Hailey's Comet

His mother’s mother made Christmas pudding in a coffee can, boiling the mull into a placental stew. His grandfather liked it stickled with cloves and lemon rind brought to a second-boil the day before Christmas. His grandmother used a Chockfull of Nuts coffee can, pealing the label off with a paring knife then re-labeling it with a Magic Marker: Christmas pudding 1958. The year the shamble leg man was born there was no comet, no Hailey’s tail or a meteor shower, just a dower gray morning in a green hospital with bright lights and a somber smell. He heard grunts and screams, yowls and hollers and the doctor clearing his throat, then the bright lights and the smell of antiseptic and ether. The following year there was a comet, so bright and glowing that it filled the night sky with hope and awe. The year he was born the sky laid hidden beneath a whore’s skirt, the smell of boiled onions and calf’s tongue, the doctor clearing his throat a second time, eyes trained on the oversized clock above the birthing-table, the morning sky red as scar tissue, his mother’s face labored with exhaustion.

Some people believe in a single god, others in a multiplicity of gods, each with its own divinity, and some believe in nothing. The shamble leg man fell somewhere in between the binary concept of god and the god of nothing, and when he worried about death and rotting, which he did from time to time, he lifted himself into the first camp, the camp of one god, a god of transcendence and immortality. This god was a fearless god, a god of magic and alchemy, and simply knowing this made him feel less ill at ease and tempered the roily feeling in his stomach, the very same feeling he got when he ate one of his grandmother’s mincemeat pies.