The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina

Author:Katya Apekina [Apekina, Katya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781937512750
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Published: 2018-09-18T07:00:00+00:00

MAE

One evening, Dad was late picking me up from my photography class. I waited and waited outside the building. When he finally showed, there was something about his face that scared me. It looked literally darker. His skin, his eyes, even his beard, had a gloom to them I’d never seen before.

He said that the deadline was approaching and he had nothing to give his publisher. What he’d written was utter shit. A photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of his first book. The critics wouldn’t even bother tearing it apart. It wouldn’t be worth the newsprint. He was giving up.

He’d never talked to me about his writing before, and it was thrilling that he was confiding in me about his fears.

“Fuck the critics,” I said, feeling rather bold, but he didn’t seem to hear me.

He could never ask me to do what I was about to do, but I knew that he needed me to do it.

I swung my camera over my shoulder and said, in a voice not my own: I don’t want to go home yet, take me somewhere else. It was not a question. It was a command.

The street lamps had been switched on, though it was not dark yet. The sun was beginning to set somewhere on the other side of the buildings. Dad looked at me oddly. I wasn’t going to wait for the hesitation, the hedging. I took his hand and walked a few paces ahead of him.

Was this intentional? I don’t know. I don’t think I was conscious of it. I don’t think I was thinking: from behind, with my hair falling down my back and my new walk, borrowed much like my voice, I would transform into the spitting image of my mother.

I led us downtown, past the East Village tenements. How had I known which building to go to? How had I known which was the one he’d lived in with her? Which rooftop had been the site of their first kiss? How had I known there would be paper jammed into the lock, so that it would open and we would be able to walk up the stairs, six flights, and then another, until we were standing on the tar paper roof under an orange sky?

I just knew.

A skeptic might say that he’d been guiding me, despite my walking ahead of him, that I was no different from a shopping cart or a baby carriage. That dogs can’t count, that I was responding subconsciously to his slight movements, to the tensing and twitching of his warm hand. But I don’t think this is true. I think, I really do, that my mother was sitting in her hospital room, melding her mind into mine. I was there, but someone else was there too, someone who knew exactly where to go and what to do.

Up on the roof, Dad and I stood facing each other. I pushed his hair back with my wrist the way Mom would have. He stared at me with his cloudy, miserable eyes.

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