The scab-red receiver flashes on my phone’s screen. The screen says DAD, all caps so I wouldn’t misread it as dead.
Dead keeps appearing in my head when I practice saying Dad, which freaks him out, or maybe makes him happy, as I never call him that. I call him Hey, or How’s it going, or You good, or, when I’m angry, Bill. Bill is not his real name, it’s Grandpa’s name, but he hated That-Son-Of-A-Bitch, as he refers to his father. His father was an army man armed with the usual army men stuff: medals, tank-jaw, whiskey, and a belt. A belt that sometimes caught the skin with the leather end, sometimes with the buckle.
‘Buckle up’, Dad said one morning, when, instead of driving me to school, he swerved left on the dirt road and drove across the country. Country roads, dusty, long, and longing, swam away in the car window. The window showed my glassy face was ready to shatter into tears, so I started quietly chanting buck-le-buck-le-buck-le, click-click-clicking the belt in and out of its retractor to the rhythm, until Dad snarled, ‘Fuck it.’ He stomped on the brake, pulled over, and pushed me out the door. The door was flapping like a broken-winged bird as the tires squealed into the blood-orange sun.
The sun was still up when his battered brown Buick came back sagging on the asphalt. The asphalt was harder on my knees than the muddy lawn in our backyard, and tasted like kerosene, and piss, and fried chicken.
‘Baby chick,’ Dad said as he got out of the car to fish me out from the dried sticks of a bush. ‘Still love your old man?’ He stuck a hand out, which I didn’t take, so he crouched down in the dirt and bowed, leaning on his hands to meet my eyes. His eyes were wet and red like a caged bunny’s and I turned away and called him Bill, but my nose was clogged with snot and it came out as Mill, so I started sniffing, hard. He was sniffing too, saying ‘Fucking dust allergy,’ and sat up and wiped his nose into his scrambled short-sleeved nylon shirt.
His shirts are now bigger and calmer over his belly. And his belly now contains stuff other than beer and wings and fried hopes. Stuff the size of bricks.
‘Bricks,’ Dad said the last time he called about the hospital bill. ‘Bricks, the doctor told me. But I told him if he threw me in the lake, I’d sure still float.’
DAD, my phone screams, but my thumb floats in the air like a pendulum, swinging between green and red, between holding on and letting go, between ‘Hey baby chick,’ and bricks of guilt, between ‘Hey Bill,’ and allergic anger, between ‘Still love your old man?’ and ‘I haven’t yet figured out how not to, Dad.’
Originally Published in the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize Anthology 2023 titled ‘But Words Can Never Hurt Me’ edited by FJ Morris
Photo source: Wallpaperflare
Noémi Writes 