Barlow Adams
1. THE DISPATCHHow Your Life Becomes a Reluctant Endorsement for Little Trees Air Fresheners
You’ll pilfer the contents of your dead mom’s glove box like picking the pocket of a well-maintained corpse. In it you will find a sealed Little Trees Air Freshener (Summer Linen), a bag of horehound candy, and the owner’s manual for the 2003 Acura you just inherited.
You’ll eat most of the candies at the funeral. Even though you hate them. Even though they smell like old people and bring the barking cough of lung cancer back to your ears with every crinkle of a wrapper. You’ll say “thank you” and “I’m sure she knew” to the mourners you don’t know with that scent on your breath, your mother’s mouth curled up inside your own; her words bursting free from your lips, eroding the backs of your teeth until they feel thin and sharp like the incisors of a rabbit, every greeting snapped off, each word chiseled from her half of your DNA. You’ll have a speech all planned out if someone asks about the odor. It’s made from a flower, you’ll plan to say. Marrubium vulgare. Used for centuries as a remedy for all manner of ailments. Native to half the world. But no one will ask.
There will be ten candies left after everyone leaves—after she’s buried and you drive away in the new-to-you car that will never feel like yours and you’ve cried for an hour about getting cemetery mud on the floor mats because she would have never been so careless.
You’ll eat one candy a year on her birthday. No more, no less.
With one exception.
You’ll eat one on your wedding day. Nearly a year after her death. Half a world away on a vacation wedding with no one to call—alone and surrounded by a dozen bottles of booze you won’t touch in a room designed for groomsmen to drink and laugh in the last “free” moments before matrimony—you will break your own rule.
You’ll slip one of those candies in your mouth because it’s the closest thing to family you have, to a witness. It will taste like home. Like death, sickness, and fear, as well. But enough like home you’ll gladly swallow every ounce of the other shit.
You’ll say I do with that scent on your lips. Kiss your bride with it. Walk along the shore of the beach and wonder how you ever got so lucky. How you ever made it so far from that gravesite. You’ll give your wife the speech about the candy you’ve been saving. She’ll be drunk and she won’t care but she’ll smile while you tell it and it will feel like the sun on your face.
Then it will be back to the tradition on Mom’s birthday. Even after they’ve turned sticky and grainy. You’ll eat a piece every June. It will be nearly impossible to separate them from the paper. They will adhere to your fingers, slide sour on your tongue. It won’t matter. You’ll eat those little bastards like you’re starving for them.
You’ll drive your dead mom’s car for seven years. Because you grew up poor. Because it’s the nicest car you’ve ever owned. You’ll drive it because she treated the thing like a chariot even as her body broke down and the lesions spread. You’ll remember with absolute clarity the moment she handed you the keys, her hand like a leaf, translucent in the light, veins showing through the skin, withering that autumn along with everything else.
It won’t be the car you want, or the car you need, but you will drive it like a portable mausoleum. With every door ding and scuff you’ll hate yourself a little more. It will get hit in a parking lot; side swiped on a city street. The car will become a mobile failure—a testament to your recklessness, your inability to preserve any part of her in totality. That horehound smell will be the only fragrance you recall perfectly; that car’s steady engine the only part of her still alive.
You won’t open and hang the air freshener because nothing could cover the rot of your inadequacy. There’s nothing bright or vibrant about this car. Nothing warm. Nothing yours. It’s a cadaver on wheels, old enough to vote, battered and beaten, but you can’t bear to diminish the stench because just like that rancid candy, somewhere in there is the fragrance of home.
One night your wife will ask you for a divorce. Days later you’ll wreck the car. They’ll tow it away like a broken love and you’ll have to pay someone a hundred dollars to take it because for all that pain and pride it doesn’t hold value to anyone but you anymore.
It’ll be months before you can buy a new vehicle. You won’t have the money. You’ll have to ask for help. People’s generosity will humble you beyond words. The divorce will complicate things. No big purchases.
You’ll read the manual to that old Acura some nights. Memorize sections. Do they even give manuals anymore? It will feel like a sacred tome. A bible. The Book of the Dead.
Then one day, same as any other—a good and terrible day to bury something as all days are—you’ll get a new car. It won’t be what you dreamed, what you hoped. Like all automobiles it will be a means to a destination, something, you pray, to move you forward. It’ll have a few less miles than your mom’s did when you got it. It won’t be quite as nice. But it will be yours.
You’ll unwrap that Little Trees Air Freshener, and it will smell as sweetly as the day it was made. Sealed away, it will have outlasted your grief, your marriage, maybe even—you hope—your guilt.
And there, in the dimming light of early fall, you’ll have two candy wrappers in your ashtray, and you’ll be damned if it doesn’t smell like summer in that car.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYBest of Dolly Parton cassette tape
King Tusk stuffed animal bought for me at Ringling Bros Circus in 1987
Sears Roebuck catalogue 1900
Various watches collected from the wrists of dead relatives stopped at the times of their deaths
Powerball 250Hz Gyroscope
Piece of the Berlin Wall
Light up Green Lantern belt buckle
Godzilla wall clock made from a vinyl record
Pen from Heirloom Evolution made by the amazingly talented @elderflowerjam and gifted to me by a mysterious benefactor. Used to sign all of my writing contracts.
Megalodon tooth: Pilocene-Miocene epoch. Approximately 3-7 million years old. Hawthorn Formation. Morgan River, SC.
3. BIOGRAPHYBarlow Adams is a collector of oddities, keeper of near-worthless memorabilia, trash museum security guard, and occasional writer. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and has been featured in the Wigleaf Top 50. Follow him on Twitter @BarlowAdams.