photo of grandpa, or kingdom of mud

by Aaron Tomey

I fly to Georgia for Christmas and Mom gives me a handful of Visa gift cards and a photo of Grandpa. He was young, in Marine fatigues. I never knew him to have hair.

Across the kitchen, Mom leans on a walker. She can’t stand straight due to a spinal lesion. She’s fragile, like old wicker, but she seems happier. She hordes less. Her cheeks are fuller. She once weighed seventy-eight pounds.

I ask her about Grandpa. She says he was born in Venice, Illinois, then goes to bed.

I feel guilty for not already knowing that; I had lived with him while my stepfather was working and caring for my mother. MS had compelled her toward Lortab. I tended to Grandpa’s zucchini garden while I would’ve rather been jerking off and pirating music. I miss that garden terribly now.

Time with him also meant time with my grandmother, who most often called me a cocksucker. If she had the strength, she would’ve hit me, too. She’d done it to Mom. Grandpa would often distract her away from me. In a police report involving my family, my mother and aunt described him as the family mediator (CID 19).

When my grandmother turned her anger toward him, she’d scream, “Dorothy! Dorothy!” Dorothy was his mother. In that same report, Mom had alleged that Dorothy molested Grandpa before “[my aunt] interrupted… [and told] her to stop saying those things” (CID 19).

So they were both present in their own ways. At thirteen, Mom signed away guardianship to my grandparents, who boarded me through high school, alongside my uncle M—.

After I left Georgia for college in St. Louis, I spoke to Grandpa over the phone. He’d called my high school that week, asking when I’d be home. They reminded him that I’d already graduated. I cried for hours at the thought of losing him. He died the next week of pneumonia.

When I used to smoke, my jackets smelled like him. I picked up his drinking problem, too. I yearned to be his past. For years after, I thought, Where did you go? You never told me.

That following Christmas, I saw Grandpa again, collected in an urn. My uncle M— was also there, drunk. He was one of Mom’s half-brothers: the other had a closed-casket funeral after a drug deal gone wrong in the ’80s. M—had twice shot himself in the head, twenty-two years apart. The first required reconstructive surgery: from a distance, he appeared normal. Up close, it was clear that his nose was a prosthetic, his lips rebuilt with skin grafted from his calf.

The second shot was after he killed my grandmother. My stepfather had discovered the bodies after receiving a call from her during yet another argument with my uncle (CID 8).

After hearing the news from St. Louis, a friend gave me some Xanax. I’d never felt so careless. I hadn’t spoken to my grandmother in four years since she said how grateful she was that Grandpa was dead.

Headlines appeared the next day. Suburban murder is always great news for the “copyeditor[s] of barbarous cruelties” (Castellanos Moya 62). Ellen Eldridge says of my family, “An extensive history of domestic violence plagued the relationship.” I’d lost count of the times M— had threatened my grandmother with an unseen gun.

In Eldridge’s article, Mom says, “Nobody deserved to be like that.” Not “to live like that,” but “to be like that,” choiceless. “He’s done enough to our family,” she continues. “Our family:” There’s no escaping blood. As the Judge tells the Kid in Blood Meridian, “Our animosities were formed and waiting before ever we two met. Yet, even so, you could have changed it all” (McCarthy 319). The Judge was always full of shit. There’s no changing fate.

But it’s inappropriate to say that in a newspaper. This should be painful to revisit, but it fascinates me to be related to someone who doesn’t “appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper” (Galeano 73). It’s a secret thrill misnamed as disgust. In Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Berardi lets slip his own fascinations, prefacing a paragraph with, “I’m not a morbid person, I don’t like this kind of pornography. Nevertheless…” (199).

There’s no avenue of grief for me. I never grieved my grandmother or uncle. I only grieved Grandpa before he died. I can’t process any of it. I’ll never be exhausted.

After Christmas, I return home and receive the full report from my hometown’s police department. It begins with a picture of my uncle’s face: a parody of a mouth under a ragged goatee, one eye socket smoothed over with grafted skin, the other eye pale blue like mine. His prosthetic nose had been removed for the mugshot.

Fourteen times, the report mentions the French doors to my grandmother’s bedroom, where police found my uncle “lying face down on the floor in front of the bed… his arms… bent out away from… his body and his hands underneath his head” (CID 9). My grandmother was  “lying on the floor next to the bed and appearing to be deceased” (CID 7).

The second page of the report is a picture of her. I thought I was the only one who saw all that hate in her, and I was right: she looks kind. I never could identify the victim here.

Her father abandoned her in Depression Illinois, left for the Permian to become a millionaire. When he died, he left her with a quarter million dollars that she spoke of so many times that I told Mom to leave me out of the inheritance. Even now, I hate her more than I ever hated my uncle. He had generally been kind to me, stuck in a teenage state: he only knew about classic rock, pornography, and cigarettes.

My Uncle M— lived a stupid life, then a cruel life. In his 20s, he was just a machinist who liked to party. He left two children in Illinois to follow the family to Georgia. The consensus then had been that he was a bum, not a maniac. But partying became dayslong meth benders. His new marriage went south, so he ate a shotgun. He must’ve woken up in the hospital to a doctor explaining how the skin of his chest and calf would become something like a face.

He lived in a shed in my grandparents’ backyard, hidden from a world that had trouble looking into his one remaining eye, surrounded by “walls… covered from floor to ceiling with pictures of adult pornography” (CID 12). A social death of few friends and menial work, “[b]etween the funeral and the animals,” drunk-driving a lawnmower through a neighborhood whose kids knew the nephew that never mentioned any connection to him (McCarthy 185).

My grandmother became more lucid near the end (Eldrige). She called the police nineteen times between Grandpa’s death and hers (CID 14-19). My uncle was without money or face, would’ve soon been without his shed. He had nothing but a gun that did exist.

Berardi says, “...the murders and subsequent suicide can be considered, in a sense, a form of self-advertising” (41). It was M—’s final cry to let others know he had shared their air and mowed grasses comparable to theirs, that he would rather die than be cast off to wander an empire of bones graded with asphalt, the “desert of the present in its purest form” (185).

Chance families become conduits of American rot and its raw explosions of violence. We’ve become so numb to it that we no longer feel what Sayak Valencia, in Gore Capitalism, describes as “the trepidation that every human being should feel upon seeing the corpse of another” after she witnesses a trash-bagged torso fall out of a car in Tijuana (189).

Why sustain any outrage against it? It’s only the distant grotesque seen via Ring and bodycam footage. Ten dead at a King Soopers (Rocha et al.). Mouth-devourer. A horse carcass scoured for carrion. I have a friend whose father once grew so irate at their barking puppy that he threw it into a full speed tumble dryer. Something with the largest teeth is doing corpse math.

Don’t believe any of it. It’s all overseen by a pantheon of awful: failed adaptations of God, the bones of that horse, eagles choking on diesel. Fake pistols, some truly loaded. Profanity toward nowhere, scalpel rejection of flesh. The direction we’re going is not obvious despite the best guesses of the academy.

“Hey man, you ever go in that slaughter room or whatever they call it? The place where they shoot cattle in the head with that big air gun?” (Hooper) “[D]efendant lying on the ground with blood surrounding his head” (CID 7). The homeless disappear in a desert Mecca (Rihl). When did they lose their names? Where did you go? You never told me. “You'll forgive me if I don't stay around to watch. I just can't cope with the freaky stuff” (Cronenberg). Grandpa’s dentureless laughter, his cartons of Doral Menthol Light 100s. “[T]hrough the unlocked French Doors,” red is the mood of all human maladies (CID 3). Over breakfast, my grandmother told me that her first husband had beaten her into the kitchen floor more than once. “The Goblin killed. I had nothing to do with it! Don't—don't let him take me again! I beg you, protect me!” (Raimi) I only know fifteen people died one night in Maine because four of them were deaf and playing cornhole (Mistler).

A zucchini garden in summer. Where did you go? What used to be someone, faceless now, washes up from the flood. “Shell casing on a bench located at the foot of the bed” (CID 8). The only place with real water is so far away from here, yet we still wait for the sea-gift: something big enough to wash everything away so the next pilgrims can run it all back atop this “kingdom of mud” (McCarthy 33). You never told me. You never told me it’s all a long engine with so many motions, moving into a future of amputations. “[A]nd she was hungry because she had not eaten since the night before” (CID 9). Where did you go?

Every death comes from something ravenous underneath us, at once animal and liquid, that bubbles up through the foundation cracks of our homes, our backyard sheds. My grandpa tried his best against it. Sometimes, he won. Now he’s dead and so is everyone else who lived impossible lives. I never wondered why they all stuck together. It was the local normal.

I keep the photo of Grandpa on my nightstand. Neighboring him is Jesus painted on a cross. I received it at an AA white elephant party. He cradles a baby lamb in the foreground of a rainbow.

A face is irreplaceable. I witness Grandpa. Something like him looks back and witnesses me.

Works Cited:

Berardi, Franco. Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. Verso, 2015.

Castellanos Moya, Horacio. Senselessness. Translated by Katherine Silver. New Directions, 2008.

Criminal Investigations Division. Case #17-088835. Gwinnett County Police Department.

Cronenberg, David, director. Videodrome. Universal Pictures. 1983.

Eldridge, Ellen. “Family says mental health struggles preceded murder-suicide” Atlanta Journal-Constitution , 24 September 2017.

Galeano, Eduardo. Book of Embraces. Translated by Cedric Belfrage. Norton, 1992.

Hooper, Tobe, director. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Vorteyes, 1974.

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian: or, The Evening Redness in the West. Random House, 1985

Mistler, Steve. “Lewiston’s mass shooting deals devastating blow to deaf and hard of hearing community.” Maine Public, 2 November 2023

Raimi, Sam, director. Spider-Man. Sony Pictures. 2002

Rihl, Juliette. “Unhoused People are Being Killed at Alarming Rates.” The Appeal, July 3, 2024.

Valencia, Sayak. Gore Capitalism. Translated by John Pluecker. Semiotext(e). 2018.

Rocha, Veronica, et al. “Multiple Dead in Shooting at Colorado Supermarket.” CNN, Cable News Network, 23 Mar. 2021,

Photo of Aaron Tomey

BIO: Aaron Tomey is from Georgia, lived in St. Louis, and now lives in Brooklyn. His essays have previously appeared in Hobart, Bushwick Burner Phone, and Apocalypse Confidential. You can find him on Twitter @ecstatic_donut.