We’re on Day 6 of Leone Ross‘ very helpful 10 Days of Flash Challenge. Write at least six short flashers – one to ten lines each. The stories all have to be about difficult ‘intimates’ in a single character’s life. Write at least six short flashers – one to ten lines each. It can have a basis in reality, but it needs to be exaggerated, fictionalized.
This one, I have to admit, was very hard for me. I’m not sure I was prepared to write this, but it’s here anyway. If you read my writing on this blog, you’ll see tiny fragments of other stories peaking through in this. I’m too close to this to title it.
_______
He loved me then. Even through the milky veil of age, I can see it in that photograph. His skeletal, angular body is hunched over me like a protective cage of bones. I’m balanced on his knee – chubby and mostly toothless – in a shit-smeared diaper, but he doesn’t care.
_______
He comes in with a bowl of steaming water reeking of Vick’s, and Sheba the bulldog at his heels.
“Come on, he says,” sitting on my bed and laying the basin between us. “We’re going to breathe this in.”
I can hardly inhale. My chest hurts so much, my ears ache. I try to refuse, I have no voice to do it with. Beneath the pink blanket, over the vapors, he is reading aloud, lost in the words, and I have disappeared: “…down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.”
_______
“I can’t,” I whine.
“You can,” he says.
On the flat, scrubby tabletop of the hill, I’ve bled all over his white tennis shorts. All around us there are piles of stones, balanced neatly on top of each other. And between each stone, a note. Littered around us are the balled up sheets I’ve wasted, finding myself without words. He rips another page out of the little spiral-bound notebook and thrusts the blank page at me.
“Write something that matters,” he says.
_______
Sunday breakfast. Around the table, we rustle newspapers and eat toast.
“I’m going to go on the pill,” I say.
He doesn’t look up. “Why? You’re only sixteen.”
“Because I want to have sex with him.”
“You’re a fucking whore.”
Silent until then, my mother stands up, turns, and backhands him so hard, he falls of his chair.
_______
“I didn’t say you couldn’t live here,” he shouts.
I look at my mother, but she’s mute.
“Yeah, right.” I’m opening the door, pulling my coat on.
He gets up and grabs my arm, even through the wool, I know his bony fingers are going to leave marks.
“How the hell did I make such a stupid daughter?”
But now I’m a match head. In that brief moment it has been struck, before it flares, and he knows it. He lets go. “Never, ever touch me again.”
_______
He’s there, looking older and frail, when I clear customs at the airport. He smiles, wraps an arm around me, and kisses my forehead. “Good lord, you’re fat,” he says.
“Nice to see you, too, Dad.”
The civility only lasted part way through our first dinner. I blame Oliver Stone. I should have never brought up that movie.
Back at his apartment, I’m crawling into bed in his spare room. It’s full of junk. Empty picture frames and stringless tennis rackets, unwired lamps, broken crockery, and towers of paperback books.
He’s yelling at me through the locked door. “The whole John F. Kennedy thing was a load of crap. It’s all conspiracy theory crap.”
“Sure it was,” I yell back.
I slip on my headphones and press the play button on the Walkman, turning the volume up as high as it will go. On the tape, Richard Grant continues his narration of “Enduring Love” but I can still hear the yelling. So I dry-swallow an Ambien.
_______
“Hello?”
The line is scratchy. It’s 2014, how can the telephone line still sound so bad?
“Hello, Dad.” It’s all I can think to say. I feel fear and an almost blinding wave of nausea.
“I got your book.”
“You did? Oh, good.”
“Yes, it arrived yesterday.” He’s yelling over the line, like he’s playing the part of a good father to an audience sitting too far away.
I sent it by courier over a month ago. He signed for it two days later. I checked online. “Excellent. I’m glad you got it.”
“They never bombed Malaga, you know. You got that detail wrong.”
“Oh, dear.”
He launches into a detailed account of that particular phase of the Spanish Civil war, but I tune him out. Instead, I indulge in a long, silent bout of self-castigation for sending him the book.
_______
“Look who the cat coughed up,” says the lover I’ve ignored for too long. But he can see I’m on the verge of tears. “Come in.”
Beyond the windows of his flat, the car tires hiss on the wet afternoon street. “Want some tea?” he asks.
“No.”
“What do you want?”
“Hurt me.” I can’t look him in the eye. I’ve never actually ever asked for it before, but I’m desperate. “Hurt me, and then fuck me.”
“What should I punish you for?”
“For hubris.”
The molding hand can be harsh, calloused, ripping.
Your correct, the words are familiar.
At some point, we don the costume that is dad and scratch at the other end of the line.
This was beautiful. It was like listening to a sad song to draw out the big fat alligator tears when your sad. It was cathartic like that. Thank you for being such an amazing writer. The world and my life is richer because of you and your talents.