#Brain Curd 228

[notsocheezy]

Brain Curd #228

Brain Curds are lightly edited daily writing - usually flash fiction and sometimes terrible on purpose.

I awoke with a start from yet another of those dreams. Those dreams, unyielding, in which he is with me. I have always hated those dreams.

Whether I find myself in a diner, or a grocery store, or strolling about my home town, he is always there, whether overtly or lingering in the shadows, hiding beneath the mask of someone else. He relishes being an unwelcome guest in my subconscious, drawing me to his flying monkeys and wannabes.

Long since incapable of finding pure love, I lay alone in my bed, groggy, having slept the night before to the sounds of YouTube on autoplay. Perhaps the only white noise worse than silence. My eyelids are heavy with the burden of lost rest, never to be clawed back from the unmerciful crawl of time.

I force myself out of bed and peek through the curtains. Orange-tinted storm clouds fill the sky. It must be Halloween. I yawn and head for the kitchen to boil a kettle.

I pour my cup of tea when suddenly the doorbell rings. What time is it? I ask myself, to which I reply, time to get a watch. The microwave clock reads half-past four PM. I suppose I slept in.

I look through the peephole and don’t see anyone. I figure it might be neighborhood children playing a prank, but it could be a package I ordered and forgot about. I unlock the door and open it, but it takes a moment to register what I see: my father, in the flesh.

I rub my eyes. This can’t be happening, this can’t be real - but when I open them again he still stands before me. He’s not supposed to be here, not even in my dreams. I pinch my arm, I bite my tongue, but nothing seems to wake me up. I am already awake.

“Trick or treat!” He says, holding out his arms, waiting for a hug.

“How did you find this address?”

“It’s almost my birthday! Didn’t you want to see me?”

“No. You aren’t welcome here. Please leave.”

I close the door but he sticks his foot in it, the sole of his open-toed shoe only barely damping the hit. He doesn’t flinch.

He pushes the door back open and leans inside. “Do you know what it took to get here? I’m not going back.”

Part of me is afraid of what he’ll do if I let him in, but the other part is afraid of what he’ll do if I try to keep him out. That’s the part that wins the argument. I open the door again.

“I’ll make dinner.” He says, as he looks around inside, scoping out a place to turn into a nest. He sets his backpack down on the couch, and I can smell sulfur on it from all the way over here by the entrance.

“I just woke up, actually, so dinner seems premature.”

“Fine,” he says. “I’ll make pancakes for dinner. You’ll love them, I promise.”

This is an uncharacteristic sort of compromise from him, and I get to wondering if this really is my father. After all, I haven’t seen him in five years, and he seems to look exactly as I remember him. The thing is, I’m not sure I remember what he looked like last time I was in the same room with him. He almost looks more like he does in that photo I keep stashed away at the bottom of a drawer, the one we took when I was ten. He doesn’t act much like I thought he did, either, but I suppose I haven’t known him for some time. Maybe he changed?

We stopped talking for the obvious reasons (those are the ones I can tell people who ask): he didn’t support me going to college, or my transition, or any of my passions beyond making him happy. But there were also the less obvious reasons: The chill I felt down my spine when we were alone, a sense of unease to hear his voice, fear when he was even slightly angry. The little reminders of childhood that I’ve learned draw me to other people who end up hurting me. Battle-worn red flags of heritage.

My teenage memories are molded swiss cheese, incomplete and green with envy of the children who were allowed to grow up without a father like him. Whether their father was a good man or a dead man or both, they were better off. I knew even then that the most I had to look forward to was writing and delivering the eulogy.

And now here he was, a trespasser in my home, standing at the stove, burning vegetable oil onto my carbon steel pan. The fishy stench of it chokes my uvula. I want to vomit. He always told me he’d haunt me after he died and here he was, haunting me not only in my dreams but in waking life as a shambling zombie of a parent that never was.

Was… was he?

I ran to my computer and checked the local obituaries of my home town. I scrambled to find anything, anything from the past year, then the past two, desperately searching my brain at the same time to try to recall when it was that via text he threatened (no - ‘promised’) to keep his death a secret from my mother and I. Then I came across the name. There it was, the obituary.

He was presumed dead on his birthday four years ago. The body was never found. There was no service. Nobody would have come anyway. And something - be it a mischievous fae or a demon or the man himself - was piloting his decaying body to make a pancake dinner.

He pushed open the bedroom door and presented the plate. “I hope you like them. I made them with love.”

“I’m not hungry,” I replied, sick to my stomach at the mere suggestion of more of what he called love.

He looked at my monitor and the smile melted off his face. “I keep my promises.”

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