Kayla Chenault

PASSING

     Will and I listen to “Like a Good Girl Should.” Or a “Guy is a Guy.” We can’t decide what to call it. Will laughs at it and he says it’s rapey.  Most of the song, my prehensile box braids, beaded, drum against my shoulder tattoo. I vomit into my mouth; it’s hot dog, bun, mustard, and Lake Michigan murk. He wants to live in a Doris Day film.

     He’s passing. He used to use a Jayne Mansfield type to do it. But she also sang: somewhere between a dying ChiPin and Maria Callas. Sex was in her shape; wife was in her voice.  His blonde knew what he was; her blonde mother didn’t. It was not allowed. She married a white man later; her mother knows his people. Will misses her hips but laughs because they disappeared in her matronhood.

     One time, they went to mass together once; she left a menstrual stain on the pew. Her communion. There was nothing virginal in the blood. He licked it from the olefin. It was nourishing holy water. He pressed his hands into her hips and she shimmered into the dying light of stained glass. She said fuck me while I gaze into the eyes of the Holy Mother.  He stopped and kissed her lips gently; they walked out to the fellowship hour hand in hand. He tells me about it as we listen to Doris Day and I say you hate yourself.  

     He licks his lips. He turns them raw-red with his appetite for Doris Day in fox fur and nothing else. I get sick of him, so I take a ball peen hammer to Doris Day’s skull. Not the 95-year-old woman with the yellowing poodle updo. I smash the skull of the blonde from Pillow Talk.  I bust her brains. I watch her blank smile sag, her eyes shutter, the telephone drop from her frail, jerking fingers. I think about killing her in Calamity Jane, too. But I watch her linger on Allyn Ann McLerie’s breast-- and then kiss Howard Keel; I almost feel sorry for her. Then I remember only she could dig her canines into a bar of music and drain the sex out of Cole Porter. Only she could turn him domesticated and suburban while invoking the name of Dorothy Parker.

     I show Will the hammer, still fresh with gore. He looks at the strips of cassette tape unwinding in my bloody hands. He notices how I cradle her broken neck in the crook of my arm. I look him dead in the eye and say you’re a black man now. 

     He says No. He finds the song funnier.  He delights in her lack of vibrato; he loves the green trace in her golden shimmer when she becomes the technicolor process. Her voice never catches the cologned collar of her lover; it’s not allowed. Wife is in her voice, sex nowhere. She says supper will on the table soon and you can fuck me on the table after. She’s too exhausted before soon arrives. He cums into his own hand; she falls asleep dead in his arms. He follows soon after and dreams he’s what he thought Rock Hudson was.