by Jim Almo
He’ll be dead by the time you read this. His body the victim of seven heart attacks, the diabetes, and decades of ignored health care.
I’ll get a message the day before he goes: “They don’t think he’ll make it through the night. Please pray.” I won’t pray. It does nothing for me. Or him.
I won’t say I love you before he goes. He never learned those words. Could never teach those words to me. Those aren’t words we know.
I won’t cry for him. He taught me not to like he was taught not to. Taught that each tear means the snap and sting of leather from a well-worn belt. Each whimper means bruises on soft skin. Each sob is a chance to watch yourself from across the room, teeth biting bottom lip, trying to suck in each cry before it leaves your throat and crawls into the splits in the plaster walls.
I may have a drink for him, a toast to nights of learning that whiskey breath and buried anger meant to stay quiet.
I learned other things, too. He taught me to drive a stick shift and change a flat tire, using a makeshift pry bar to loosen stuck lug nuts. I can pop the clutch on a stalled car and stack wood so it dries.
I learned to find that wood while I bounced in the passenger seat of the rust-speckled blue pickup along rutted fire roads deep in the forest. I carried the tree stumps and dead branches he cut with a chainsaw and smelled of sawdust and gasoline.
He taught me to chop that wood, swinging an ax from high overhead using gravity and momentum to split a log into two then four then eight pieces that would go into the cast iron stove that tried desperately to warm a house full of cracks and gaps and frigid drafts, but that could never hope to warm a family full of cracks and gaps and frigid drafts.
I learned even with the wood it would be cold. So cold. Steam radiators standing impotent, icy.
He taught me to collect. And sell. In spring, before the heat of summer made the stink unbearable, we would go to the landfill. The one with mountains of refuse 80 feet high, with 865,000 tons of waste, with 30,000 daily gallons of leachate draining oil, asbestos, mercury-tainted sludge, and medical waste into ponds, streams, and rivers like an open sore leaving a trail of blood and puss on the earth. That dump is now a superfund site, but then felt like a playground as I scampered over piles of trash and old appliances and car parts and discarded furniture moldy and damp, looking for steel and copper and aluminum that we could haul away to the recycling center where they would pay you per pound. I once found an intact car radiator, but it was mostly broken things. Broken like us. Familial recognition made them easy to spot.
He’ll be dead by the time you read this. But I’ll be here. My body a victim of memories. Of questions about forgiveness. Of picking through the waste and broken parts, finding what’s salvageable, wondering if it’s worth anything. Wondering if I can sell it.
Jim Almo (he/him) grew up in the south, but currently lives in the northeast where he gets weird looks for saying “y’all.” He enjoys cooking vegetarian dinners with his wife and two teen boys. His work is published or forthcoming in CP Quarterly, Anti-Heroin Chic, JMWW, Roi Fainéant Press, and Reckon Review. He is occasionally witty on Twitter @jimalmo.
Emerge Literary Journal 