The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories by Christopher Merkner Page B

often asked for his son’s feedback. “Stop crying,” his father would whisper into his ear, “and tell me how the hell to do this.” The one time the boy told him (“Maybe use more palm?”), his father thanked him sharply. The boy was then chopped across the spine in one fantastic blow. Those who were purchasing their groceries at the front of the store heard this. They turned to look at the minister and the boy, facedown in the massage chair. The father smiled at them. He waved. “Tapotement,” heexplained. “Just the tapotement technique. Very big in China!”
    The boy would not offer his feedback again. He stopped speaking to his father. He could be found in the massage chair for six or seven hours a day, listening to his father comment on the lives of people from his church, yet never speaking a word. The father pressed and stroked and pummeled and pinched his son’s body. He could feel it give beneath his hands. Whenever the boy’s body tried to grow, the father could feel it, so well had he come to know the boy’s body, and he pressed and pinched those developments away. As a result, the boy stopped growing. He began, indeed, to shrink. By the age of sixteen, the boy was as big as he’d been at four years old. He required a booster for the massage chair.
    Those who walked past the two of them over the years became concerned. They asked the father, sometimes, if he had more than one son. The father only laughed and nodded vaguely. But they were moved. It would have been difficult to ignore: the once-large boy was now a helpless imp. It was clear to everyone what the minister was doing. So they began asking for and offering money for massages,and when they pulled the little boy out of his father’s massage chair, they handed him to another person who took the tiny child away to be fed.
    They slipped the boy food right from their grocery bags, just out of the sight of the minister. The boy ate frozen fish sticks, chocolate cereal, fruits and vegetables, candy, eggs, tea bags, entire loaves of bread, bags of cornmeal—anything at all they showed him, anything he could grab from their bags. They laughed about it. They were pleased. They did not mind his gluttony. They watched as he snapped up anything he could find. The only thing that stopped him was a can of foie gras.
    The boy just looked at it. He smelled the can. He shook it. He looked up at the man who had offered the boy his bag of groceries. The man nodded. “Goose liver,” he said. The man took out his pocketknife and cut open the can. He handed it down to the boy. The boy smelled it and fell backwards. His vision blurred. He had to sit up. He swiped his fingers through the foie gras and shoved them in his mouth. He was suddenly in the air. He was out of doors, soaring over the grocery store. He took the wind into his eyes and cried. He yelled outand swept over large spells of forested land, deer herds, and white-tipped lakes. Then he returned to the grocery store. The man was slapping him in the face. “Are you there, little man?” He was shouting. “Are you there?”
    The boy went after the foie gras and was flying again. When he returned to the store, he was laughing. He smiled and was red with pleasure. The man laughed and told others to buy the boy goose liver, because it seemed to make him happy. And they did. They shoved it at him. He ate as much goose as they would give him. They shook their heads (What sort of child likes foie gras?), but they brought it to him just the same. And the boy began growing rapidly until his father noticed.
    One day the boy was called over. He was told to sit in the chair. The boy situated himself. The father felt the boy’s size beneath his hands. “You’re a fat Herod,” he whispered into his son’s ear. “You will be crushed,” he said.
    â€œI doubt it,” the boy said.
    But his father worked against his