Scenes from Jurassic Park 5

J. Bradley

Spring 2010

Scene 1

I’ve lost track of all the children I left in orphanages of napkins and boxers but I've gotten so used to the squeal of my chair.

Scene 7

The hip huggers makes her vagina look like scalene triangle. She walks like the kind of testicular cancer that gave you something in return. Her children will be named after vodka that comes out of plastic bottles.

Scene 11

Tonight, her wine glass is bulimic. I try staging an intervention but the pinot noir makes it look like a sparrow coughed up blood on my right shirt sleeve. She also punctuates each sentence with her lit cigarette, the ashes leaving an ellipsis on the carpet like bread crumbs. If I lived here, I would clean up the trail to make sure she couldn't find her way back to me.

Scene 17

The swab in my urethra is like a paleontologist dusting clumsily for fossils. I score the scene by grinding my teeth, keeping the "ow"s and "fuck"s to a wisp. When I hear boys say how badly they want to grow up, I will tell them the story of the doctor with slender, rough sticks for fingers, how this doctor steals their dreams by siphoning them through their peeholes.

Scene 29

The woman in front of me at the airport security line guts herself open, her purse, jacket, cellphone spilling into the bin below. She never notices the gapped smile of the bolts holding the bin down or how the “Do Not Use” stenciled on the bottom glares at her in the hot yellow of a father meeting his daughter's tattooed date for the first time. As the woman yanks the bin, the tetanus of insomnia keeps me polite. The hangover wants to feed her to the x-ray machine, slowly.

Closing Credits

The little girl sitting next to me on the plane wears her Mickey Mouse scalp proudly. I want to her to behave like a piñata this morning but her mother fends off the dentistry of my left elbow with coloring books and earphones. I know I will eventually become a father, a lion tamer using Santa and birthdays like a whip and chair but my children will also learn to keep their smiles to themselves; it'll make sense to them when they reach that age where they teach their hands to roam.