Best Canadian Essays 2023 by Mireille Silcoff

Author:Mireille Silcoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2022-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

I spent the night at his place. He let me have the queen-size mattress we used to wrestle on and claimed the oily couch for himself. For all that had happened, I had no trouble sleeping.

When I woke up, my mother was waiting for me in the kitchen, on the same lipstick-red chair where I’d sat the day before. She was across from my father but they faced away from one another in a silence that was both comfortable and contemptuous, using their lips only to smoke. My father with his natives and my mother her filtered menthols.

“Gather your belongings,” she said dryly, tapping her nails against the laminate tabletop.

At the door my father hugged me for a long time, planting kisses on my hair, my forehead. “I’m sorry,” he kept saying, “for all of it. It’ll make sense when you’re older. I pray that it will. Just be patient and I’ll come for you, habibi. Soon as everything’s sorted.”

He peered down his aquiline nose, as if weighing my understanding. His eyes had that lazy, calculating look of a desert merchant appraising a rare jewel in the quiet of a still noon. They were deep brown, like coffee with a splash of milk—the pitiful remains of a nearly expired carton. Now those keen Phoenician eyes appeared to say, I live my life by the whims of the sea; my home is nowhere.

That was the last time I stepped foot into a place my father called home.

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