This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley

Author:Cole Arthur Riley [Arthur Riley, Cole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2022-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

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•••

There are parts of me I didn’t know could tremble. As I walked down that hall, even my fingernails were twitching.

The night before, a call from my little brother had led me down the stairs of our basement, where my parents’ room was, to find my father on his bed writhing. I had already called for an ambulance, just like I had already known what my brother would say to me. For my father, my large hero magic father, was also an addict. And on this night, he had taken too much.

As I waited in the hospital to see him, I was cruel and afraid—cruel to my friend who sat quietly chewing his lips off and cruel to my stepmom who did not sit quietly. She told me that I had to beg him to get help. If you ask, he’ll listen. And I have never known a feeling like walking down that hospital hall, approaching his room. Each step was a death. My stepmom went in first, and before I passed through the doorframe there was a pause that I lived years within. In that time, I took myself back down to that basement—my father cuddling me and bringing me Italian ice to soothe my throat after I had my tonsils taken out. We’re watching a Dateline special ranking unsanitary fast-food chains, and laughing like it’s as good as stand-up. I’m in between his legs and he’s laying grease on my scalp.

And then it’s the night before and he’s writhing again. He’s calling out for me.

In that pause in the threshold, I was not afraid my father would refuse to go to rehab. I was not afraid he would never come home again. I was not afraid of seeing him “this way”; I had seen him in the basement dark. I was afraid of him seeing me. Of us seeing each other and knowing once and for all that a profound veil between us had just been torn. Him seeing me see him. An illusion asunder, and I could no longer rouse my belief in it in order to keep him upright. He would have to watch his daughter recognize her father outside the myth of his heroism. Laid bare in a hospitable bed with shaking limbs and missing teeth. This is a sadness that catches you in the throat and doesn’t ever really let go. In that pause between me and him, I held on to a former life. My breath began to rattle, my heart into my throat, and I thought just this: People shouldn’t live in basements.

My father says we’re the same because we both only feel behind closed doors. Like when a cut doesn’t hurt until you look down and see the bleeding. After he was hospitalized, I stopped going to class for weeks. I was so avoidant that I didn’t even email or withdraw, I just stopped going. In that time, I kept going to church, but I didn’t tell a soul for months.

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