John Marion

Against The Grain

“Just eat it. It’s not gonna grow inside you.”, he said with a tone so passive that it seemed like he was just a passerby. Like he didn’t also eat this same cereal out of this same box every morning. In fact… “Did you have cereal… breakfast already?”, I say with a nervous stutter, trying carefully to tiptoe around any words that would come from my complex about eating food infested with the larvae of bugs. I screw my eyes up, hoping that he would think of it as innocent, completely detached from the previous conversation, but knowing that he had been around me long enough to know exactly what I was doing. That was another one of the things I did that annoyed him. He never failed to complain about my peculiar speaking patterns and stutter whenever they surfaced in a conversation. I heard his rants on my way of talking on a consistent enough basis that I have found out that he pretty much recycles the same speech every time. I say rant when I talk to my friends about him; tangent has too much of a congenial connotation to accurately describe what he does, and diatribe makes it seem like he slowly picks apart a view or state of mind piece by piece using sound logic and reasoning(neither of which he seems to have in droves) until there would be no way to defend the opposing argument. But there is nothing to argue against here, in my speech. I am not saying anything with the way that I say things, it is just how I work. I never construe my logic for a particular sentence maliciously; when I dislike somebody and I want to subtly hurt them, I don’t try to speak in the way most offensive to their ears, using sentence structure like one would use their fists. Every little ounce of pain that I supposedly dealt to people is accidental. And anyways, if he did manage to pick apart my logic, I wouldn’t exist. It’s something hard wired into me.I say supposedly because I don’t actually think that anyone minds it, maybe their subconscious picks it up but nothing more. No one has ever came to me asking that I please adjust my natural speaking to something more palatable except for my dad and people I go to that he sends me to, people that tell me how to appease my dad. He says it will tick people off, drive people away, make people avoid me without them even knowing why or any other synonym from a seemingly endless list he has in his head that he developed for this exact reason. He would begin with his signature opening statement. This was the heart and soul of his argument. “No one else in the world is like you.”, he would sigh. I couldn’t really argue with that one. He was factually correct. But I didn’t care enough to waste my breath telling him that, in fact, everyone was different from the very small quirks of their mannerisms to their broader personality traits and their identity as a complete being. I don’t think he would like it, he would think it very matter-a-fact and blunt and just feed into his anger. Either that, or it would pass right through him. He was always going to construe my every action in this way, just like how I would always act in the way that I act He would then follow it up with “Why do you care about this.”, “If you’re picky and very particular like this, nobody’s going to put up with you. I do because I’m your dad, but the outside world isn’t going to be as sympathetic and you will get nowhere in life.”, or even “Just do what everyone else would in your shoes. It will make your life a whole lot easier. I don’t see why you make this so hard for yourself.”. At this point in the “talk” as he called them, I would start to tune out. I knew what was coming. A breakdown of all the “weird” things I did that both he and I really knew didn’t matter to other people. One sentence after another, like bullets flying from an automatic rifle. By the time he was finished, it had taken longer than if we just had done things my way. “Are you listening to me, or did you ask a question and drift off again?”, he said, with a distinct look of expected disappointment in his tone. His tone immediately startled me and sent my heart rate skyrocketing. “I said that I didn’t care about things like that the same way that you do. No one does.”, he said, this time less forceful, but it still bred frustration in me just like the last sentence. “I didn’t know that not wanting bugs in my food that I eat every morning and every night wasn’t normal. Seems pretty reasonable to me.” There was fire and vitriol from my words, powered from my upset state like it was an engine. But there was also something else. Force. I started to get more forceful and less whiny as I got older, it was part of my germinating confidence as a teenager. “You’re growing more cocky by the day. You’re starting to test my patience now. I don’t know why I put up with you anymore.”, he said. I fired back immediately. “You said that like you can choose to not be my dad.”. “Well I can certainly stop being so nice. I spoil you rotten and this is my thanks?”, he said with a tone that was almost intended for me to yell back at him. That’s what he wanted. “Yep. Spoil me rotten. Spoil me with a house that’s infested with flour moths.”,I whispered out of sheer anger, not thinking. A moment later I put my head on the table, regret slowly filling me like water. I guarantee that my dad waited so long just so that I could suffer with worry as greatly as I did in anticipation of his next action. He made sure my worry was not unfounded, as he got up slowly from his chair in the living room and made his way to the kitchen. Once there, he took the box of cereal from the kitchen table. I half heartedly raised my hand and opened my mouth, but I knew I was too late. I didn’t know exactly what he was going to do, but I didn’t need to: I knew that it was going to be bad. He stormed out to the trash can outside, then emptied the contents of the box into the trash can. He shook it even after I was sure everything was gone, making sure there was absolutely nothing left. My eyes just followed him as he came back in, making sure not to look at me. He sat back down and went back to working. I just watched him as he watched the screen, acting like nothing was out of the ordinary. Suddenly, the door flew open, startling me out of my seat. My mom was home. Even just after she entered, I felt my heart slow, calm was restored within me. I felt like a weight had just been lifted from my shoulders: the weight of my father. The weight of all the “problems” I had. I always liked my mom a lot more than my father. There was never the uncomfortable tension between us like there was with my father. She knew the behaviors that made my dad treat me like a bane to his existence, sent to him by god for sinning in a past life. The air felt free when she came home. Sadly, she had a job that made her spend more time away from home than my father’s, so I was always picked up by my father. I really enjoyed waiting an hour before she came home, barely even talking to my dad. “I’m home.”, she said, almost on cue with my thoughts. ‘What’s happening here?”, she said with great genuine curiosity in her voice, even if she knew what had just happened moments before she arrived at the doorstep of the house, there would not be a trace of venom laced within those words. My dad didn’t immediately respond. Then he actually registered that she was there by his chair, and he responded with a voice so devoid of life, even for my dad, that I wondered if he had been replaced with a machine that day and I just didn’t notice it up until that point. “Oh, nothing major. Just the usual inconveniences.”, he said while looking straight at me. I seethed and balled my hands, the only reason I didn’t rush at him and sock him right in the face was my mom. “Well, ok.”, she said with an unsure smile and went back to her room to work. I took the opportunity to join her up until the hallway split into our two rooms, and then I turned into my room instead of hers. I wondered just how the flour moth eggs could still be in the house. We had kept all of our flour in containers, containers with supposedly tight lids. I wonder if we could get airtight lids, maybe the moths could get inside the containers with just a basic lid to keep insects out. I winced when I saw the prices, and my hope and sudden burst of energy slowly faded the farther down the amazon page I went. There was no way my father would ever agree with these prices. He thinks it’s all silly, just a little game I’m playing with him. An idea pops into my head.I have to work to contain myself from laughter, the very thought is absurd. Apparently, barn owls eat flour moth’s eggs without really liking flour at all. I took my computer off my lap and put it on the bed. I walked over to the door to mom’s room and knocked. She came to the door almost immediately.