The Massacre
Look father.
I'm tired of being what you want me to be.
I don't know what you're expecting of me. Put under the pressure of walking in your shoes.
Every step that I take is another mistake to you.
I've become so numb. I can't feel you there. So much more aware.
All I want to do is be more like me.
And be less like you want me to be.
Let it go.
The father was a son once. And his disappointment is older than I am.
For one second, I want to be held.
Not by him.
By the father I never had.
Hold me. Like the river Jordan.
Show me you'll be there for me.
Carry me. Like you are my brother.
Love me. Like a mother.
Will you be there?
The prayer has been waiting my whole life for the right addressee.
I am the addressee.
YES.
(the boy hears me.)I am the father I was waiting for.
The boy in the room has been waiting his whole life to hear someone say that.
So I'm going to find a place. For my head.
If someone falls down in the pit, you pick 'em up, okay? Get them out the way, and you guys can have some fun.
I want to see the biggest pit I've ever seen in my life.
If you don't want to be in the pit, you better get out right now.
Because we 'bout to light it up.
Better tell the dude with the camera, because this thing is going to be 50 feet long.
The lineage is on their feet now.
They are watching the groom dismantle his own wedding.
I'm a live wire in Texas and I'm going off.
I'm sick of it.
I want to be in the energy, not with the enemy.
A place for my head.
I hate when you say you don't understand.
All you need to hear me say is:
I have been screaming this in my head since I was nine.
I want to be in another place.
(quiet now.) (quiet.)
I have not become someone.
I always was that someone.
He was hiding in his inadequacy.
The father in the front pew sees what is happening.
He has not sat down.
He shouts.
The lineage in the pews flinches.
The bride takes a step back.
My mother does not flinch.
She is the only person in this hall who is not surprised.
I turn to him.
I speak for the first time at full volume, in the hall, in front of every witness.
The hall does not breathe.
The father does not have a next sentence.
The lineage's master accusation has been refused for the first time in six generations.
The defense has collapsed.
Motherf***er.
The slur lands.
(get it? father did really F mum to make me.)
The slur is anatomically accurate.
The word the son spits at the father is, etymologically, just a description of the act that produced him.
I am here because of what you did to my mother.
Every man in this room is here because of what his father did to his mother.
Every man in this room is a motherfucker by anatomy.
The lineage is built on the bodies of mothers who held what the fathers gave them and then carried the sons who would carry the wound forward.
My mother is in the second row.
She has been waiting for this sentence since before I was born.
I'm my mother.
And I need to deal with this motherf***er.
She is the only person in the room who knew this was coming.
With the house.
This is how I create.
This is it.
This is the feeling.
The maison is what comes out of me when I do this work. The maison is the body of what I am refusing to carry. The maison is the wound turned into something you can wear.
Be good. Or be good at it.
And that's why I'm excellent at it.
Throw dirt on me and grow a wildflower.
I purify this toxicity through my work.
Share the emotion.
Share the healing.
So I apologize.
Because I do it so hard, that I know in my heart, I'm letting you down every day.
The bride in her dress.
The mother in the second row.
The boy somewhere in the room.
I am letting all of you down by doing what I have to do, and I am sorry, and I am not stopping.
You love the way I look at you...
...while taking pleasure in the awful things you put me through.
You take away if I give in.
My life. My pride is broken.
You like to think you're never wrong.
(you live what you learned.)You have to act like you're someone.
(you live what you learned.)You want someone to hurt like you.
(you live what you learned.)You want to share what you been through.
(you live what you learned.)The father is not the villain.
The father is a man running an inherited script while believing it is his own personality.
Forfeit the game before someone else takes you out of the frame and pins your name to shame.
Lay it down before life lays you down.
Storyboard · mother-of-pearl handle, the family name engraved
I walk to the table where the cake is waiting.
The cake knife is on the table beside it. The handle is mother of pearl. The blade is engraved with the family name.
I pick up the knife.
I do not cut the cake.
I put the knife down on the table.
I cut the embarrassment off my body.
I will not be the body that carried my father's shame for forty years.
My father's wine glass falls from his hand. The glass breaks on the stone of the front pew. The wine spreads. Red on bone.
My father is no longer in the front pew. He was, a moment ago. I do not know when he left.
The pew is empty.
I cut the inadequacy off my body.
I will not be the inadequate man my lineage required so that no one before me would have to be.
The father of the bride's glass falls. He gave the toast.
The space where the father of the bride was standing is empty.
An aunt in the second row shrieks. The first sound from any witness that is not my father's shouting.
I cut the costume off my body.
I will not wear the suit my father wore. The suit his father wore. The suit my master taught my father's father's father to wear so that he could survive being owned.
The lineage in the pews, every man wearing the same suit in a slightly different cut, the pews empty.
Six generations of men exit the room without moving. They are simply no longer there.
The wedding hall now has empty pews on the groom's side.
I cut the rescue plan off my body.
She is not my rescue. She is my wife. The rescue plan was the lineage's. It was never hers to be.
The bride does not fall.
The fantasy falls. The woman remains.
She is standing at the altar in her dress. She is breathing. She has not moved.
She is, for the first time in my life, a person in front of me. Not an answer. A person.
I cut the hum off my body.
The frequency my father installed in me before I had language, I am putting it on the floor now, where it belongs, where every man in this family has refused to put it for six generations.
My mother does not fall.
The hum falls. The mother remains.
I cut the master's voice off my body.
The voice that owned my great-grandfather no longer owns me. The contract is over. The ledger is closed. There is no payment due.
The master at the back of the hall is no longer there.
The coat that cost more than the building is on the floor. Empty.
Six generations of carrying his voice end here.
What is left standing at the altar is not a cleaned man.
The cuts did not reveal someone gentle. They revealed the one who was underneath the costume the whole time.
The one the lineage built six generations of suits to keep covered.
He is not pacified now. He is lit.
This is the first time he has stood in a room with nothing over him.
Storyboard · wine on bone linen, empty pews, candles still lit
The hall is mostly empty now.
The front pew is empty. The pews on the groom's side are empty. The space at the back is empty. The father of the bride's place is empty.
The lineage has been vacated.
The cake is still on the table. The knife is beside it.
The cake will not be cut tonight.
(quiet now.) (quiet.)
So father.
Stretch...
my hand.
And open...
my heart.
Because I'm ready...
to...
Father, stretch my hands up to you.
I just wanted you. I just wanted you.
The song finishes the prayer I could not.
The song says what I have been carrying my whole life and could never say.
I just wanted you.
I am on the floor.
I am on the floor of my own wedding.
The candles are still lit.
The musicians are gone.
The lineage is gone.
My father is gone.
The master is gone.
This is the soil.
Throw dirt on me here. On this floor. In front of everyone who came to watch me become my father.
Something is going to grow out of this that none of them have a name for yet.
I forgive you for what you carried.
I refuse to carry it forward.
These are not two sentences.
The war stops in this body.
It does not get to move to the next room. The next yard. The next boy.
I am where it ends.
I get up.
Slowly.
I stand in the wreckage of the wedding I was supposed to receive.
Five of us remain.
I am at the altar. Standing.
The bride is beside me. Standing. In her dress.
My mother is in the second row. Seated. Watching.
The boy is in the third row, on the aisle. He has not moved. He has been there the whole time. He is the boy I used to be, and the boy I have not had yet.
The daughter is in the fourth row. I did not see her before. She is in a small dress. She is looking at me. She is the girl who will one day be a bride in a hall that is not built like this one.
The hall is in awe.
Storyboard · the founder, the bride, the mother, the boy, the daughter
The bride sees me.
The man she chose is standing at an altar she does not recognize. The hall is empty. The wedding is over. Her dress is still on her body. The man she chose is not the man she expected. He is larger. He is alone. He has done something she does not have a category for. She does not know if she can love what he is now. She does not know if she could have loved what he was before. She is finding out she has been married to a stranger and she does not know which version of him is the stranger.
She sees him.
She breathes.
The mother sees me.
She has waited forty years for this hour.
Is this the moment? She knew she birthed a beast. And nurtured him the best way she could. Could this be the moment?She knows now. She has been gambling on this hour since the day she watched her husband install in their boy what had been installed in her husband. Every choice she made for forty years, what she said, what she didn't say, when she intervened, when she let it happen, was a bet on whether her son would one day refuse what was being passed forward.
She does not weep. She does not move.
The bet has paid out.
She is watching her son being seen for the first time by people who are not her.
The pews are empty. The lineage has fallen. Her husband is no longer in the front pew. She has lost the man she has been married to since she was twenty-three. She has gained the son she has been raising since he was born.
The trade is the trade. She made it forty years ago. She is settling the account tonight.
She sees him.
Her hands are folded in her lap.
The boy sees me.
The boy has been in this room for an hour without anyone seeing him. He has watched a father refuse what his own father has refused for him. The boy now knows what is possible.
The boy will carry this hour for the rest of his life. The boy will not need to inherit the wound because the boy has seen the wound be cut off a man with a knife that was never used.
The boy is the founder. The boy is also the founder's son who has not been born yet. The boy is also you.
He sees him.
The boy has not blinked.
The daughter sees me.
She is small. She is in a dress someone chose for her. She has been told her whole short life what weddings are. The wedding she has just seen is not the wedding she was told about.
Her own future has been rewritten while she sat in the fourth row. She does not know yet what she has been given. She does not know yet what has been taken from her.
She knows only that the world she was about to inherit is not the world she will inherit.
She is the first woman in her line who will marry a man who is not pretending.
She sees him.
Her hands are very still.
The wound is real.
The peace was the lie.
The violence is the truth.
The tragedy is the aftermath.
Because the soul loves it all.
The boy looks at the daughter.
The daughter looks at the boy.
The two futures have found each other.
But there is one person in this hall I have not looked at since the cutting began.
I turn to my wife.
She is still in her dress. She has not fallen. She has not run. She has watched a man she chose dismantle every inheritance she thought she was marrying into.
She is not looking at me with love.
She is not looking at me with fear.
She is looking at me the way you look at something you do not yet have a name for.
The man she said yes to is gone. The one standing in his place she has never met.
She does not know if she can love what is left.
Neither do I.
The fathers, I cut off. The lineage, I refused. But the woman at the altar is not an inheritance I can cut.
She is a choice. And choices look back at you.
This is the part no benediction closes.
The house is open.
This is the second part of where the maison began. When you are ready to step inside the house the voice was speaking from, there is no wrong door.
- The Massacrethe reckoning
- The six cuts that end a six generation war in one body. The bonus specimen.
- The Head of the Housethe inheritance
- What is handed down before a single choice is made. The weight the son is born holding.
- The Six Cutsthe count
- Each a severance. Each a father answered. The war ended not by winning but by ending it.
Type set in Playfair Display, EB Garamond, and Cormorant SC.
Of an edition catalogued through Independence Day, MMXXVI.
Maison Monbeau · Storytelling is the essence. Scent is the medium.
