Complete Short Fiction by Doris Piserchia

Author:Doris Piserchia [Piserchia, Doris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-01-19T07:00:00+00:00

HE GOT up at noon and we had lunch together.

“Make me eat it,” he said to me. His head dangled over his plate as if it had a broken connection.

I spooned some egg into his mouth. He grabbed his cup of coffee and gulped. I stuffed toast through his teeth. Again he gulped coffee. I held a strip of bacon and he nibbled that.

I made him eat two eggs, three strips of bacon and two slices of toast. After he finished he wiped his mouth, belched, looked sick, got up and stumbled into the bathroom.

“Get the hell out,” he growled—slammed the door in my face.

A bell rang somewhere. I ran to the open window, looked down. A blue truck was parked in the front yard and the driver was pounding on the door.

“What you want?” I said.

He backed away from the door, looked up. saw me and waved an envelope.

“Can’t you read?” I said. “Put it in the basket and I’ll pull it up.”

He kept waving the envelope. I hung on the windowsill and watched him grow agitated. Finally he saw the basket, threw the envelope into it, gave me a severe glare and took his truck away.

The cable was from Germany. This time the zoo offered fifty thousand for the aphrodisiac.

“Who have you been talking to?” I said to Father as he came out of the bathroom. “I thought you didn’t want anybody to know about the aphrodisiac.”

He kicked a clothes hamper out of his way and hunted on a bureau top for a comb. He combed his hair, his most beautiful feature. It was long and white and wavy. His skin was almost as white as his hair, which was why he made me coax him to eat. His health was poor. I think if it wasn’t for me he would have been dead long ago.

He combed his hair and smacked his lips, rubbed them with a trembly hand, looked at me with big sorrowful eyes. What he wanted was a stiff belt. What he expected me to bring him was a beer. What I got for him, out of the bureau, was a box of chocolate-covered cherries. With a shrug he took two and ate them, took two more and shoved them in his shirt pocket. He ate them before he got out the door. I had the box ready when he turned back. He had half a dozen.

Fine. When he ate candy he didn’t have beer and when he had no beer he didn’t follow it up with whisky. Today he would do some work. Marvelous, that candy. Me, too.

In the beginning, Father had no money and figured he would end on a farm, but he was too bright and went to school nights and eventually he got hooked on genetics. Or he hooked it. Everything he did was right. He took his Ph.D. and taught at the University. After a while he stopped teaching and did only research.

Sex wasn’t something people did, according to Father. Sex was a phenomenon, like life.

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