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Shovel 5 | Jul 19 2002

Mostly I remember the tuna fish sandwich my aunt made for lunch. It had tiny slivers of celery mixed in and was cut diagonally. I had never seen a sandwich cut diagonally and honestly didn’t know you could do that.

My aunt was nice. Tragically, her daughter, my cousin, wasa later in a car accident that left her disfigured. Before that, her son, my other cousin, took drugs that were supposed to make him taller but instead screwed up his digestive system so that he had to have one of those operations where they cut a hole in your side for you to shit out of.

It was my job to mow the lawn. I don’t know why my cousin (the boy cousin) wasn’t doing this himself. Maybe he wasn’t old enough yet. Or maybe my uncle took pity on me because my “situation” back home. It’s a mystery because by this point my family had stopped seeing my uncle’s family because my uncle had refused to visit or even be in the same room as his mother, my grandmother.

I can still see the shape of the lawn, the way it wrapped around the side of the house.

In the middle of everything, my aunt came out and asked if I wanted lunch. Various people despised my aunt for supposedly turning my uncle against his mother, but to me she always seemed nice.

After lunch I ran over the lawn mower cord. I mean, with the lawn mower. Unfortunately it was the actual lawn mower cord and not the extension cord. I say this because otherwise I might have found a way to finish mowing.

I wheeled the mower back to the garage and left the severed cord on the engine. Then I went and told my aunt that I was done mowing.

My aunt gave me money and drove me home. The next time I saw her or anyone in her family was at my sister’s wedding, twenty years later. At that time no one brought up the cord. I’m still not sure who knows about it.