Purple Heart

 

by Matthew Dexter

 

I stretch Grandpa’s scrotum with the inertia of a butterfly in a blender so the
skin becomes translucent in the sun as the nail gun spits its obstinate shadow. Blood oozes and Grandpa’s nuts and I was born to nail his sack to the front porch. Dragonflies bounce, bloodshot eyeballs, the taste of tears is the sound of singing shrapnel.

Too frail to fight back, geezer killed dozens of Viet Cong before raping me. Maybe he fears the memories will crumble into my skull like Zipperheads ambushed by machine guns. His penis winking, sinking into me, whiskey warm wet.

“Semper Fi,” Grandpa says.

Nails are medieval. His unmown lawn is the jungle and his moaning is conjuring curious neighbors onto ramshackle porches. An old bearded woman points her Budweiser bottle at us. I swagger down rotting steps, slog through tall clammy grass, fire a few nails into ballooning cumulonimbus. The sun vanishes.

“Please don’t do this,” Grandpa says.

Scrotum unfolding, each wrinkle a continent expunged, an oyster map of the
Atlantic, tornado mocking me, Grandpa howls and I know the twister hears because her funnel swoops down and zigzags across the labyrinthine cornfield, catapulting cobs and drizzling husks, melting street signs, wiping out porches, flinging boards into faces—nails into eyeballs—swallowing houses, shredding trees like toothpicks, leaving toilets for tombstones and bathtubs where elderly couples huddle in puddles of urine and collages of feces.

We’re lost and dancing in the dust of a butterfly’s wings. I wonder where the sound of weeping goes to die and how her echo is eaten alive. My heartbeat is our porch exploding, obliterating wingless cicadas and decapitating dragonflies

 

***

 

Matthew Dexter is an American author living in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. His fiction has been published in hundreds of literary journals. He writes abhorrent freelance pieces for exorbitant amounts of pesos to pay the bills while drinking cervazas in paradise with tourists. He is the author of the novel The Ritalin Orgy (Perpetual Motion Machine). His second novel and memoir are forthcoming. He’s the Lil Wayne of literature.