t ecofriendly according to my parents who didn’t give me grief for the stolen packs of Pokémon cards stowed inside my funeral shoes, as if the grief we shared was enough for this life and several reincarnations—javelina roaming parking lot, potbelly pig cared for by fancy vegans, Sonoran hot dog vendor slipping extra güeros into styrofoam containers at no charge, chiles that made me cry when I ate them, when nothing else made me feel the brunt of sadness, not the thought of my grandpa’s over easy eggs, Whitney Houston’s voice, or my teacher Ms. Linda’s gorgeous handwriting—fluid language that I mimicked, but which didn’t neutralize my ticking, ritual twitching that I thought would save me from an early death, an absence my parents wouldn’t live through, though they stomached other severances, like their homeland’s refusal of their dignity, a quality I didn’t understand when Ms. Linda attributed it to Max from Where the Wild Things Are, a boy whose monsters were fuzzy despite their terrible teeth and terrible claws, not like the monsters in my dreams—disembodied hands chasing me through M. C. Escher plazas, men in feathered suits luring me onto thatched rooves and convincing me I could fly, then laughing when I jumped and tumbled through space, waking eventually with throbbing temples and lingering resentment that the dream was over, the dream where I was afraid and gullible, but not twitching or clenching my jaw in Ms. Linda’s class, thinking, if I clench hard enough, no evil will spill out, definitely not the evil that led me to the hippy couple who spun vials of my blood in a device that looked like a refurbished claw machine, then declared me too sedentary, a claim my parents denied, citing my participation in afterschool athletics—running laps around a patch of buffelgrass for an hour, then searching for cig butts and spent canisters of nitrous oxide in the buffelgrass until my parents picked me up, or I took the early evening city bus packed with fellow twitchers and babies bellowing with their full might at a volume I wished I could achieve, though my parents discouraged roaring at home because they taught violin and piano lessons in our living room where kids blared “Over the Rainbow” over and over, leading me to consider a silent career as a night embalmer, surely a more lucrative vocation than addict seeking exegesis, as if my childhood were a text only I could interpret, affirming my stubborn desire to clarify, to ask—would you believe I was predestined for a sort of ruin?  

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