The Social Contract
By Kelly Fordon
I’ve been thinking about Irish wakes—
what my aunt’s must have been like—
19—killed by her drunk boyfriend
who slammed into a light pole.
For years afterward, my grandfather
ran into the boy around town.
My grandparents believed he would pay—
if not in this lifetime, in the next.
But I heard it nearly drove
my grandfather mad to see his face.
Those were the days before we all decided
drinking and driving is dumb,
a collective decision after so much loss.
What we had tolerated before,
we could no longer abide.
Irish wakes always took place
in the deceased’s home.
Back in those days
they covered the mirrors
so the soul wouldn’t float off
into the nether world instead
of zooming straight up to heaven.
The vigil lasted all night.
The men lit their cigarettes
to ward off the evil spirits.
That’s another thing
we used to sanction—
several of my family members
went up in smoke.
It takes a village, they say.
What I happen to believe
matters little without you
on board. Otherwise, how
would we even set the speed limit?
I was working one day
behind the circulation desk
and a man walked in
with a Glock strapped to his chest.
Who he was,
what he intended to do,
we had no idea.
He was exercising
his rights, and it made me think
about my aunt flying through the windshield,
my uncle hacking up a lung,
bombed-out hospitals,
preemies huddled together
in shoe boxes,
kids who were just having fun
at a music festival,
my son cowering
in his MSU apartment,
a killer on the loose.
His grade school friend, who
didn’t make it through that night.
Back when I was in high school
we didn’t know boys were supposed
to stop when we said stop.
If we’d banded together,
if we’d called out the bystanders,
if we’d agreed that we deserved better,
that what was happening
was really, really shitty, maybe
we could have shut it down.
Maybe we could have changed
everything.
Kelly Fordon’s latest short story collection, I Have the Answer (Wayne State University Press, 2020), was chosen as a Midwest Book Award Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist. Her 2016 Michigan Notable Book, Garden for the Blind (WSUP), was an INDIEFAB Finalist, a Midwest Book Award Finalist, an Eric Hoffer Finalist, and an IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist. Her first full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House (Kattywompus Press, 2019), was an Eyelands International Prize Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist. It was later adapted into a play by Robin Martin and published in The Kenyon Review Online. Her new poetry collection, What Trammels the Heart, will be published by SFASUPress in 2025. She is the author of three award-winning poetry chapbooks and has received a Best of the Net Award and Pushcart Prize nominations in three different genres. She teaches at Springfed Arts in Detroit and online, where she runs a fiction podcast called “Let’s Deconstruct a Story.”
Photo credit: Marc Nozell via a Creative Commons license.
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