The Children's Room

This man, is a true story. This upper-class American housewife cultivates a mustache – single eyebrow, then divorces her husband and kids (her pores fill with pus, enlarge and burst). She remarries a socially-upward-moving factory worker and reproduces continually until the workman’s mind rips blue like jagged metal. He sells the car, mortgages the house, takes the bus to Atlantic City and puts it all on one number – loses, and fades away into the infinite social continuum. Meanwhile the housewife goes on welfare does drugs and worships the devil. The kids remain locked together in a single room, at each other’s throats – T.V. set blaring, frying their minds like an electo-magnetic shock to the brain or a goldfish in a microwave. They stumble outside, nervous systems stunted by mismatched genes, stuttering: DUH! DUH! DUH!

Epilogue

The Time: Two years later.

The Place: 230 Claywood Drive, Brentwood, N.Y. 11717

The father fails to respond to a Ford factory recall, gets rear-ended by a carload of born-again Christians, and burns to death due to a defective Pinto gas tank. He leaves behind a $200,000 life insurance policy. The mother accepts – Jesus into her heart, fixes up the home, and now those kids live in the best damn house in the neighborhood. Fuckin’ A.

by TJ Richter

© January 1986 Theodore J. Richter

Early sketch of God's hand leading his children to an early grave.