Three Monologues
The Sitcom / The Incompleteness / The Slash
The Sitcom
One day they broadcast a list of everyone that had died on the news. I still don’t know why they did that. It happened on every station simultaneously. I know because I wanted to change the channel, and my dad said it wouldn’t make a difference. They showed the whole list, every name, and they read them all live on the air. Some of them I didn’t even know how to pronounce, but they read them anyway. Even the ones in Russian or Chinese. My father shook his head at that. This was in 1987. I was just a kid back then. I wore my hair in pigtails. At school, boys would hang around by the steps and try to look up my skirt. My parents were divorced, so they figured I must be a slut, although at the time, I had never even been kissed. A few years later one of them got me drunk and knocked me up and then nothing really happened in my life anymore. Kurt Cobain died. I remember that. Michael Jackson, too. A lot of celebrities died, I guess. I’m worried my daughter is turning out just like me, but when I try to talk to her it’s like I’m made of cardboard. It feels like I’m the mom in a bad sitcom with no jokes. I used to watch a lot of sitcoms as a kid. I would sit on the floor and my dad would sit behind me and we would both watch them, but we weren’t really together. We were in completely different rooms, separated by a plate of bullet proof glass. I liked the sitcoms for their stability. They felt like a closed loop, where nothing could really happen. At the time, I found the idea of nothing ever happening to be comforting. It might sound strange now, but back then it was taken very seriously that you and your family might have the skin eaten off your bones in a blast of unbearable light at more or less any time. On the night they broadcast all the names of the dead, I wasn’t able to watch the sitcoms like I usually did. All the regular programming was canceled. Towards the end they started reading more and more slowly. The pauses would stretch for minutes sometimes, while empty lines scrolled up the screen. I was worried they wouldn’t ever finish it, that this is all TV was going to be now. When they said my father’s name, I knew he would still be there if I turned around, but not for much longer.