Original short story from your humble narrator.
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Short Story
Remembering Dad
I can’t seem to get things under control. I sit in my deep orange, plush throne and stare, usually across the room. I feel that something is wrong, but cannot think what. I meditate on it, sifting through my memories like a sandbox, trying to remember where I buried my toys last. I see some red rim of plastic poking through the hot dry sand of the little desert -
The phone rings.
Or, someone walks in, or a siren blares outside, or I suddenly notice that I have a creeping need to piss as I’ve been setting in the same spot for an unregistered number of hours. All interruptions and I lost the trace of what I’d almost found.
Like I said before, I can’t seem to get things under control. I’ve missed professional appointments almost regularly for two weeks now, finding some way or another to hold my superiors at bay. The appointments I have kept have been whored by tardiness and a nonchalant pride I have trademarked. I have good intentions of wiping the slate clean and starting over fresh, starting over with a righteous vengeance against the idleness that has been casting over my mental faculties of late. Then I realize, with that same fleeting sense of urgency rudely prompted by my bladder or bowels, mid-thought, that the idleness has again draped over my body and wrapped itself like a soft, weighted blanket. I had been thinking again, with that vacant stare, that empty mask of body negligence.
I try to shake it off by standing. My papers, disheveled in a cluttered pile on the floor, silently scream for attention. Next to them lies a photo of me as a child.
He was a careless little boy in oversized red galoshes brimmed by stubby smooth knees, short plump pale thighs, and then bright white disposable diapers. His tiny, delicate fingers were outstretched at waist level, arms at his sides, no fists. Above the diapers was a blue T-shirt worn beyond his age with the faded word DEFENSE stenciled into the chest. A slender, flawless neck, stark and naked in comparison to the color and texture of the stretched T-shirt collar, propped up his disproportionately large, round face. On his face was the widest, most genuine smile ever worn by anybody. His little hazel eyes sparkled with the same genuine happiness and unadulterated pride that his smile beamed. On his head he wore a red -
An ambulance howls by outside.
Again, I am violently wrenched from my intense trance. I ruffle through my papers and find bills intermingled with homework. Damn bills. Gotta have light to read by, so I decide to write a few checks before I get down to the monotonous business at hand.
I maneuver through the debris left by the party last night; beer bottle, a blue bucket, the titles “The Portable Nietzsche” and “Unabridged Works of Edgar Allan Poe” glare from the floor in bold red print next to an empty bottle of Absolut. Next to my bed I dig, again. This time through a collected pile of dirty laundry and assortment of valued personal items. Glasses case, zippo, cigarette case, empty wallet, where the hell is that checkbook. The only light cast on the pile is red and too dim to see much. There is no natural light in my room. All the bulbs are dim twenty-fivers and colored some warm shade of brown, red, orange, or yellow. Natural light hurts my eyes for some reason. I can never decide whether it is physical sensitivity to bright light and I am at risk of glaucoma, or whether it is mental sensitivity and I just don’t care to see what is around me.
A cop car shrills out a double-quick “woop-woop.”
Musta got a speeder. Checkbook, checkbook. No use fumbling in the dark, sometimes you just have to squint and bear it. I maneuver back through the bottles, books, and step over the bucket. Under the bar I keep a seventy five watt soft white bulb for a rare occasion such as this. I retrieve the vile thing from its hiding place and tip toe amongst the rubble to the lamp next to my bed and intermixed heap of valuables.
I fumble beneath the shade with my fingers, trying to find the switch. After an annoying, impatient, however brief duration I find the switch and click out the light with a double turn clockwise. Now I have to wait for the bulb to cool before I can twist it out counterclockwise.
I stand there hunched over in the dark with my back to the black cavern of my room. There are two kinds of people in the dark. There is the kind that are sure that something behind them is reaching for that exposed area of skin just at the back of their necks, and there is the kind that are not afraid of that something. This second kind knows they are worse than whatever may be lurking behind them, and secretly hope that something will grab them so they can prove it.
I remember being the first kind a long time ago. I wonder when that stopped. I wonder when I learned to not grab that bulb.
Blindly in the dark I flounder for the lampshade and then crane my hand in through the top to remove the now lukewarm bulb. I twist counterclockwise and deftly navigate the bulb out of the shade, while snaking the soft white seventy-fiver into the shade. I blunder with the bulb and socket for awhile and then come to the dismaying conclusion that my lazy ass will have to pull the shade off to get the light bulb in.
I set the now cold red bulb down on the floor to my far left. I mean business now. This is taking too damn long. I crudely grab the lamp and wrangle the shade off, tossing it aside, into the dark. Left hand blunder to switch, up, then socket, right hand bulb, connect left and right, place in socket, and twist clockwise.
A piercing burst of white light burns into the hollows of my eyes. Back I go startled and squinting.
I remember now. There I was sitting in my parents’ living room. They had just bought the house and the place was a wreck. Plaster on the floor in mounds, dry grout in little trays, and me in the middle of it on my blue blankie. My parents were around the corner in the kitchen-to-be. I was alone in the room with the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It was everything good I had ever seen in one spot. A little ways from me stood a crystal lamp and on top of it was the gorgeous thing. It shown brighter and whiter and more brilliant than anything in the whole world. I sat there in amazement, I can still feel the smile. I wanted it to be mine. I had to have it. I got up determined, waddled barefoot to the lamp, and thrust my tiny hand to palm the magnificence.
A sustained shriek left his lungs, the likes of which his father had never heard. He wouldn’t let go. His father pried his teeny, barely burned hand from the bulb and sat him down on the blanket again, out of the plaster and sharp rubble.
I wanted the wonderful thing more than anything, but I was glad that I didn’t have it in my hand anymore. I looked at him very happily. He looked questioning. His thick neck, sooty with plaster dust and dirt, was craned toward me. His lips were pursed in and drawn slightly down at the sides in concern. His hazel eyes were wide and probing my face.
I reached to my head and pulled off the huge red plastic fire helmet that I wore all the time, then I gently plopped it on my unemployed father’s head. He smiled as wide as I did.
He looked like a hero in that hat.
“Must’ve twisted the switch while molesting the lamp,” I think as I get back on my haunches to find the checkbook, of course, right on top of the pile of junk. Without interruption I write out the bills swiftly. I turn off the light with two clockwise turns to let the white bulb cool this time.
I hate bright light,” I think in the dark, “ I haven’t talked to Dad in a long time. Maybe I oughtta give him a call at the fire station.” I smile very widely.
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Joshua Schenck 1998
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