UNCLE DAVE

It’s 2006 or 2007. George W. Bush is our president. I am eight or nine years old.

Uncle Dave, my mother’s younger brother by a handful of years, is my official introduction to pain. Dave is in a great deal of pain.

Some accomplishments. He’s not drinking anymore. He’s not wetting the bed anymore.

Dave is a devoted jogger. He chain smokes. He swallows his medications in his apartment. He visits his psychiatrist in Manhattan.

He sobs. He sobs whenever he’s upset, angry, or confused. He sobs violently.

He throws things across the room sometimes, and glass shatters. He drops things, intentionally sometimes, and glass shatters. I have always hated the sound of glass shattering. I loathe the fury behind it. When glass shatters, I am at my worst.

And, right now, I’m crying. Dave is trying to pick me up. He’s trying to hold me. He’s trying to comfort me. He’s trying to force me into his lap. He’s grabbing at me. He’s clutching me. He’s forcing his comfort, his support, onto me. Severely and earnestly at once.

Because he can relate.

Because I think he can relate.

I try to pull away. Towards my bedroom. Towards anything else. The opposite direction.

I am not succeeding. I am trying to push Dave away.

Don’t want him to see my tears. Don’t want him to see my fear. He's not taking no for an answer. I have no voice.

Yet, in some way, I am grateful for his presence. I’m grateful for his insistence. For his deformed insight. His wrinkled Oxford shirt. His courage. There are shards of glass in my stomach. My throat, too.

My parents are upstairs. In their bedroom. Fighting about my stepfather’s heroin addiction. He didn’t inject. It was a purely nasal habit. She fails to understand that. She doesn’t get it. My stepfather is still acting like an addicted, selfish asshole. That’s according to my mother. He’s not recovering fast enough. He’s still hiding orange juice from us. He’s still sleeping. All the time.

Dave finally captures me, and I cease struggling. He holds me tight. He reeks of Marlboro Reds. He carries me down the street. He buys me ice cream. I eat the whole pint before dinner because just a taste is never enough.

Dave is the uncle that, years later, you might want to accuse of sexual abuse. But, he didn’t do that. That didn’t happen. He only wiped me when I didn’t know how. He only taught me dirty words. He only let me puff on his cigarettes. When nobody was looking.

And, later on, that night. We had a beautiful dinner. All of us.

Then, I brushed my teeth. Then, I went to bed.

by Myles Zavelo

Myles Zavelo’s writing has appeared in the following publications: New York Tyrant Magazine, Muumuu House, The Harvard Advocate, Spectra Poets, and elsewhere.