There's a Pinot I Can't Drink

by Jane Marshall Fleming


I think what fucks with me the most are those minutes after Michael realized what he had done, his hands shaking, eyes glazed with rage from someone else’s mouth. The smoke clearing with screams and an empty chamber. Click.
She says it wasn’t his, that rage. She said his marble eyes were somewhere else. Someone else. Because he couldn’t wouldn’t shouldn’t have done it if it were just him.
            The Michael we knew.
            But we all knew he had a gun
            between his teeth, long and slick, but twinkling with laughter and the idea that nothing was ever wrong. He just needed some sleep that day. He just needed less liquor.
Violence is a handgun in his palm, pointed towards his wife. Like my husband says, there is a thin line between love and hate.
Michael’s father told a story at his funeral about a mouse that he used for a prank. The little mouse, tiny and gray. He didn’t want to let it escape. He wanted to feed and hold it in his room, but his mother said it couldn’t stay. His dad told us that he took the mouse to a nearby field and soberly watched it crawl away.
And if he had been sober, maybe we wouldn’t be living with smoking slick holes in heads and shoulders and collapsed lungs that smell like ash and gunpowder. That bloom like poppies, red and wide and deep. That seep into stock carpeting and haunt upscale apartment complexes for twenty years or more. Deep in seeping hue vermillion and maybe even cerulean too. It’s not the kind of painting we wanted him to do, but it’s his last work like Velvet Buzzsaw and we’ll have to take it alongside the rest of him too.[1]
We always wonder if we can separate artist from the art and I think that conversation is appropriate for Michael too. We wonder whether we can ever separate the person we knew from his last act on earth. Violence is not the word we would use for Michael. And yet, it is what took him from us. There is no wisdom to take, just the knowledge that he can be many things at once. He can let the mouse run and also hold a gun.
Two weeks before, I told Michael I wasn’t afraid of the shotgun my husband left in our apartment.  I still asked him to hold it for me because I just didn’t understand it. And it was a steel bogeyman in my home without the knowhow,
            but I didn’t have the knowhow to have him in my home either.
And all I can see is the Michael that I heard at the gun range but without the headphones or eye protection and just barrels against barrel heads and houses and homes. I know I said I like true crime, but I didn’t know what it really meant to have true
            true crime
            time in my life like I do now. And the family members who I called bullshitters because how could they not know? But we didn’t know. And we love you.
So, I guess what fucks with me the most is the feeling that I could have called him in those few minutes and maybe he would have picked up. And maybe I would be talking to him through metal bars
            instead of iron-laced tongues.
Maybe I wouldn’t be able to feel him shaking with fear and wondering whether it was better to be a spirit or in metal chains--
            iron chains
            skin chains,
            and many changes, but at least we could still speak with him. 
When I search his name, I just get wedding photos and a LinkedIn profile--
And his smile. And Google remembering that when I type in Michael 
            it asks for shootings
            and death
            and obituaries. And I just want some sort of reason. Some reason that I thought I saw him, trailing his poppies down fluorescent hallways, buzzing like they were waiting for him, just Michael to fire directly into tile floors pocked with flowers of that vermillion hue. Like I would find it in empty police reports that don’t even call him by his name. They don’t call his name like we do.
No, what fucks with me the most is the nagging feeling that I should have known. I should have known like the grass knows to move from a lightning strike. I hugged him two weeks before in my pajamas. He just stood in the door and gave me wine that I still can’t drink.
            It just sits in the holder on my wall and I think--
                        if I drink it he’ll die again
                        Or I will lose the last remnants.
But now I’ve gone and made him wine and phantom ooze. I can still hear his voice in my head, his laugh. I can already imagine what it will be like to lose it like if I drank that wine and replaced the empty bottle in the rack like some talisman of violence and some sort of call back.
            Because we still love him and know him. At least part of him, we do.
 I wish I had understood him better and told him to lock it up. And maybe given him a better hug. So that they would both be whole and our group could be whole too. Like I could hold them both in my arms and he would just heal like we want him to--




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