GLORY, GLORY, HALLELUJAH
Ohh
Ohhhhh
Ohhhhhhhhh
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Ah
Ahh
It had to be the stray dogs, didn’t it? The ones that loitered along the snaggletooth shoreline like ghosts with mange. “Poor things,” the Moms would say, clutching windbreakers to their clavicles. But those weren’t the whimpers of mutts. No, they were something else entirely— strange, wet sounds slithering in the troughs between crashing waves. A language, maybe. Not spoken and certainly not canine.
“Those were no dogs,” I told Mrs. Buttons (her Christian name, though she’d long since abandoned any Christlike impulses) one Easter afternoon, out on the back deck, swapping melancholies and puffs off her Cigarillo. “Well, if not dogs, then what?” she asked, squinting through her smoke. It was the holidays—I didn’t want to puncture the cheer. “Coyotes,” I said, which wasn’t necessarily a lie, just the kind of thing you say when the truth is far far away.
All the lifeguards knew. The ones who spent summers watching for drowning—they knew. Some fathers had bored a glory hole into the back stall at the Marine Street bathroom, surgical in its placement. By day, it was plastered in shit-stains and graffiti-script. You’d need a split in your soul to even consider using it. But at night, darkness equalizes. Anonymous sons would take unknown fathers into their mouths, knees slicked with whatever festered there. There was something transactional in it, something more necessary than appetite.
It broke on a Wednesday morning, sometime post-housing crisis, when mortgages were underwater. The local news caught wind, zooming in on the gnarled porcelain toilet to conjure dirty deeds. It didn’t matter that the fathers denied it, or that the sons did too. Small towns are funny. Privacy survives in soft whispers that mar friendly faces like slow-growing poxes. Ultimately: four divorces ("irreconcilable differences"), two STDs, and too many unanswered questions.
And now, of course, this story.
Art by Max Tullio.
MAX TULLIO: