Today on Midwest Weird: “Gabriel's Horns” by Kip Knott.
Kip Knott is a writer, poet, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Ohio. His most recent book of poetry, The Misanthrope in Moonlight, is available from Bottlecap Press. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at www.kipknott.com.
Midwest Weird is an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions. We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.
Episode Transcript:
This is Midwest Weird, an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions.
We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.
Today’s episode: A short story by Aarushi Bahadur, titled “Red Velvet." Read by the author.
My father, Gabriel Oliver Deville, had horns and a forked tongue. On top of his head, just beneath his thick black hair, my father had two fleshy protrusions that he called horns. Every chance he got he would grab my hand and force me to touch them, telling me that if I rubbed them enough, I would grow my own set. I knew it was the old “touch a toad and get warts” logic, but I recoiled nevertheless. As far as his tongue was concerned, it was actually slightly split at the tip, and when he slipped it between his lips and applied pressure, the split would open up and he would hiss softly out of the corners of his mouth to heighten the effect. I never understood until I grew older what my father meant when he said, “Your mother loves the split.”
When I was a kid, I loved to haul my friends in front of my father and have him “perform” for them. He never failed to oblige. After a few years, he even established a kind of routine: He would kneel down and look my friends in the eyes, take their hands, and stare unblinkingly at them before asking, “Do you know who the devil is?” He would open his eyes as wide as he could and ask loudly, “Do you?” Then he would take my friend’s hands and lift them slowly to the top of his head, pause for a moment just above the scalp, and then rub two small, quivering palms across the horns. “The devil is me!” he’d yell, and then he’d stick his tongue between his lips and part the split. Always, without fail, no matter which of my friends was standing before “the devil” at that moment, they would scream and yank their hands away as if they had been burned by the fires of Hell. And always, without fail, I would laugh hysterically and my father would wink quickly in my direction before calmly walking away, his job complete.
Initially, it was my mother who always made peace with irate parents. Batches of Toll House cookies and fresh loaves of bread went a long way towards soothing the neighbors. But when my father came up with the idea of hosting an annual Halloween party for all the adults of the neighborhood (complete with a fully stocked bar), suddenly his antics became an acceptable novelty. In fact, it became an annual event during the “Clean-Up the Neighborhood Fun Day Fundraiser” for people to pay a dollar to see who could stand to touch my father’s horns the longest, with the winner receiving a free dinner for two at the swanky Knotty Pine Club. Other than Miss Arcolino, a buxom divorcee who had a “Buck a Kiss” booth, my father always pulled in the most money. I must say that it was sad to see grown men fidget nervously as my father took their hands and lifted them menacingly to his head.
By the time I got into high school, however, my faith in my father’s antics began to wane—replaced by the embarrassment most teenagers feel about their parent—and I began to distance myself from him by disparaging him in front of my friends.
“Hey, Pete, your old man’s the whack job with the horns, right? He still let people touch ‘em?” Tommy Dowder, the coolest kid in school, asked me one day.
“It’s just a gag. They’re not real. He used to stick pencil erasers on his head and fool my friends when I was kid. He’s a dork, nothing more.” The denial of my father’s physical attributes was the harshest criticism I could level at him. When all was said and done, my father was proud of his horns.
And that’s what made the spring of my freshman year in high school so difficult. It was that year that my mother decided the time had come to liberate herself from the confines of the kitchen and get an education. She had once completed and mailed in one of those artist tests in TV Guide and received an “invitation” to enroll in a correspondence art course. My mother believed she could be the next Georgia O’Keefe, and rather than wasting her money on a “phony baloney” correspondence course, she enrolled in Art History, Introduction to Sketching, and Human Anatomy at the local community college.
It was the anatomy course that ultimately caused the problem. In a matter of 10 weeks, my mother not only became an expert on the Post-Impressionists and a master at sketching bowls of fruit, but she was soon poking and prodding my father and me, diagnosing every bump, bruise, and dry patch of skin as some rare malady. Thankfully, my mother limited her expertise to that of a diagnostician and never attempted to treat our afflictions. At first, we took her recommendations to see a doctor seriously, but eventually we realized mom’s prognostications were essentially baseless. My father was more patient with her, and asked me to just consider what she had to say before dismissing it. He himself saw doctors for possible cases of hemophilia, hepatitis, tetanus, and Crohn’s disease. But when my father complained of a headache for three straight days, my mother diagnosed him with a possible brain tumor, suggesting that his horns were somehow connected to the tumor and therefore needed to be removed for analysis. Finally, my mother had crossed the line, and my father let her know it.
“You might as well ask me to get neutered,” he fired back. The diagnoses ended, and my mother shifted her focus to horticulture.
It was also during the spring of my freshman year that my father turned 40. If my mother and I had known what was about to happen, I doubt we would have given my father a bouquet of black balloons. For when my father turned 40, he noticed that not only was his hairline receding, but his hair was thinning on top, too. Like hidden rocks in an evaporating river, his horns gradually became visible. And the more visible they became, the less mysterious they became. In a matter of two months, my father went from devil-in-disguise to just a man with two abnormally large warts on either side of his head. Neighbors who used to look at their feet in the presence of my father now stared and gawked at his horns like geek show patrons.
At first, my father tried to embrace the change. For instance, at Halloween, he painted his face red and his horns black and wore a devil costume to the annual Halloween party. The result was comical, and Mr. Breen, the Baptist preacher who lived across the street, let him know it by patting him on top of his head and snickering, “Can I have my soul back now, Gabe?” And when my father set up his annual booth at the Fun Day Fundraiser, he made only $2, both from Miss Arcolino who stroked each of his horns and moaned seductively, “Ooh, just as I imagined.” Overnight, my father became an old man, my father became mortal.
During my sophomore year, my father’s hair receded even more until he was nearly completely bald. His horns became even more conspicuous, and perhaps even a little bit larger. But he never once considered having them removed. My mother, on the other hand, became obsessed with their removal. Every chance she had, she would bring them up, hoping to embarrass him so completely that he would finally “get those damned things cut off.” Once, when my father treated us to dinner at the Knotty Pine to celebrate my mother acing her Botany final, I noticed the couple at the next table staring at him. My mother noticed, too, and when she leaned over to speak to the couple, I thought she was going chastise them for staring. Instead, she matter-of-factly said, “I know, they’re horrible. Honestly, I don’t understand why he won’t get them removed. It’s an embarrassment to my whole family.” If that weren’t bad enough, my mother actually tried to cut the horns off one night while my father slept. Had she not been slightly drunk form one-too-many hi-balls at dinner, she might have succeeded lopping them off completely rather than just nipping the tip of one with her unsteady hand before my father woke up. After that night, my father began sleeping on the hide-a-bed in the basement.
In many ways, I can sympathize with her position now. Ask yourself what you would do if your husband or wife would stubbornly cling to an easily corrected physical abnormality. And my father was a stubborn, stubborn man who demonstrated his inflexibility in many ways other than his refusal to be dehorned. For instance, he steadfastly refused to let my mother drive whenever the two of them went anywhere, even if he had had too much to drink. He refused to ever let my mother pack the car for family vacations because she wasted too much space. He refused to ever hire a plumber or a carpenter or a handyman of any kind to make various repairs to the house, even if it took him three times longer and cost four times as much to fix the problem himself. My father could try the patience of a saint, not that my mother was all that saintly.
But to blame my mother for what happened at the end of my sophomore year is unfair. In fact, she has never fully recovered from finding my father, hornless and naked, hanging from the rafters in the garage.
My father must of have thought out his suicide very carefully, for he had placed a small painter’s cloth beneath his body to catch any drops of blood that might have spilled from the two wounds on top of his head, and he had carefully sealed his horns in a baby jar and placed then on top of the step ladder with a note that read, “I apologize if I have ever brought shame upon my family. I am now just a man, the man you have always wanted me to be. I love you both.”
With the passage of time, I began to see the signals of my family falling apart that were, in my youth, invisible to me. My parents’ constant squabbles behind the closed door of their bedroom now take on greater importance. And there were other incidents that, as a self-absorbed teenager, I failed to acknowledge: my father’s worsening “back troubles” that kept him home sometimes for days at a time; the annoying phone calls in the middle of dinner from “rude charity workers asking for money”; my mother’s hi-ball glass becoming fuller each night; the canceled spring break vacation to Disney World my sophomore year; the sudden disappearance of my father’s red convertible Mustang that he fondly called “The Devil’s Chariot.” Time has shown me that more was being exposed in my house than just my father’s horns.
It’s difficult for me to recall the last time I spoke to my father. By difficult I mean that it pains me to remember my ambivalence toward him just before he died. As I was rolling my bike out of the garage to ride to school, my father, still dressed in his bathrobe, was watering my mother’s flower boxes hanging from the garage windowsills.
“Off to school?”
“Yeah.”
“School is almost over, is it not?”
“Yeah. Tomorrow’s the last day.”
“Why aren’t you at work? Your back acting up again?”
“No, no. I’m fine.” He turned off the hose and set it at his feet. He looked up at the cloudless sky and rubbed his bald head, his horns bending beneath his palm. “Say, do you think you would like to rub the horns for old time’s sake, for one more bit of good luck?”
“Dammit, Dad, I’m not a kid anymore. I don’t believe in that shit anymore. It’s not the same, and you know it. Jesus, why can’t you put on a hat or something?” My father blinked a couple of times, then slowly stooped down, picked up the hose, and continued watering the flowers. I shook my head and sped off as fast as I could down the street, through the stop sign, and out of sight of him.
Living with the stigma of a man who had horns on his head was nothing compared to living with the stigma of a father who killed himself. My junior year in high school was plagued with whispers, unkind jokes, and mandatory weekly visits to the counselor’s office during study period. I hated my father for what he had refused to do and for what he had ultimately done. In any way I could, I denied I was my father’s son. Eventually, as my mother grew more and more dependent on alcohol after my father’s death, I was allowed to go live with my aunt and uncle, which meant attending a new school where no one knew I was the son of the “Devil Man.”
It’s been nearly 20 years since my father died. I’ve begun to develop a new understanding of my father’s attitude concerning his horns and the way they made him feel unique. Now when I put my own son to bed each night after telling him a story and before turning out the lights, he inevitably asks, “Daddy, can I honk your horn for good luck?” I lean down to him and gently take his hand, slowly lift it up to the top of my head and press it down on my own fleshy horn.
“Honk,” I say softly, watching a crooked smile spread across my son’s sleepy face.
Kip Knott is a writer, poet, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Ohio. His most recent book of poetry, The Misanthrope in Moonlight, is available from Bottlecap Press. You can read more of his work at www.kipknott.com.
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