Squonk

It was raining, and I was walking home from work when I saw him. His face was placid and his eyes were focused on mine. On the other side of the street, my pace slowed. Our gazes locked as harried pedestrians jostled past me. He looked away, and I quickly turned to face forward, breathing heavily. For a moment the rain had stopped, the wind had slowed, and time seemed to forget itself as my father and I exchanged glances. Now that I had snapped back, the sounds of traffic and the crowd around me were magnified, and the constant torrent of rain and breath-taking wind overwhelmed me.

The people around me pushed past, and I ducked into an alley to catch my breath and clear my head. A frustration gripped me, just as it had so many years ago, when I had last seen his face. He had been scowling then, his rude mouth turned down as he stared harshly at my mother, who was sobbing on the couch, hurt by another of his biting insults. Then he had turned to me and shouted.

“You’re no son, you’re no son of mine!”

The words caught in my head and repeated as if in refrain. In his glare I could see him blaming me, blaming me for what had happened to them. I left the contemptible apartment that night for the last time. The moment was fixed in my memory, and though today his expression was different than he had that night so many years ago, the familiar drain of energy stopped my feet. Could I keep running away? Ducking into an alley, I leaned against the rough brick wall of an apartment building and turned my face to feel the cool beat of rain on my face.


A year after I saw my father on the street, I got a call from an old friend of his. My mother had suffered a stroke and the doctors feared she would not survive. I went to visit her in the hospital one day when I was sure my father would not be there. A nurse escorted me to a private room, and left me alone with my mother. With hesitation I approached her bedside and squeezed her hand. I looked at the floor, unnerved by the alien expression on her face, the asymmetrical features of a typical stroke victim. When she spoke, I jumped. Her voice echoed harshly off the sterile medical equipment and the blank, white walls.

One eye rested on me, and the other was half closed, unable to respond. Her wrinkled features drooped to one side, the side that had been immobilized by the attack.

“I never asked you,” she began with a croak, slurring the sounds together, “...what it was like to own a real house.” “...what it was like to be free.”

Her eye closed and she sighed deeply, as if speaking made her weak. I felt my face grow hot. I had almost forgotten what she sounded like. Tears I had never had before blurred my vision and I blinked to clean my eyes of their burning sensation.

“It’s good, Mom. It’s good.” I felt like an imposter as I left the room, finally moved by her condition.


The funeral was held graveside. My stomach turned every time I moved my eyes to another painful aspect of the scene before me. And I never once looked at my father. He was standing directly opposite me, on the other side of the coffin.

The priest finished speaking and three men came forward to turn the cranks of the crude machine that lowered my mother’s body into the open ground. I was frozen in place, my head bowed and my eyes red; sick of the over-fragrant flowers my aunt had placed atop the mahogany coffin. One of the men looked aside at me, then turned his head to the other side. Instinctively, I glanced up to follow his gaze. My father stared back at me. We were the only two left of the original funeral procession, and we watched each other. Then he turned and headed up a grassy slope that defined the center of the graveyard. I had to run to catch up with him, and when I did, he ignored me. But I persisted and stepped in front of him, blocking his path.
He paused, eyes defiantly set over my shoulder at the gravestones that covered the land before him. Seconds went by, only seconds, but I could see before me nearly everything I had ever done to him, and everything he had ever done to me. I was caught up in the flood of memories when he turned his icy gaze to my face. I held my breath, and for a brief moment, we stared. Then the same cruel sneer I remembered too well crept over his sharp face. The words he had spoken to me all those years ago suddenly echoed again in my mind. I understood what he meant. They rang inside my head as he turned his back and walked away, back down the slope.