The Living Sway at Night

I find Dad in the garden at 2 a.m., waltzing with the taxidermy stag from the dining room. Until now, I have only ever seen it standing nobly over the rosewood table, ever since my grandfather yelled the loudest at an auction in his final years. That day, he dragged it through the door, moving furniture as though it were his duty to house it – full-sized, a violet bullet-hole sewn up behind the ear.
 
The house was loud and full.
 
Now, it’s ear-ache silent, as my father dips the stag under a sky shot through with stars – no smoke.
 
“Dad?” I try from the patio door. “What are you doing?”
 
“What does it look like, Anne? Your mother and I are dancing. The soldiers are home.”
 
I tighten my lips along with the ropes on my robe, press my feet across the smashed-china grass. My father rises on tiptoes, about to whirl, as I drop a hand on his bare shoulder.
 
He turns quickly; eyes pulled wide in fear. His mind scrabbles, attempting to place me through a blur of blood thinners and risperidone. The stag’s eyes share my father’s horror. They have seen the same thing – death, but from different angles.
 
“Don’t be frightened, Frida,” he whispers into its antlers, breath still spritzed with the ham sandwiches I made us for dinner, like every night, before reading the last pages of Pale Fire – that final canto still flitting somewhere between us among the murk.
 
“Come on, Dad. You must be so cold.”
 
I slip the forelegs of the stag from his shoulders and it stands guard in the dark, chestnut fur felted and stuck out, mouth permanently ajar. My dad fidgets against me as I move him towards the house. Until a sob rises from the bed of his lungs, walling up and out into the air. I can tell from the way the sound crests; his teeth are upstairs in a tumbler of milk.
 
“But the soldiers are home, Anne,” he mutters as he tilts into my arms.
 
I keep still. And we remain hooked together like this, Dad in his candy-striped bed-shorts, the night air stilling around us.
 
Yet, the garden billows – zinnias and peonies my mother once planted with the care of a painter, grown dark and tangled. “The size of a gooseberry,” she had guided as I crouched beside her, rubber-glove hands pressing seed holes in the soil. Mum measured most things in fruit – the Peterson boy’s head was shaped like a pear, the mouse she saw under the stairs was as big as a banana, the cancer was a nectarine in her smokeless throat.
 
Furred and brown at our feet, the apples have fallen from her tree like heavy heads. Nettles rage, weeds blot out whole patches of herbs. We have allowed this overgrowth, grey paint to spill like marrow around our survival. Only the occasional thrap of a bird-wing reminds us we are still here, surviving.
 
My father tucks his jaw over my shoulder and his army-pianist’s fingers, now liver-spotted and arthritic, tap out a tune along my vertebrae. Though we are soundless, I recognise it. As a child, I bundled under the piano stool, my mother swirling through church halls and function rooms alone while Dad made the music, and I made paper dolls pirouette on the ground.
 
“Won’t you dance, Frida?” my father whispers and with this, his feet move. A gentle stumble. I rock with him, the stuffed stag forced to watch our restless slow-dance through acrylic eyes. And as we droop and sway like this, briefly, softly, I hear the music – the bone-white tone of a grand piano. The wheeling skirt of a once-was wife and mother.
 
–We are the shadows she made.