by Joel Tomfohr
On the Eve of My Hospitalization
Here is a short list of the dead: uncle by hanging in a hospital room, G’s suicide by gunshot to the head under the pink Sandía Mountains. My own father who said no to life when the time came. Say hello. Shake their hands.
Once I liked to throw the baseball with my dad. I stayed up late in summer playing capture the flag. I liked to hide in the woods and climb trees. I watched Nightmare on Elm Street. I liked when my mom made smoothies with orange juice concentrate from the freezer. I liked the sharp ice pick of brain freeze when I drank them too fast. I liked to laugh about how much it hurt with my younger brother. I laughed about it all.
I see that the third floor of the hospital is a long empty corridor with doors to rooms. A social worker has faded tattoos up and down her right arm. I have two tattoos on the inside of my right forearm. The pale white of a pale white fish belly turned up at the tepid shore of a lake. Two coffee cups my younger brother drew. One for him and one for me. We drink hot coffee together outside a café during a blizzard while our mom works late into the evening. While our stepdad drinks Scope in his office downtown. The snow accumulates all around us. Great chunks of it like buttercream frosting on a cake.
My older brother tried to kill himself twice, but it didn’t work. Here is what happens when someone in your family tries to kill himself twice. Go to the hospital for family week. Watch red-eyed adults drink stale coffee from a carafe, with powder cream and little packets of granulated sugar. Sit in a circle in a gymnasium on an uncomfortable metal chair with your younger brother. No school for a week. What a relief.
See the snow falling into the black river. See the snow again for the first time every time it falls again, but that same old feeling of something breaking apart inside violently, gently. A hammer wrapped in velvet. See the snow fall again for the first time. So long, long ago.
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The Veld
I only write this because if you know someone who has done it, I guess that means that you are more likely to do it yourself. I write a short list of the dead. So, what does that mean for me?
There is my uncle in the tall grass and, can I go find him, Dad? Will you join me? Will you help me find him in the tall grass this fall morning? I am so young I don’t remember anymore. I am too young to remember. Please do not go, Dad.
The grass is tall and dry like a faraway veld from a world unknown to me. Like the realm of the dead across a black river. We walk along the river on an orange and red fall afternoon and now I am the one who is hiding in the tall grass. Where is Carmichael? Where is he?
Shh.
Later we will throw the ball, and I can see him in the shade of the trees of my grandparent’s backyard. Over there stands my dad. My dad has a mustache. My dad wears glasses. Sometimes he shaves his mustache and then I don’t know if he is my dad. My dad is the tallest man I know. My uncle is the second tallest man that I know. I am in love with them both.
Ghosts haunt the corridors of these pages. These pages are written. They were always written. I didn’t write a thing.
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Gun Collecting
I have a collection of pictures of G in my head, and I try to write about them so that I can release them. I write them down and then they come back up to haunt me in the silence of the morning when the light is low, and it is hard to see the words on the page.
I am done writing about G I say to myself, and so I am done thinking about him. Except he doesn’t go away, which is what I was talking about in the program yesterday to my group when I was talking about how when I write about someone, I release them. Except even though I have written hundreds of images of him, it’s not possible for me to not see him in my mind’s eye sometimes in the morning.
He has long shiny black hair. He has a black goatee. He has round, brown, sad eyes. He cinches his camo jeans with a snakeskin belt. He keeps a python under a heat lamp in an aquarium next to his bed. He feeds it rabbits from a chicken wire coop next to the garage. He has a serious gun collection. Sometimes he takes them out to the desert with his older brother and fires off a few rounds. Hahaha. I am not supposed to love a person like this.
Square this detail though: he drives a sweet Galaxie 500. It is brown and it shines under the red sun. He takes me for a spin on Tramway Road underneath Sandía Peak. Time stands still and we roar past it. The desiccate desert beneath us. The sun detonates in the sky. I think about pythons and rabbits and gun collections and firing off rounds at lost coyotes out on the mesa.
At night he doesn’t sleep and so he sits in my living room and when I come out to say hello, he says hello and then shows me memories of myself where I am in their living room, and I am watching him circle the kitchen island counterclockwise beneath the fluorescent light as if he could reverse time. As if he could return to an age when he wasn’t so afflicted. He knows I am sitting there on the couch in the living room studying him and he knows how scared I am of him. Carmichael, he says. Don’t be afraid.
But maybe he doesn’t know that I love him, because how can you love a gun collector who feeds rabbits to his python that he keeps locked up in an aquarium for its entire life. How do you love someone like this? You might be able to love him because he takes you on joyrides in the desert in his Galaxie 500 with the windows rolled down, blasting Alice in Chains for all the coyotes out on the mesa to hear.
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Joel Tomfohr is a writer living in the Bay Area. He is the author of the chapbook, A Blue Hour (Bottlecap Press). His story, Sandia Is Spanish for Watermelon, was the winner of the RUNNR Residency Challenge (August 2025). His fiction has been featured in Maudlin House, Bright Flash Literary Review, Short Beasts, Bending Genres, Joyland, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, X-R-A-Y, BULL, Hobart, and others.