Photo by Chris Curry on Unsplash
by Chris Scott
I don’t know the exact incident that made Dad decide to move into the walls of our house. It was probably a bunch of little stuff over time: The Padres always losing, or his boss being a pain in the ass, or Mom getting on his case about fixing the downstairs toilet that wouldn’t stop running, or Katherine playing the same Third Eye Blind song over and over, and not even one of the good ones. Or maybe it was some annoying, stupid thing I did, something I can’t even remember now. Or like Mom says it could have been nothing at all really, just he was tired of doing all the Dad stuff but still wanted to be nearby so he started living inside the walls partitioning our rooms where he could listen to us through the plaster and the paint, and make sure we knew he still existed too, shuffling around back there like a rodent scratching at the wood when we’re trying to eat dinner. Or when Katherine is struggling with her homework, stomach all in knots about another D in precalculus, and she hears the muffled sounds of the Padres on the radio he brought with him. Or when he taps behind the Jurassic Park poster in my bedroom as I’m falling asleep, trying to reach me in Morse code, somehow never realizing that’s another thing he forgot to teach me before he left without leaving.
Chris Scott’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He is a ClickHole contributor, and an elementary school teacher in Washington, DC. You can read his writing at https://www.chrisscottwrites.com.
