SANCTUARY
June’s dragon breath lay like a
comforting quilt on Ella’s back as she stretched over the Wildcat’s metal
haunch. Inside the house of her
childhood, her father was dying.
Seeping, seeping, seeping life away,
Ella’s mind chanted hypnotically. It was
a five-year-old moment in a fifty-five-year-old mind, tired from months of
caring for one swiftly disintegrating parent and another, harried and
grief-stricken.
This is the last time, last time,
I’ll be like this. Ella felt the
sun-warmed car beneath her. A jellyfish
on a beach rock, she absorbed the Sweetpeas along the driveway, the smell of
summer dirt, and the peace of being a child of two living parents, outside the
house where she had been raised.
With one last embrace to the Wildcat
– car of the father who loved her, still cluttered with his odd assortment of
tools and toys – Ella returned to the house, where the imminent passing
whistled and roared down the hallways.
In twenty more days, Ella’s father
split his skin and splashed against the wall, a sunburst of light, headed for
the window and the relief of the July day.
It was the first day in two months Ella had not been with her parents.
Her sister, who hadn’t been able to
help, had said she couldn’t help, even wouldn’t help, was there. It was an interesting coincidence, Ella
thought. But the next day when her
mother refused Ella’s help with the last arrangements, clung to the reluctant
Sophie, it was a shock – a second orphaning in so many days.
Perhaps, I’m wrong, Ella thought to
herself and waited to be summoned.
Waited through days of sudden chilly breezes in closed rooms, slamming
doors, smiling Casper the ghost bedside emanations. She waited while Sophie sorted through their
father’s possessions, taking tools and three cars, including the Wildcat,
Ella’s one request.
When Sophie was done, Ella was called and brought to deal
with the rest: old clothes, boxes of worn books, leaking faucets and plugged
drains, a bereft widow. Bereft but no
longer restrained.
“I’ve always had a special feeling
about Sophie, like we were married in a previous life or something.”
Ella could almost see the cloud of
her illusions moving from between them.
She bent to fill a box with the remainders of her father’s
medicines. She had known his love like a
many-colored coat; she hadn’t recognized it as a safe shelter within her own
home.
My Short Stories Workshop is July 18th 10am-2pm through Everett CC. Call
425-267-0150 to register.
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| Father and daughter |
