The crack by mikel jollett

What if the tunnel caves in? What if somebody cuts the rope? Look at this. Dig, the General Major, and i exchange glances. We all watch as a tuft of hair comes out in her hand. We freeze. She looks down at the ball of matted, lifeless, golden locks in her palm. Her lip begins to tremble. Fuck you! Fuck all of you! Fuck this! The General chooses the better path. So live like it already. Glen is the founder and editor of This Is Nowhere.

Twitter Facebook Instagram YouTube. It would be the new way people lived, all together, being honest and free and not taking drugs. It all sounds great when she tells it but did they have to make it so the kids were alone so much? Since Chuck, the Old Man, said that Dope Fiends would just mess up their kids anyway, we were all put in a building together to become children of the universe. It was, at turns, terrible and wonderful and life-changing and tragic. We lived on the run. We experienced violence.

We learned to hide. And in some ways it was as if the child invented the man I became in order to deal with these traumas. My own son was born on a quiet February morning. He came into the world purple and screaming, his arms small, his fingers tiny, his face swollen. They wiped him down and warmed him up and handed him to my wife, where he nursed, rooted his head into her shoulder and fell asleep.

I put him down and lay awake listening to his breath, all the little gurgles and sneezes, the steady rhythm of his inhales and exhales. The sounds brought such a blinding joy to my chest. What was in those barren corners before you arrived?

When we took him home, he filled the quiet hallways of our house with his cries. My eyes lingered on those fingers and counted his toes. It feels magical to me, this gift I never thought I would have: a family.

To simply be a husband to a wife, a father to a son. Jollett meets his extended family, and sees a rotating cast of father figures enter and leave, as his unstable mother leaves him to construct a reality from seemingly contradictory scraps.

Eventually, Jollett finds refuge with his former heroin addict father and loving mother-in-law, and slowly comes to bond with his paternal figure, taking after him in certain ways, but simultaneously taking care not to follow in his footsteps. Jollett finds himself struggling with relationships, partly because of the baggage of his traumatic upbringing. This is the stuff of grand stadium gesture, from the propulsive stomp of resounding drums, the ringing, distorted guitars that strike just on cue, the gruff voice that tells a story of struggle in just its timbre, and lets out in anthemic bellows, with backing vocalists of varied voices chiming in to magnify the already majestic sound.

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