SUMMER 2024, FLASH AH AH, 800 WORDS
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The night my dad dies, he’s not my dad—he’s fifteen years old, fluffy-haired and lean, and he’s sneaking through the neighbor’s backyard with a friend. They’re on their way to play a prank on their little sisters’ sleepover when he trips and runs into a trampoline. Snap, crackle, pop! deep in the dark of his abdomen. He feels gray, he goes to his dad, and as he rattles in the passenger seat on the way to the hospital, his heart stops.
I.
The night my dad dies, he doesn’t really know what happened until he’s already back. His resurrection hits with a blast of pale light and trumpets and brassy choruses that no one in the hospital can pinpoint the source of. The neighbors make the trampoline that killed him a shrine. They light candles in a circle and watch them wink like fireflies through thick summer nights. They ask him for intercessions, which he grants, sometimes benevolently, sometimes resentfully. It is difficult to intercede on behalf of so many people, especially strangers. My dad learns the term emotional labor twenty-seven years before anyone else and, when he is an adult, he thinks twice before he buries a statue of St. Joseph in the back yard of the house he wants to sell.
II.
The night my dad dies, he glimpses the color and shimmering movement of another dimension. He knows he can only choose one or the other; the other draws at him with gentle fingers, but then he sees his dad’s glasses glinting in the fluorescent hospital lights, so he chooses our world. He keeps that glimpse of the other side with him, though. He becomes a painter. He does a lot of drugs, trying to find that other side while he is safely grounded in the world of the living. When his dad dies, he’s less careful. Ayahuasca, LSD. After a few years, he cracks it: He can cross between worlds whenever he wants and carry messages back from the dead. He never charges for his services; he is not interested in money, this dad of mine. Then again, he’s not my dad, because this one never finds or marries my mom. I remain a mote of energy flitting through the dark matter of the universe, no one’s second thought or disappointment. Maybe we’ll meet in that other dimension when he dies again. Maybe we’ll like each other.
III.
The night my dad dies, he sees the River Styx and the boatman. He slips his hands into his pockets and finds that he has no money. The boatman says to look under his tongue, that’s where they usually put the fare. My dad sticks his tongue out; no dice. The boatman shrugs. Guess you have to go back. “Which way?” The boatman points. There’s a dog. She’ll take you. The dog leads him all the way to the hospital room, and when he wakes, my dad asks for the dog. His dad says that’s the drugs talking, but in a week, when there is a dog up for adoption at the pound, my dad sees her and knows. That one. Her name is Tippy. My dad says it’s because there’s a white tip on the end of her tail, but really, it’s because he had nothing to tip the boatman with. Everything else is the same: He goes to church and he meets my mom at the party of a mutual college friend and then eventually there are the five of us, but this dad always has pockets and pockets of loose change. It scatters across the front hall table, it jingles in his winter coats when he steps off the train, it accumulates in empty pickle jars in the kitchen and the garage. It drives my mother crazy. When she complains, he shrugs. You never know when you’re going to need it.
This is what happens the night my dad dies: A long night in the hospital, pale faces, IV drips, sixteen sutures that heal without drama. A white scar straight up the center of his abdomen, which he later tells us is a shark bite, and we believe it for years. Whatever he saw the night he died, he tells no one. He tells himself it never happened. We are not allowed to play on trampolines. We are sent to a sleepaway summer camp that has no trampolines, where we go to daily Mass and daily confession and daily catechism, where we sing songs about sacraments and forgiveness and sometimes go canoeing when the drought’s not too bad. We are pure of soul, baptized and unblemished, always ready for the Kingdom of God, because it turns out, you never know when you might trip into it.
Isabel Cañas is a Mexican American speculative fiction writer. After having lived in Mexico, Scotland, Egypt, Turkey, and New York City, among other places, she has settled in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and writes fiction inspired by her research and her heritage. Her novels The Hacienda and Vampires of El Norte are available now.
