E.P. Rains

My father never had a beard. His pockmarked skin was always sheared clean by a straight razor. When the sun hung low like a ripe orange, I would stand on our front porch with my toes digging at the splintered wood waiting for the camouflage pick-up truck to pull down the long driveway. I would run and press my lips into his smile lines. He would ruffle my hair with a grin and climb the stairs to find my mother inside. She protested his kisses because he dripped wet from cutting lawns in the sweltering heat, but eventually succumbed to his affections. As she hunched over her bubbling pot he would scoop me up and pull me onto his damp lap. He would offer me whatever pocket candy he had in his cargo pants. I would lay my head against his chest, listen to the sluggish beat, and close my eyes.
            One day my father wasn’t grinning. He had no pocket candy. He pushed past me up the stairs, standing before my mother with his hands limp by his sides. Their eyes locked, wordless conversations flowing between them. She had worried a dish towel in her nimble fingers all day. The phone call during breakfast changed her face, pulling down the corners of her thin mouth and setting wrinkles in her forehead that did not exist before. Maybe it was the bank calling to collect the late payments on our mortgage. Maybe it was the government informing us that my father did not qualify for any benefits. Maybe it was one of the countless relatives harassing us for money we already spent.
            My father cleared his throat and glanced at me standing by the front door of our home.
            “Run outside and play, baby,” my mother said. “I’ll come for you when the streetlights turn on and we’ll eat our supper.”
            Her glassy eyes were rimmed red. I slipped on my tennis shoes and walked outside, standing no more than five feet away from our doublewide trailer when I heard the sobs. It was as if his soul was beings stripped from his body and leaving through his gaping mouth.
            I slid into the plastic seat of the swing set my parents got me for Christmas. I swung my feet out, stretching the toes of my battered shoes towards the dusky sky. Lightning bugs began to flicker over my head, preceding the stars. The creases of my elbows grew sticky with sweat as I pumped higher and higher into the atmosphere. I wondered if you could launch into space like the rockets at Cape Canaveral that my father and I saw last summer. Maybe if I kicked hard enough.
            Darkness crept up like a suffocating hug. My mother had not come to collect me. Fruit bats flew low over the light across the street, catching unsuspecting moths in their jaws. I watched my parents’ shadows dance in the window like a projection against the pale lamplight. He tugged at his hair with frantic hands, jutting his chin angrily towards my mother. Her body crumpled inward like a paper doll in a child’s hand. My chest tightened uncomfortably.
            The ambulance rolled into the driveway. The silvery box stopped and two broad men in blue jumped out. I watched as they wheeled the gurney out of the back. The rolling legs clicked into place with the snap of a broken bone.
            “You’re gonna take my daddy?” I pursed my lips.
            One turned to me and nodded without a word. They entered my home irreverently and they took him. They swaddled him in a strait jacket and wheeled him into our yard. I stared into my father’s eyes. His mudpuddle eyes looked like the deer we hit two Novembers ago: blank and frightened. I could feel the tears welling up inside of me. The feeling cut me without drawing blood. My nails made pink crescents in my palms as I squeezed my fists shut. My mother grabbed my face and pushed it into her wide belly.
            “Don’t look, it isn’t worth looking.”
            A few months before, he duct-taped all our power outlets to prevent the government from listening to our conversations. I figured the government must be evil if they wanted to spy on us. My father buried all his guns in a footlocker in the woods to keep the FBI from taking them. I thought that was a smart idea. He said when he served in the military they put a chip in his brain to track his thoughts. I worried they would come for mine next and that frightened me.
            They filled his veins with sloshing liquid and lifted him up into the ambulance. I watched the vehicle grow smaller as it drove down the road, feeling my father grow smaller too.
            For six months I slept with my mother in in my father’s oversized shirts. I drowned in them without him there to keep me afloat. We could only call him once a week. It cost a fortune, but my mother couldn’t go without catching him up on the monotony of our lives. When it was my turn to cradle the headset to my cheek, I didn’t speak. He told me about the leather coin pouch or bird house he made me that he’d bring home. He asked me to draw him colorful pictures to hang on his grey walls. I never did.
            “You know I love you more than anything and I’ll be home soon,” he said without fail.
            I passed the phone back without signing off.   
            After months of phone calls my mother loaded me up into my car seat and we set off for Chattahoochee. She let me have a package of gummy bears and halfway down I vomited all over myself. She pulled over on the side of the interstate and used handfuls of baby wipes to clean the front of my dress. The vomit stained our interior. I felt bad.
            We pulled through the security checkpoint. My mother explained to the gun-wielding guard why the car smelled like acid. I felt worse. The building in front of us rose as a grey monolith. Color only existed in a wilting azalea bush by the guest entrance. On the cement curb stood a man. He was sallow. His skin sagged off him like a bedsheet ghost beneath a salt and pepper beard. He looked like a shadow against the background of the building and the horizon heavy with clouds waiting to spill a summer rainstorm.
            My mother rolled down the window, “Honey.”
            He turned his head towards us. His shoulders slumped inwards like a turtle retreating into its shell. My father once had a straight, proud spine. He slunk over to the car, opening the door with a creak. He tossed his single sack into the back seat beside me. When he climbed into the car a silence fell over us. The two-hour drive was peppered only by my mother telling him anecdotes about her new job as a church janitor. His chest held no rolling laughter. He didn’t have a bird house or a leather coin pouch for me.
            For the next year I watched the pallid man grow fat as he sunk deeper into our suede recliner. I couldn’t entertain him with my dances, I couldn’t make him chuckle with puppet shows. He was zombie, eyes fixed to the news and a remote clutched in his fleshy hand.
            His sweat stank of medicine when my mother would force him to cut our lawn. I hated to be close to him. I grew unable to stomach the smell of the man seated beside me. In the middle of the night I often caught him sitting on the floor without the television on. He would clutch a pile of scribbles in his lap that disappeared before my mother could collect them and turn them into his psychiatrist. I found one crumpled up and stuffed in the chair. The handwriting was not my father’s chicken scratch.
            Then one day my mother insisted that we start going to church. She thought it would help us all recover from what happened. She was unable to say what had happened out loud. She noticed that I was growing introverted as the days turned into months. I didn’t want to do anything but sit and stare at the creature I lived with while he ground his molars and rocked.
            “Honey, go shave,” my mother said.
            His fingers ran through the scraggly forest growing on his face before he obliged and marched into the bathroom like a good soldier. I stuffed my chubby legs into translucent stockings and my mother scraped my curls into a ponytail atop my head. She wanted us to be normal and she said God could fix us.
            He emerged from the bathroom with a soft, plump face. I realized he could not be my father. No number of pills could bloat someone into a new person. I didn’t recognize the man. The smile lines disappeared in his round cheeks. His nose and eyes sunk into his face as if they were beings swallowed. He ground his teeth and tongue into each other uncomfortably as I stared. Fear settled into my stomach. The stranger looked over my head blankly. My mother shepherded us to the door with a fresh Bible pressed into our palms. I lingered behind her.
            “Who are you?” I leaned my face towards him.
            He shrugged, “I’m not sure.”