Fathers, Sons, and Ghosts

Fathers, Sons, and Ghosts

             He lies there clothed in a warm, familiar darkness as I, still awake, observe the subtle, steady ebb and flow of a pale bare back, his quiet breaths summoning soft beams of vague heavenly light drifting through the window panes, which leave shadows like scars across his skin.

             They are so much more like children when they sleep.

             Even in the dark, especially in the dark, his room is an orphan boy’s: half-boxed promises collect dust in the corners, blank, white walls stare back, unresponsive to the clean or dirty crumpled boxers, the wrinkled silk tie.

             Even less distressed over that hole—the one where a crucifix used to hang over his mattress—the crucifix he replaced one restless night with a worn leather belt—the belt that just wasn’t strong enough.

             Of course, who am I to say, but I know it’s his father—the unholy ghost who shares this room with him in the dark, the one with the blank white wall stare. The one who knew how to take it like a man and get angry. The one who’d be with him always, to the end of time.

             And now, his son, a sleeping child, knows he’ll never be a god.

             And I, searching in the blackness for a man who’s barely there, for a man who’s barely a man, whisper to his back like a mother to her sleeping child, “Yes, you’re just a man, but if you let me, I’ll be your savior.”

3 - Last Mistake

Last Mistake

             I stumbled in from the balcony through a wall of vertical blinds and let myself fall back over the armrest of a loveseat. The room was dark, save for the television flashes dancing and laughing across the textured white walls. I watched the world stop with an unsettling silence and waited. I waited for something to happen.

             I settled deep into the loveseat, heavy with indolence. Thoughts dissolved, synapses disengaged, molecular bonds, atomic structures fell apart before my smoke-filled eyes. Even the vertical blinds, still swinging in perfect cadence with the dancers on the walls, began to blend together, to lose their own convictions. Every whirling electron, the whole of the cosmos existed within that little apartment.

             For a moment, the universe made sense, the meaning of life, my role in it, the whole bit. I needed a record to remember, to live to tell what I had seen, but my body was too heavy, too tired to find pen and paper.

             Then he stumbled in, disturbing the blinds into a clash of chaos and violence and imperfect madness, his smile ignorant and unapologetic. Overhead his ceiling was just a ceiling stained and peeling, and the cosmos was just an apartment. His hand seized my calf, and I knew there was nothing I could do. He crept and clambered or slithered across me until we were cheek-to-cheek the way I had seen people dance before in movies or in dreams.

             We didn’t dance.

             We rose, we collided, we strained, we resisted, and together we fell, without a sheet or blush to shield our shame.

             And though the cosmos had vanished, I had known its face, and resentfully, I accepted my fate.

             The sun slid in through the still vertical blinds, too bright and too late. He was standing in front of them, an unlit cigarette dangling between his lips.

             There, he almost said, throwing his old boy scout shirt over my bare legs.

             He held out a carton of cigarettes, as though to offer me a smoke, or his deficient conversation.

             Button by button I thought I felt a strange sense of nothingness swelling in me, a desire for a meaning, a reason why, I knew he couldn’t give me, but would only take away as soon as he got the chance.

             A girl in her right mind might have known the right words to say.

             I don’t remember last night at all, to tell you the truth.

             Bitch, he muttered, or something like it, and parting the vertical blinds, he stepped out onto the balcony to smoke, while I sat and waited.

             I waited for something to happen.