Brian Blanchfield

What you type and submit appears to you attributed to You. What he replies and enters comes from Partner. There is, as it turns out, a lot to say while watching Partner look at you watching. He is, to begin with, in a room of some kind, particular, contingent, “real.” With art and clocks and books and pillows and cigarettes and mail and daylight, or lamplight, with a bed or desk or basement sofa, with doors you can ask him to open, bags he may or may not empty, of content you may deduce about. The bottoms of his socks are dirty. You give it to him that his socks are dirty, that his door is ajar, that his grin is telling. “Partner: Are you for real?”

“That’s mighty white of you,” my mother might say to my father when he offered to stack his plate and saucer but not to take them to the sink or wash them. Subtending familial relationships in Southern white households then with narrow perspectives, weakened heritage, and no initiative beyond economic betterment was the master-servant template, demanding allegiance and compliance, expecting parry and subterfuge, and rehearsing moreover Old South subject positions, casually racist in their ventriloquism and chilling anachronism.

As the bristles gave resistance, I stood and stepped on the top of the brush, and then the earth accepted the whole thing rather easily, snugly. Only the brown wood button top of the brush was at last visible. To bury it entirely seemed wrong somehow. Uncovered, it has a touch of authorship, this penny-sized honey brown button above grade; and perhaps the organic, even potentially nutritive essence of Frank’s hair is aerated a bit this way.