Amp'd by Ken Pisani

Author:Ken Pisani
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781250085214
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

POSSIBLE CAUSES OF ONE-ARMED AFFLICTION

Alligator attack*

Infection

Cancer

Defusing a bomb

Run over by train

Machete fight

Propeller accident

Clumsy axe murderer

Threshing-machine mishap

Shot by your own Confederate troops

Malfunctioning automatic sphygmomanometer

Stupid fucking SUV driver

*For brevity’s sake “alligator” also stands in for shark, lion, angry badger, and all potential predators of arms.

REGRETS

The next couple of days pass like a kidney stone, slow and painful. My arm is still draining and Dad continues to be observed—although, thankfully, he suffers no further episodes. While I’m under the intermittent barrage of IV swaps, bandage changes, fever checks, blood taking, drug dosages (and once, just to annoy Dad, a sponge bath), Dad is left relatively unmolested. In his boredom he plays the television like a first-person shooter, never relenting in his fevered manipulation of the remote, images flashing in front of us almost too quickly to register. When he finally settles on something, he usually dozes off shortly thereafter; if I reach over to snap off the TV the abrupt silence is enough to awaken him and start the cycle all over again.

But this time instead of reactivating the TV he turns as if to make sure I’m still here. I wave with my good hand and Dad nods back, managing a smile that quickly fades. He looks a little sad, and regretful—things I’d never seen cross Dad’s face before.

“Do you ever have regrets?” I ask him.

“Jesus God,” he groans.

“Really,” I press. “If we were to die right now, what would you regret?”

“How would we die at the same time right now, by meteor?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Well, if we died, of course I’d regret that my son didn’t live longer than me.”

“Fine. What if it was only you who died?”

“Everything we do, we do for a reason. As long as it’s a good reason,” Dad shrugs, “what’s to regret? You did the best you could with what you knew at the time.”

“What about things you didn’t do? Opportunities that never happened?”

“Like what?”

“For me, I regret never having sex with two women.”

“What are you talking about? You’ve had sex with a lot more than two women.”

“I mean at the same time.”

“Oh,” he says, thinking. “I never had sex with two women either. In my life.”

This information stuns me. Dad has only been with Mom? And now, if she hadn’t already, Mom has trumped Dad with her firefighter.

“That’s … remarkable.”

“Only because you believe in instant gratification—you see what you want and you have to have it. And every shiny thing around you is something new you want, and you can’t imagine what it’s like not to want it and not to have it.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“Do you think I ever even looked at two women and thought for a second I want to have sex with those two women together? As if that was even possible in my life?”

“I guess not…”

“Of course I did,” Dad laughs, surprising me. “What am I, made of wood?” We’re both laughing, and I find it comforting that my dull, reliable father, who had chosen

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