Even Stones Cry. By Jerry Vilhotti.

 

Ever since I had known my parents they bickered: always taking opposite sides of an issue; using their words like needles against one another as if mending all the bad things they had done to one another; hoping a new whole cloth would emerge to stop their hostilities.

One time they really scared me when I thought they were going to fall into a death grip One upon the Other. I was not even a teenager yet and tried to get in between them – nearly being squished to Purgatory!

It began when my mother told my father he had done a real stupid stupid thing when he painted the wall pink. He had built it for three weeks after coming home from work in the chemical factory - that every so often had explosions going off - keeping all the workers on their toes. He never told this about his job and since the media were all being bought by big corporation the secret was being kept by the radio and newspaper, we only got stones of false information to understand the world around us which was eating away our native intelligence which would realize only after our country would give up its freedoms to protect its pseudo safety.

The workers had signed their union contract which promised if they all would take a four dollar an hour cut in their wages, the company vowed to forever pay theirs and their family's health care needs too but did not. - making stones fall upon heads who needed medical care what with all the pollution being spewed out by the many factories in "The American Valley" affecting lungs and other organs - including the brain.

While I was in their midst, my mother had to add that all the other walls he had built on the street looked better than his own wall. Which was really true in that my father took great pride in his work which he did for other people who had mortgages to pay too, even going so far as to point out a stone's face to my very eyes.. He went into his Cincinnati pitcher's Ewell Blackwell's windup, sending his half-full cup of coffee against our white kitchen wall creating an image that looked like a group of people looking at us with distorted shocked expressions.

I cried which made them stop fighting..

 

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