“The bathroom rug has a white whale wet with footprints. They aren’t mine.”
My doctor is aware now.
I visit her all up and down the state. I yell at the rowers and the fishermen and the families, “Have some goddamn respect.” They always respond nervously but seem forgiving. I hold a church inside me. It is quiet and lonely. There are true moments of peace there. And when there are disturbances, when my heart crackles too loudly, I pray her tomb will flood into me and muffle the noise.
Baths have come close to drowning me, so I take them often, just like my father did, but I can’t think of him, not now.
We still liked kissing, just like we did when we were teenagers, but my memories have become skewed and fuzzy. All I see now is water penetrating her mouth and filling her until she is swollen. I can’t quit tracing her scars with my pinky when we fall asleep at night, even if I’m just tracing air. It doesn’t take half a mind to understand the bends in a river.
Have I already said this?
I try to talk to someone sometimes. But usually anger ensues as soon as his lips start twitching. Nobody, not a soul, not even he, knows what to say or how, especially when you can’t unclench your own jaw to scream.
The parish is sleeping.
I want to scream: “But I can’t.”
I want to scream: “Can’t.”
I want to whisper: “You can’t place a stone on water.”
But, really, I want to scream: “You sure as shit can sink a motherfucking anchor, can’t you!”
My dad haunted us too, call it ghost-smear—I got the potbelly and the nose hairs and the sadness. His sadness sits inside the church inside me like a stone. He is the fire licking from the ends of the candlesticks. She said, “If you parted your hair the right way, I think he’d love you.” I’ve never parted my hair.
I was followed into my backyard from inside my house when I was alone. My dogs faced north and south, circled, then settled south and north, total opposites, adhering to their instincts, perfect creatures. I watched them. Can’t tell you what it is like to be hugged by invisible arms, but I can assure you that I was not afraid.
Troy James Weaver lives in Wichita, Kansas, with his wife and dogs. His work has appeared in New York Tyrant Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, Lit Hub, The Fanzine, Hobart, and many others. His books are Witchita Stories, Visions, Marigold, Temporal, and Selected Stories.
