Short People by Joshua Furst

Author:Joshua Furst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307427717
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

III. Mom and Dad Grow Up

So here we were, Denali and I, in oversized t-shirts, crouching for the second time that day outside their door. Making funnels out of our hands, we held our ears to the wood to listen. We could hear pacing. Muffled and tense conversation. The foghorn bellow of Mom crying. And then that single intelligible sentence: “You raped me.” I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I knew it was something incredibly bad. “Is that what we did?” I asked Denali, but she punched me and hissed, “Shut up,” which I guessed meant yes and explained why I’d felt so queasy while doing it. Something smashed against the wall, and when Mom sobbed, “I want to hold my children,” I wanted to shout out, “Yes, hold me, Mommy. I’m scared too,” but that seemed like a breach of a different sort. Anyway, my sister poked me—“They’re coming”—and we scurried off to find some innocent thing to pretend we’d been doing while waiting for them.

Dad, reeling from Mom’s accusation, and fumbling for something to moor him in place, picked up the pieces of the phone. Everything seemed unfamiliar to him, slightly shifted, the perspective skewed, diced and cubed, and he wasn’t sure when or how this had happened. Three syllables from someone known to exaggerate shouldn’t have the power to shake a man of dry, stoic principle. The phone, though, with its cracked plastic casing and exposed primary-colored wires, was tactile, simple. If he didn’t know how to fix it, at least he knew how he had broken it. He twisted the wires farther from the casing so he could study the workings inside. Guessing where the dangling mike might fit, he tried to wedge it back into place and roughly stuffed the wires around it. He snapped the batteries into their compartment. Meticulously straightening the antenna, he tried to knead out every kink, but the dents, like cracks in ice, extended with agitation and it broke off. He gave up, placed the phone into its cradle and lumbered out of the room.

Where were the children? What further havoc were they wreaking now?

Slowly, so slowly, he moved down the hallway. This was a new depth of degradation. This was a place of self-loathing. He fell and fell. The details of what had come before this instant—his children’s actions, his wife’s, everyone’s—had been left up above on the rock face, replaced by a cold, burning sensation.

Denali and I sat cross-legged, silent, thumbing through magazines— Omni, The Utne Reader. When Dad appeared at the edge of the room, we overreacted—too much surprise, too much teeth in our smiles, the conspicuous, false cheerfulness that only a guilty child can muster. We tilted our heads and gazed up at him in an adoring, approval-begging way we had learned from our dog. But he ignored our plays on his sympathies.

He seemed twice as big as himself and he watched his feet as he walked. His body jerked like a car with a faulty transmission, staggering forward, in constant danger of freezing up.

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