Walls. Singing Bushes.

If walls could talk maybe they could have alerted someone as Alex lay sprawled out convulsing on the carpet spewing saliva across his face as his eyes rolled back into the black depths of his poisoned skull. If walls could talk perhaps he would’ve been saved from flopping around percussively—his arms striking the carpet like heavy drum sticks to a pair of tom-toms—and gasping for air like a blankly staring, shored crappie. 

The mop-haired carpet could have been saved from soaking up the sudsy vomit overflowing from his gurgling mouth. 

A court ordered stay at the sober-living-house couldn’t save Alex. Nothing could truly save Alex because there were two opposing things from which he needed saving. Drugs and alcohol saved him from having to deal with the horror of life; drugs and alcohol killed him. 

Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. 

A plastic baggie of leftover smack was smushed in the back pocket of Alex’s jeans under the weight of his bouncing ass. He kept flailing around like that until he finally stopped for good. 

The sober-living-house didn’t seem to help many of its residents, the walls probably thought. The bushes lining the house hid within their bulbous canopies an ever-growing pile of booze bottles; the most popular choices 40oz. Budweisers and pints of Wild Turkey. Those bottles lay in there clinking together like chimes on windy nights whenever the weather shook the foliage until one of the residents, desperate for a little cash, would collect them—anxiety and mental anguish building as they gathered into a large trash bag each of those chiming bottles—and haul them off to be recycled, hoping not to be seen by the landlord, a cop, or their sponsor. 

If walls could talk they could have communicated to the subsequent homeowner upon finding hidden in the back of that deep closet in Alex’s former room cold as the grave a child’s water-color painting that said ‘To Dad, Happy Father’s Day.’ The walls could have maybe explained that the artwork wasn’t left there by an apathetic father moving out of the house. Alex wasn’t apathetic in a paternal sense; he cared—he experienced anguish at the reality of his shitty parenthood. No, he wasn’t apathetic. He was merely an uncontrollable junkie who had managed to get himself killed before making it out of the sober-living-house. The walls could have explained that Alex didn’t want to leave his kids painting at the house, he had just fucked up. Again. This time for the last time.

If the walls in that small rectangular bedroom could talk they could have explained that it wasn’t a piss stain dripping down the side of the wall, it was a dark yellow candle that had overflowed—much like Alex’s vomiting mouth—after he had passed out and then perished. 

That candle had burned for hours, the smoky aroma of Birchwood Beach fusing with the growing scent of bodily fluids and death. The Kentucky spring breeze blowing in through the open window couldn’t mask it; that stench would eventually fill the rest of the house, after which Alex’s roommates would come and find him lying lifeless, staring upward at them as they entered the room with the vacant eyes and opened mouth of an expired toad. 

They would cry, not entirely unselfishly. They would know that Alex could have been them; they would know they too could soon be dead. 

In the back of their minds they may have even felt angry at Alex. They might have been planning to get buzzed off later that evening, loading up a pipe or sniffing a pill or throwing an emptied bottle of Turkey into the bush. They wouldn’t be able to do that now, not without further regret and self-loathing, at least. 

The hangover would now be worse.

If walls could talk the subsequent owner would have known as he painted coat after coat of fumy satin white over the candle wax stains and ripped up the carpet that this was a room that had seen pain. The walls could have explained as he assembled the crib that decisions are important and loneliness can be deadly. 

If walls could talk they could have alerted that subsequent homeowner, called Oscar, of the reason for the baby’s continued crying. Those walls could have told Oscar, a first-time parent, that the baby wasn’t being unreasonably noisy. The baby wasn’t simply reacting to new experience. The window—that one in the bedroom above the singing bushes—was blowing in with its breeze the specter of a lost father. A spirit with a clear job to do though no way of doing it. 

The baby wailed and shook the brittle old crib, one likely too old to again reuse, but one Oscar had gotten recycled and was all he could afford. Oscar would enter Alex’s former bedroom and comfort his newborn, his head throbbing as he remembered the bottle he had thrown in the bush earlier that afternoon. He had heard a soft clink as the bottle landed, but he didn’t look inside. He hadn’t noticed the entirety of the collection.

If walls could talk they could have told Oscar. If the baby could yet talk, maybe they also could have explained. It wasn’t the wind; it wasn’t the child being unreasonable—it was Alex darting around the room, bouncing off the newly painted walls and screaming through the restlessness of an unquiet grave. 

If walls could talk, they could have told Oscar that Alex was aware of the painting in the closet; he knew it was still there. 

He simply couldn’t tell Oscar about it. He couldn’t explain his situation. The baby noticed him, but he couldn’t explain to the baby, and the baby couldn’t yet talk.

Alex had no way of lifting the painting. He had no method of delivering it to his son. His son, who gazed out his own window every evening, inhaling the crisp breeze, fragrant of both earth and fuel—both nature and construction—wondering where his dead father might now be, if anywhere. 

If walls could talk they could have told Oscar what to do with that painting when he finally found it deep in that cold closet. Walls can’t talk, though, so Oscar, shaking his head at the neglect of some parents, threw the painting in the trash. 

The painting featured a family holding hands, a house, and a sun. Several bushes surrounded the house.

The Building Blocks Of Life

“The funny thing about DNA is that it belongs to you, something unique that makes you who you are. A series of complex organic building blocks that only the smartest of people can tear apart and put back together to tell us how we’re built. Even though it is so uniquely you, it is also your mom, dad, grandparents, and siblings. It is the culmination of the short-term evolution that your family has gone through just to create you. That’s how I always thought of it, anyway. But sometimes other people don’t see it the same way. Some people don’t see DNA and the miracle of evolution at all. They see a small child writhing around, covered in the blood of their mom, who didn’t make it. These people see a baby screaming and crying as if unaware of the destruction they have just caused, how impossible they have just made life.” 

“Please, why are you doing this? I have a family now. I love my children with all my heart. Please let me go. Just untie me and walk out the front door. No one will ever have to know you broke in. It will be like this never happened. Please, please, I beg you.” 

“Uh uh uh. The story wasn’t finished yet. We need to listen to the whole story. As I was saying, sometimes people just don’t appreciate the miracle of children and all of the science that actually goes into creating a child inside the human body. Half of the mother’s DNA, she has half of her father’s DNA, and it just goes and goes in quarters and eighths and sixteenths of all of the people who came before. It’s fascinating, really, how you are yourself but also everyone else. Technically, you should be half your father and half your mother, personality and all. 

That’s when all of these “scientists” come in and tell you about nature versus nurture and all this other horse shit that is really just guesswork. No one can really truly prove that your surroundings determine your personality. I thought that the day I met my parents was the day I would finally figure out for sure that these psychologists were just taking stabs in the dark. I, who grew up in nine different houses and hopped from dinner table to dinner table with all sorts of families, and all kinds of lives, I would be just like my parents. I would be the proof that DNA is everything, you and Mom were two halves of me, and I was the sum of you.”

“What are you even talking about? Please just untie me, and we can talk through this like adults. You want to know if you’re half of me, right? We can go to get dinner, and we can talk, and we can be a family again. We can talk about your mother. I’m sure you’re just like her. You look just like her.”

“Stop talking. Didn’t anyone ever tell you it isn’t nice to interrupt people? No one ever told me that. You never told me that, Dad. You never told me anything, actually. Do you talk to your precious little kids now, Gary? What was so different about these ones? Did you like them better because they didn’t take Sarah away from you? Did you think about me when she was giving birth? How you could lose a second wife? Go through giving away a child all over again? Well, I lost her too, Dad. I lost Mom too. But I also lost you. I lost both people who made me who I am. I need to take a deep breath…”

“I just couldn’t do it without her, please. I loved your mom so much. I was just too young to do it alone. I am so, so sorry. You’re older now; I’m older now. We can still be family.”

“No. What are you not understanding? Now, open your mouth. If you can’t shut up on your own, I’ll help you. Yup, mhm, open for the airplane. Do you like the taste of that? Haha, yea, I bet you do. I just grabbed it out of the dirty rag pile in my kitchen. Either way, not knowing you or Mom really did help me in the end. I needed to find you; I needed to figure out why I’m like this. It turns out that if you’re an orphan, colleges really love you. They love you even more when they realize that your research has some deep-rooted connection to your past. They think it’ll make you work harder. They even gave me $2,500 to try and get a deeper understanding of our DNA. They helped me pay for a DNA test and even found you for me just so I could really get down to the roots of my building blocks, the things that made me. Now don’t worry; all of my scalpels are fresh out of the packaging. You’ll feel a tiny pinch, but then you don’t feel anything. Isn’t that so nice? Now stay still; let’s find out what DNA looks like in real life.”