Father and Son
By Lucy Zhou
It was dusk, the sky flattening into indigo, and Daniel was driving his son Jay home from Little League practice.
“Daddy, mommy’s outside.” Daniel looked in the direction of Jay’s outstretched finger, down the empty, inkblot road.
“Jay, mommy’s still on her trip. She’ll be back this weekend.”
“No, she’s right there!” And when Jay realized his father’s intentions: “Why aren’t you stopping? Daddy, why?” His small fists beat the back of the driver’s seat, a barrage of paper airplanes curling upon impact. But Daniel continued driving, the veins in his hands shining blue. Protruding.
Soon Jay tired. Slumped back into his seat. He stared past his father into the rearview mirror. A moonless night, charcoal-smeared.
—
After Daniel tucked Jay into bed, he poured himself a tall glass of whisky. Swirling amber liquid pooled around ice cubes, little cracked milk teeth. He took a sip, sank back into an armchair, and called for his wife.
“Suyin, are you there?”
He knew he didn’t need to call her, that she was already there, waiting in some purplish crack of sundown because that’s what the dead preferred.
The ceiling lamp—no, the underside, its penumbra—bulged, growing arms, then legs, and finally a pale-sick torso. Suyin hung, a wiggling catfish hooked by the lip, suspended from the ceiling by a long, red tongue. She dropped to the floor with a hollow thud.
Daniel took in his wife: red-shot eyes like a croaking frog’s, a blackened ring around her neck, the grey, bone-bare limbs, and of course, that long, red tongue flapping between mud-stained teeth. A word bloomed in his mind and crawled like a long-legged spider down his throat: gui. Ghost.
“My son,” Suyin hissed, her mouth full of hornets. “My son, my son, my son—”
“Sha bi, you almost gave yourself away today!” Daniel rose, his fist guided by muscle memory. This useless wife of his, even in death. The alcohol sloshed inside his veins like burning gasoline.
I won’t let you take my son away. He vowed after each blow. I won’t let you I won’t let you I won’t let you—
Suyin raised her hands over her face and turned to stone. A silent movie except for the thwacking of an overripe peach, dull and pulpy. The machine-gun snap of the wrist.
“You think just because you killed yourself you have power over me now?” Daniel paused to catch his breath, his fist vibrating like a tuning fork. “The first night you came back, we made a deal. You give me a week to tell Jay that his own mother abandoned him, chose to die. Then you get to see him one last time.”
“My son,” Suyin came alive again, whimpered. “My son, my son–”
“Shut up, he’s my son, too!”
“Daddy, stop!”
In the doorway, Jay stood with a baseball bat. Before Daniel could yell at him to stay away, he dashed in front of his mother, bat raised, trembling like a white flag.
“Don’t hurt mommy anymore, daddy.” Snot dripped down Jay’s nose, mixing with saltwater.
The grip of Daniel’s rampage loosened at the pitiful sight.
—
Daniel grew up understanding the language of power and fists, the son of an inflexible man with a rabid dog’s temper. One day, after a bone-trashing over an extra helping of rice, he spat in his old man’s face, swore never to grow up and become like him. Sealed the oath with split-lip blood. Even whispered it twice, once to himself and once to a hole in the ground, buried alive.
He became suspicious of human nature, convinced of its proclivity towards wildness. Wickedness. As a beansprouted schoolboy, he beat his enemies red-pulped against the sidewalk, some for egregious slights, such as commenting on his injuries, and others for looking at him the wrong way: cross-eyed or with too much eye contact, too little. Later, as he climbed the police ranks, known and rewarded for his cruel, crushing efficiency, he learned how to channel his rage, that thin-skinned ghost running veinless through his body. Molten.
Then he met Suyin, with her full-bellied laugh and warm, intelligent eyes. And thought he could change for her. Hushed by her cream-skinned touch. Stoppered. But the whiskey-fueled rage continued to erupt, first at her slowness, uselessness, then her weight gain, lack of sexual desire, inability to keep a pristine kitchen, to prepare a good meal, still warm and tender-braised by the time he got home. Then he thought he could change for his son.
Pressing his lips against his newborn son’s pink oyster belly, he swore never to lay a finger on his precious boy.
—
The bat struck Daniel on the forehead. He stumbled backward, heard Jay yell, “mommy, come on, let’s go!” and tried to reach for his son. He swiped at air. Then, the door slammed shut-eyed. Daniel lurched once, twice—a hand passing over a candle flame. Something warm and dark pressed against his eyelids. Sticky. And before he crumpled, a strangled cry, stuck in throat-skin, echoing: no.
In the morning, Daniel woke up with a lump the size of a chicken egg across his left eyebrow. “Jay,” he shouted, stumbling through the rooms. He found his son sitting on the porch, his face buried in mud-streaked knees.
“She’s gone,” Jay said to his lap, to no one in particular. “She’s okay.” Sunlight pierced through ashen-grey cloud cover, and Daniel put his hand on Jay’s rigid shoulder.
His son, his precious boy, was safe. Daniel felt no anger, no more rage, as long as they could move forward into the fractured morning light, as father and son. Beneath his father’s ironclad touch, Jay flinched once, twice—a struggling bird—before relenting.
In the car, on the way to school, Jay looked anywhere but the back of Daniel’s head. I’ll never grow up and become like you. Digging half-moons into his palms, biting back the metallic taste of tongue. I’ll never grow up and become like my father.
Lucy Zhou is a technical writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She loves long-haired cats, labyrinths and endlessly revising her pieces.