For My Sons, Who are Convinced We’re All Screwed by Craig Holt

And also for the three-legged buck who limped out of the woods last spring, looked me in the eye, and pissed on my lawn.

Because it’s true, my boys, that you were born into a belligerent age where you can’t turn off your morning alarm without the screen flashing news of such appalling dumbfuckery that Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet, and Caligula would blush to see it. And, worse, there’s the vehemence with which we the people vent our impotent, ugly rage; the pornographic glee we bring to hating each other. 

Nor can I deny that summers now produce such an infernal bounty of fires that the mountains your mom and I admire from our porch are occulted behind foul brown smog. My phone says the murk is so thick that fifteen minutes tending our parched garden is worse than smoking a pack of unfiltered Marlboros. So, most days I just poke the dry dirt a while before apologizing to the shriveled strawberries and retreating to the house for a glass of water. Which is, god-damn-it, also poisoned with laundry soap, motor oil, Round Up, and Adderall. 

So, okay. I hear you. 

But it’s also true that a couple years ago my neighbor, the gimpy mule deer, was hit by some asshole in an Escalade out on Highway 3, and no way no how should have survived the impact, much less made it through these intervening years dodging mountain lions, phone-blinded drivers, and hunters bent on reducing him to backstrap and summer sausage. And yet that deer lives on to hop-step out of the salal each spring. He crouches and fixes me with his cold-ass stare while emptying his bladder on the desiccated moss-and-dandelion expanse I call my lawn. 

Boys-who-are-my-heart, the continued presence of that damaged, defiant ungulate raises questions about what it means to be screwed. Because you would think getting smacked on the haunch by seven-thousand-pounds of hurtling American steel would be the very definition of fucked. But the buck was too dumb to know he was dead, so he limped into the trees thinking Ouch! and Son of a bitch! and went right on living. 

Guys, I love you but I have bad news: we are all fucked by Time as surely as we are by our wireless internet providers. And during the flicker and fade of our brief lives we will burn too much time sorting laundry and navigating the labyrinthine phone trees of insurance companies who make billions betting on our mortality. Hours, days, months will be wasted online, staring, entranced and murderously bored, at our friends’ photos of plated meat and their shamelessly filtered faces. After years of that foolishness, at some point mercifully unknown, we will kack out. Our mouths will drop open in dumb surprise and our intentions will blow away like dandelion fluff, and we will return to the soil. And despite what your theologically inclined buddies tell you, the closest we’ll get to resurrection is having our mortal muck sucked up by flowers or fruit. (So remember, when my time comes, sprinkle me in the berry patch and work me into the dirt. I’d like to be delicious in the afterlife.) 

I admit things look bad lately, but hopefully we can spend our given days trying to tip life’s needle toward the good, or at least not making it worse. At a minimum, we can occasionally tear our gaze from humanity’s lurid clown show to appreciate what my pious pals call our blessings, be they ever so mixed; like the blackberries colonizing my yard. They’re a pain in my ass and impossible to get rid of, but they also produce plump fruits the size of my thumb, which make excellent jam. 

Look guys, the world ends every night when we close our eyes, but each morning the sun pops up again from behind the mountains, whether we can see it through the smoke or not. 

So let’s appreciate this morning together. Let’s celebrate the way, at the end of every leafless winter, Spring sashays out of February’s frozen ribcage wearing a halter top and hot pants, and says to the huckleberries and raccoons, “Hey, babes and babies! Wanna party?” And the crippled buck struggles to his remaining feet, shakes the frost off his car-scarred rump, and skip-strides into the hot and horny new day knowing he has nothing to lose by living. 

What do any of us have to lose by living? 

Boys, I hear you. But let’s not waste the days we’re gifted in boo-hoo lamentation. To be here now is the extent of our good fortune, so rise and run before arthritis cripples you, fade and fall when it’s your time. Try not to be a dick about it. 

For now, please, let’s watch the day grow. Put down those backpacks full of worry and stay to argue with me a minute longer. Celebrate this rickety porch, this coffee and toast I made for you. (I made that blackberry jam. There’s a jar for each of you by the door.) Laugh with me about the musky pee steaming off my lawn in the April sunlight. Because only half of it is deer piss. 

My children, who have somehow been magicked into adulthood, you tell me it’s not okay for a gray-bearded man to pee on his own lawn like some naughty toddler. You say I’ve gotten strange and sentimental in my old age and am an equivocal kind of optimist besides. Well okay, put all that in the ledger under Truth. 

But it’s also true that we are together on this gentle morning, and I am so glad of your presence I can barely talk around the love blooming in my chest like an artichoke. 

And look! At the edge of the woods, in the blackberry brambles beneath the big pine. There’s that cocky, broke-down buck I told you about, staring right at us. I swear to god he’s laughing. 

Quick, grab me an apple. He looks hungry.

Artist’s Statement

The twenty-four-hour news cycle and the tsunami of social media shithousery make peace of mind hard to come by. And while I know there is abundant reason for pessimism right now, I thought it was worth reminding my sons that although things look awfully grim and twisty, consolations still exist. I wanted to remind them that they are loved, and they will feel better if they take a break from the doom spiral once in a while to appreciate what is good, while it is good. This also seemed like a fine opportunity to publicly brag about my blackberry jam. So I guess, at least as far as the jam goes, mission accomplished. 

Craig Holt’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Jersey Devil Press, Psychopomp Magazine, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of Net, and Best American Short Stories, and his first novel, Hard Dog to Kill, won the 2018 Independent Publishers Book Award gold medal. He is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program and was a 2023 Fellow in the Bookends novel incubation program at Stony Brook University. He is represented by Mira Landry of Corvisiero Literary Agency.