My mother did what she does best: piss me off. Except that time she did it a little more than usual.
Know how I dealt with it? I punched her. No no, not a love tap. Not a slap. A punch. The kind you put your weight into. Foot forward, shoulder taut like a bow and arrow, and bombs away.
Right in her nose. That nose that wrinkles whenever it's upset. Which is almost all the time.
I expected a dull thud and a few broken knuckles flecked with blood.
There was actually a hollow THWACK and my mother fell flat on the kitchen floor. Literally flat. She was a cardboard prop. The cat sniffed at the tall cutout suspiciously. I mentally retraced everything that led up to the confrontation. Not that any spat with my mother had any logic.
She was very real. Very loud. Those eyes that were once blue, washed out to gray, wide open with pointless rage and indignation. Probably yelling over something about toast and then jumping to whatever grievance she had with the state of the bathroom.
Her gums receded over the years giving her dull and long fangs.
She just wouldn't shut up for anything so I got out of my chair and tried to persuade her with blunt force. THWACK.
She was silent. She was flat.
I wanted to make a missing person report. I didn't want to explain to the police why I punched a cardboard prop of my mother. So I decided to think on it until the evening.
I went to work.
I straightened up the shelves at the small, mostly quiet convenience store with shaking hands. The electronic bell let me know someone else was inside and I called out,
"Hey there, can I help you?"
Tall guy. Dark complexion. Wide, ivory smile.
"How's it going today?" I tried again.
Nothing. Just that smile.
I took a deep breath and walked up to him and reached out to shake his hand.
"How can I help you today, man?"
My comprehension sank in and I grabbed the man's arm.
He was a cardboard cutout.
I went drinking with my bar buddies. All two of them. They sat next to me on either side, shot glasses refilled with amber liquid and their heads nodding like they were mounted on springs as I babbled about the episodes with my mom and the customer.
I was so far into my monologue that I didn't notice they had stopped nodding until late after the fact. I elbowed one and then the other. They both fell on the floor as cardboard cutouts.
I went into work the next day.
The store was a large cardboard prop.
I called my wife on my cell and it rang until it went to her voicemail.
"Oh no," I muttered.
I slammed my car door and looked at our house. A large cardboard facade. As were all the other houses in the subdivision of gray and ivory. The lawn was a large printout of manicured grass with a few stand-ups of dandelions. A prop of my neighbor stood frozen in a permanent grin and wave.
The cat wove figure 8's around my ankles, confused by the transformation of her food bowl into cardboard.
I picked her up and held her close, feeling the vibration of her purr and looking into those deep olive eyes.
She stayed real. Which she had always been.
A dutiful furry alarm clock. Mouse-catcher, bird-killer. Yet always sincere about it.
My Mother. My wife. My friends. My house. My neighbors. They all flooded back to me. And I wondered if I ever got close enough to them to see or to hear them. If they were more than cardboard props or if I just wanted them to be.