Oedipus Mess, A Story

Oedipus Mess, A Story

    We left our beds and began sleeping on the floor instead, or even on the stairs. Accidents became frequent, gruntings in the night, thuds and groans of irritation and pain. Some of the dogs residing in the house evacuated their bladders onto our upturned faces. Dreaming became impossible.
    There were several murders and many suicides.
    My father slept without blankets. Shivering, his old bones creaking like rusty hinges.  Somewhat shamed by the extent of his sacrifice, I left the house one night with the intent of sleeping fully clothed in the street. I decided I would no longer eat. I would drink, but only when in the company of others. More, I would not move when the cars passed through  my nesting place and ground my fragile bones into beautiful, flattened, leaf-like shapes. I would laugh at pain and misery, and believe in ghosts, and infuriate God, and play tuneless songs on my flaccid cock to tempt the Devil, and tell the Devil to go to the Devil.
      My father responded by hanging himself on a regular basis. He would doubtless have done it endlessly, but there were few places left in our town where one could do it. Our buildings were mostly crumpled, bombed-out, burned-out burlap bags filled to bursting with uncombusted gases. There were few firm beams to be found, and no hooks that had not already been taken. A few  streetlights (that did not light) with ropes pre-supplied, and sometimes with dangling skeletons, yes.
    Still I was shamed by his selfless example, even if it was not forever. For often he would hang there motionless for whole foul seasons of weather, shat upon by both cloud and foul fowl.
    Angered, I cut off my head and kicked it with me wherever I went.
    But that was not so startling in a place where so many people were already in pieces.
    I became known for being the boring one in the family, the one without the common decency to even light himself on fire.
    One day then, as I passed beneath my father where he dangled, and where the smoke from his singed nostrils curled my own, and where in the puddle of his blood the town's small children laughed and played, and where a bolt of lightning was striking him and setting his old bones to bouncing, and where he had only one shoe, having eaten the other, and where I was told he had shot himself in the heart six times, and yet lived, and where even my rolling head was afraid to go (rather it cringed behind me like a shy dog, shivering and chattering its shattered teeth), I asked, "Father, what next? What can I do? Why will you not love me?"
    When he still did not answer, I felt I had no choice but to go away.
    Back in our former home, returned to the stairs, lying on the floor playing nursemaid to my bones, finally returning to bed, crawling back into the cleft, I developed a taste for myself and began comsuming, bit by bit and day by day, my own secret, special me meat, until finally I chewed up even my own tongue and swallowed and then even my pulse disappeared.
    The room fell silent. The stairs creaked no more. The old man, swinging on his post, cocked his head, puzzled, and was not particularly at rest.