Suplex

by Tim Frank

I suplex gran after Christmas dinner. I land her with a thunderous clap on the extended dining room table, next to the congealed goose fat potatoes, and the cranberry sauce that’s splashed on the wicker placemats like a bloody show.

Gran is very old and her bones are brittle, so her chest caves in. But she’s alive. 

In the glare of the fairy lights, she looks like Stalin on holiday in the Algarve. 

“What the hell was that!?” mum says, pinning me to the wall with the strength of a middleweight prize-fighter, mince pie and Chapstick smeared across her lips.

“It’s called a suplex, mum—a wrestling move I learned at the Y.”

“Why’d you do it!?” says my brother, picking strands of sinuous turkey meat from his massive block teeth.

I take a look at grandma curled up in the foetal position, wheezing, stunned.

“Well, I’ve got to blow off steam somehow,” I say, soothing myself with the image of Taylor Swift sprawled on my tumble dryer, sorting through my unmentionables.

“This is like the time you spiked the dog with acid and made him drive around town in the Ford Bronco,” mum says.

I’m stressed—Taylor will never be mine, and I’m suffering a disturbing buildup of earwax. So, I break my mother’s choke hold, rip off my sweaty string vest, and suplex gran one more time—flinging her at the Christmas tree with a dramatic flourish. 

Her body shifts and cracks like a Rubik’s cube.

“Sweet,” I sigh.

Tim Frank’s short stories have been published in Bending Genres, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Maudlin House, The Forge Literary Magazine, The Metaworker and elsewhere. He has been nominated for Best Small Fictions. His debut chapbook is, An Advert Can Be Beautiful in the Right Shade of Death (C22 Press ’24) 

Twitter: @TimFrankquill