Photo by Vishal Yadav on Unsplash
by Gary Fincke
One son, eleven, had been fascinated by the intricacy of knots; the other, twelve, had loved the strokes of swimming’s medley relay, one bedroom wall displaying bowline and square, sheepshank, clove hitch, and tripod lashing, all those twisted cords arranged under glass like monarchs across from a wall that photo-celebrated the recent heroes of butterfly, breast, back, and free.
Because the father listens to nothing else but the music of rage, his body sometimes clenches and stiffens, his blood thickening in his throat until he hurls and thrusts the closest object, whether book, chair, dish, or cue stick, even, because he is often empty-handed, settling for his fists, weapons he uses on his basement wall, refusing, afterwards, to mask the breakage, claiming that those scars are comforting, surrogates for the damage he dreams upon that driver.
The mother, who once listened to someone explain mindfulness, keeps the silence of ghosts, but writes her thoughts in columns headed, at that mentor’s suggestion– To be done. Maybe later. To delete—items to be recognized as erasable and sent into space to create the rapture for distractions until, now, she refurbishes that page like a failed mall, filling it with Never.
Sometimes, a counselor tells them, a second language is necessary for what we suffer, the longing for impossible just beyond the borders of English, offering Tesknota, “the pain of distance” in Polish, a longing, beyond nostalgia, for more than the past, although, sometimes, the counselor relies on the second language of silence because she is afraid she is about to lie.
Often, the father dreams of family, his wife a frequent character, the voice of their daughter, nine, from the doorway after midnight, her questions progressing, phrase by phrase, from anxiety to dread to fear; often, the mother sees their sons in their former room, searching for things they hid when young, toy cars and tiny, coded, secret notes wedged where they expected them to survive, untouched, forever, the boys returning only at night like livestock, both sleeping as late as vampires.
Late at night and still downstairs, when the couple’s conversations end in limbo, they rise from their chairs at last and approach each other with so much sorrow in their arms that they cannot lift them to embrace, their daughter beginning to cry and call, their sons silent overheard, even as they move from room to room.
Gary Fincke’s latest flash collection is The History of the Baker’s Dozen (Pelekinesis, 2024). He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.
