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Shahmeen Saeed​

 

Prompt: Narrative

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Do you remember the first time, or a specific time, you made someone laugh? OR do you remember a time someone made you laugh? Tell the story of what happened and its impact on you. 

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My mom sank to the floor, her hands trembling while she vigorously shook her head as if she believed it all to be a nightmare she can just wake up from, the brown wooden floor was decorated with various shapes and sizes of the china vase lay as evidence of what had just transpired, the broken shards mirroring my mom’s mentality as the last remaining proof that my grandfather ever lived vanished, only carrying on in vague memories of his face or when he took his last breath in the hospital room using the only little strength he had left to squeeze my mom’s tight grip to his frail hand as to assure her it will all be okay. The loud stomps of my father’s rough shoes against the marble tiles dissipated further and further from the room he had just moments ago shattered my mom’s only hope in continuing to be healthy. My father never was someone who fulfilled his role as a dad. He’s someone I have to call my father for the sake of it just being his title as I grew up, my father being the reason I never truly understood love, the act of being cherished by someone, by being their priority, it was a feeling that was uncomfortable to me when displayed by others as it was something almost foreign. I crouched next to my trembling mother picking up the once beautifully designed remembrance, not flinching by the occasional sting my small 7-year old hands had to endure, while carefully making sure I was picking up every small piece, I got up determined I had to make this right. Believing that the power to better the relationship of two people who are worlds apart was my responsibility.

I gently kissed my mom’s tattered hair and marched out of the room with confidence. Finding my father sat on the old, ripped leather couch in our living room, watching a cricket match as if the events of what had just befallen on us in the space a couple doors away from us had not affected him in the slightest. The attention he showed to the team he was supporting, the slight scrunch between his eyebrows when one would be out, or the small smile he displayed when they would hit a six, showed how willing he was to completely give all his attention to people behind the display of a screen, than the small child with fragments enough to slice her hand if it moved even slightly standing by the side, waiting for her father to acknowledge her existence. He turned his head slightly to the place he felt a presence, he looked at the girl and turned his attention back to the game as if to let her know where his priorities lied. I wasn’t going to give up, I purposefully came and stood in front of him, he sighed and asked me what I wanted in an irritated tone, I let the shards fall from my hand and they all fell one after the other on the glass table in front of him, determining an answer of why he did what he did. I was frustrated, angry and disappointed in my father, how could he not care? I yelled, I shouldn’t have yelled but I did. I had no choice, that’s the only way I believed my voice could be heard. I yelled at my father for what he did, I yelled at my father for not being a father, I yelled at my father of how much I resented him.

What escaped his mouth was something I didn’t expect, a laugh. He laughed. That was the first time I had ever made my father laugh. However, it wasn’t a laugh filled with joy and happiness. No. It was a laugh filled with anger, sadism and malice. That was the first time my father ever smiled at me, however, he didn’t smile in appreciation or love. He smiled with hate. He smiled with regret. Not over what he had just done, but regret of ever having me. Me being there is what caused my father to even start going down the spiral of rage. He never wanted me, he believed he was too young. However, my mom was someone who was determined to never give up. She never wanted to end my life before it even started, so she kept me. That act of disobedience is what set my father over the edge, an edge he fell from and keeps falling down deeper and deeper into. My father got up displaying how much taller and powerful he was than me, he wanted me to be afraid of him. He smiled a twisted smile before a pain I was all too familiar with spread across my cheek. I looked back at the man I called my father, a smile of pride had settled once he had seen the mark he had left. Another laugh echoed in the room that was once filled with the laughter of me and my mom playing with toys and coloring, but now, it was filled with the loud excruciating sound of my fathers laugh, a laugh I so wanted to hear for so long, but now that I have, I never want to make him smile again, I never want to hear the laugh I once dreamt of hearing, again, because to me that sound can only be associated with the pain I felt as being unwanted, the pain of my mom sobbing loudly in the distant four cornered trap, the pain of my father spiraling out of control and never understanding the hurt that his actions would cause. The repetitive phrase I heard of my fathers maddening tone as he stated with disgust “If you weren’t here, we would’ve been happier”.

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Ava Schultz

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This is the story of a father dying in the night, and three women who do not cry for him. Maybe he deserved a little bit of credit for the kind of night that took him, the kind of night with sharp saw-teeth and high-speed action, the kind of night that snatches and wants more and didn’t care whether he’d found a shred of happiness, only that he hadn’t partitioned it out to anyone else in a long, long time, and didn’t, anymore, know how; this may demand a little credit, or a tear or two, but it doesn’t really matter, because he didn’t get any from us.

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Ransdell (he had a first name, but the night lost it) was a father, but before that, he could have been Cobbler, or Color TV Salesman, or Husband, or Tender to those Utah Plains, sowing the same seed every day until it choked the title father out of him, or a bum in the back of the Junction. Patent leather! Technicolor! What a typewriter he could have sold, limited time, fresh from the factory, which spits out lies and half-truths, and sometimes things like “this is the story of a father” instead of “this is the story of how he was never a father to begin with.” The paper with his obituary has just one question to answer, and it’s already lost: who was Ransdell? A different sort of typewriter could tell it just as untruthfully, a typewriter beneath my grandmother’s hands: he was a driver-away of goodness, a non-giver of orange slices of happiness, a man who left his wife for a woman who left him—but at any rate, this would have been a more honest picture of what dishonest men think of themselves to feel better. Who was Ransdell? He was not so wholehearted, earnest, or free as that woman, my grandmother, whose name is Carol Jean, because somehow, he lost her to a pilgrimage towards what mattered more.

When Carol Jean met him, he was married. I guess she didn’t really think about it at the time. Maybe he took off his ring. But that’s just grade school stuff. That shiny new grasshopper in contact with another of his grasshopper buddies? Technicolor!—he turns himself right into a locust and swarms those Wisconsin crops. Guess he made her feel above all that, taping books and conversations shut like puckered mouths.

He was not a husband anymore, he was hungering, swarming, taking, and taking for granted—a reverse transformation when the husband is not husband anymore but all alone, and bam! He’s not a father anymore, either. (This is a brief, but helpful guide, for the writers of obituaries. “Loving Father and Husband” is very nice, but “Locust” will do and is doubly as truthful.) 

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My grandmother used the newspaper with his death notice as scrap underfoot her chickens and lining for an old clay pot and fodder for the compost, which sometimes housed rats, and in this way, his death to my grandmother was not a slipping, sliding away in the Night Machine, but the scratch of hens’ talons; the thorn of a brambled bunch of ugly roses; the hungry, pointed, mouths of hungry, pointed, rats. Whoa, sell that! Before he died in this way, and after he had died in his own way, Carol Jean saw his name posted in the newspaper—Husband, Cheater, Ex-Husband, Re-Husband, Father, Liar, Ex-Father, Man, Ex-Man—and what’s the verdict? She saw it, and she ached? She saw it, and she felt nothing at all? She saw it, and a question was answered which she had never uttered or thought to utter, or which overwhelmed her heart now and again as a daughter grew, and whose answer crashed against her ribcage, the tide coming and clambering back, as her life would’ve been, too, if she hadn’t run when she had thought to and was still Wife?

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Here’s what happened today, rolling out of the typewriter of full-truths in Royal black Ink: Carol Jean saw it, and she called my mother. My mother told her children that a man had died in the night, and that that man had called himself her father. And three generations of Petersen women did not mourn his death. They’re crowded in the kitchen, eggs are on the table, someone’s getting married, Ransdell’s dead, what’s the weather Tuesday—it looks like this is what happened to Ransdell at all; it’s what happened to the woman in the grocery parking lot, who took the keys like reins and made her flight back to Wisconsin, and what happened to her daughter, who shed a surname before she could say “dad,” and her daughter, who bears a-whole-nother one. 

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There are three, tragic, women in the kitchen, playing Maiden, Mother, Crone, and somebody’s gotta tell their story because Ransdell gets a lot of attention. We’re those women—parts are drawn on popsicle sticks, and someone else got Odysseus, but you can have his wife—and we’re tired, so put in an intermission, Cut, for god’s sake! Sowing the same seeds every day, until it chokes the titles out of us. 

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In my grandmother’s bathroom is an empty conch shell, pink as salmon in its underbelly, white as spray but grubby where the fingers of little grandchildren go to hold it to the ear. The swelling, cresting, crashing of the wave is what I imagine Carol Jean heard with that newspaper in her hand, before it lined the garbage can and was just another unsold biography that some bookstore threw out. But that wave wasn’t so formidable in a shell held to the ear, because it existed only when grandkids were told waves are heard there; its might was not something terrible but something made up and far away; the dangers of the tide meant nothing in Rhinelander as they did in Florida where she grew up. The man who had thrown Carol Jean against the wall like he exercised the right of the sea was trapped in a conch shell, all the same; he existed only for the fact that my grandmother read his name and it went recognized. Hey now, they call that bit extended metaphor—highlight those and similes!—someone’s got Poseidon already, but you can be the ship he sends to the watery grave.  

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Had the echo faded to just an echo and Ransdell’s name to just a name? Had he ceased to be father—Husband, Cheater, Ex-Husband, Re-Husband, Father, Liar, Ex-Father, Man, Ex-Man—and stopped at Man? Well, if the newspaper’s asking about Ransdell, they ought to ask after Carol Jean a little, is all. Who’s reading her ex-husband’s obituary? Not the man in the photo, that’s for certain.

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This is the story of how Carol Jean is not at such liberty to stop at Woman, but at one point Maiden, Mother, or Crone; how she is tired of this, and of marriage licenses, deaths, and paying for preying grandkids’ rent; how Carol Jean’s name will be in a newspaper—Virgin, Bride, Wife, Mother, Ex-Wife, Wife again, Teacher, Ex-Wife again, Grandmother, Grammy—and it will not stop at Woman. It will stop at “Loving Mother and Grandmother” like Ransdell’s didn’t. Where’s the girl who rode an Arabian through the sea? The woman who went to Scotland and danced in the pubs and put her family tree together with careful hands? Where’s the woman who tended her garden and grew raspberries with thorns and fought to keep that rooster alive, no thanks to the animal hospital for killing him? Hey, someone bring back that woman whose name was Carol Jean on that newspaper, lest a distant relative puts her in under her father’s Petersen and later, her ex-husbands’ children by her ex-husband’s Boote, and when she ceases to be tired because all the titles are choked out of her, instead of when she picks one and tries it on and likes it, they call it called Natural Causes—is this just? Is that obituary not just another entry from Ransdell’s lie machine?

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Surely she deserves to give the Royal a spin, and define herself however she’d like to, or say ishkabibble, it’s too damn hard to make a whole lifetime of people into one, definable, woman. 

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I guess if the newspaper is going to pick this letter up—get out your blue pens, theses are just popping up all over in last paragraphs—they’d better think about who’s writing the story about the retiring substitute teachers, gardeners, and wild women of the world, and what kind of typewriter they’re written on. There are salesmen with a hungering for half-truth—patent leather, satisfaction guarantee!—and they usually look like grasshoppers before they get so hungry, but once the appetite’s whetted, they’ve eaten half of your crops and sold you a color TV with busted knobs, too. And that’s all in an itching, shameful technicolor that distorts.

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A man didn’t die in the night today, three women didn’t cry; those three women should be handed, for once, the rights to their own biographies and their own obituaries. Where’s the typewriter? I, myself, am not too tired to start.

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