Father tipped his toes towards the portraits. The girls were coiffed and blushed, holding black and white bouquets that had been retouched with sepia tones at the photographer’s request. The boy sat in his suit and yarmulke, wincing into the lens, smiling through his teeth in the way that he had been taught when he was little. The father recognized the dirty spots near the corner of the son’s eyes and realized that he had been crying. The children were not his. Father tilt his glass back, running liquid into his insides to digest with water and Ego Waffles. The four children carried his name but they were not his. The son would always belong to his mother, his daughter also destined to remain a shadow of a woman seven years gone. The other two girls came from his new wife, and were as equally disconnected to him as his own creations were. Father sat on the floor with his legs crossed, facing the portraits and murmuring to himself all the ways that life can change.
Seven years ago there would have only been two pictures, framed and displayed in a different house, hung on a wall in his children's' home. The father remembered how he sat stiffly in the simple living room, trying to understand that the fight was over. The children’s dead mother looked like she was sleeping in her bedroom tucked in and warm. The fan in the corner was unplugged because she was cold. Her son asked her how she was, and she said, “freezin’”. The boy had been with her as she passed and in the forlorn emptiness the foundation of a family so well cared for crumbled six feet underground. Father jolted himself off of the ground. His stepdaughters would be home soon and he needed to get back to the office. He had not put any pictures of his first wife in the house, not wanting his new family having to combat with the ghost that encompassed his kin. He rinsed his glass and put the bottle back in the cabinet. Tomorrow he could return to his equilibrium and fountain pens that inked his rehearsed signature. Today he could only feel the sticky residue of his loved wife dead, only haunted by the perpetual moans in her children's' silent eyes.
As a student of logic, the son counted. It was 61,320 hours since she had died. 17, 520 hours later there were two new rings, two new children, and a new family certified by the proper legal authorities. The son sat at his desk clicking through banal emails, categorizing envelopes, filing requests. He had 1,208 unread messages that had piled up over the term but no new voicemails and he accepted that another year had surpassed without anyone remembering. It was hot and people swam around him as if they were aquatic dancers in a dream but the son was lost when he tried to recognize beauty. His dry eyes skirted beneath the lids as he tried to maintain order and control over the synchronized sea of the office. Time lagged and hazy clouds peeled like carrots underneath the sun. It was the hour of her departure. Shadows from the window blinds crept across the desk like a warning sign of the minutes to come. It was 3:10. At 3:46 it would be over, and another year would grow before he felt the death again. Seven years ago she still had 36 minutes left.
The son always thought she knew, like she could feel the end twisting up from the root of the disease deep within her. What is there left to say in thirty-six minutes? Not even an hour, but long enough to watch one more episode of her favorite sitcom, or listen to her son read her favorite passage of The Great Gatsby five more times. The shadows climbed onto his hands, severing them into five even splits. The son’s computer screen refreshed, he had a new message. The day persevered despite him. In a room of buzzing phones, dinging alerts, and frenzied student government officials his world died as the clock ticked. The second hand mocked him when it paused, as if this year it might take mercy on him – as if it might stop and remember his mother for a few more moments before the minute arrived that she evaporated. He wanted to wraith on the floor, to twitch and feel his pores expand to release the nectar of sadness that echoed off of his insides and clung to his veins.
But he remained concentrated, ever perceptive to the movement and talk around him. There was a choice to shout and scream and cry, to be wildly unabashed so that his insides covered the room, the walls dripping with loss and remorse. There was a choice to remain gravely still, stoic, and focused as more labels were printed to categorize papers that would be rendered insufficient in six to ten months. The continuous motions of his fingers allowed an icing numb to expand within him, to freeze his blood and suppress his beating heart from ever being surprised or enthralled. There are ways to fill hours that the son had never fathomed before 3:46 seven years ago but today a moment in wait caused him to hold his breath without realizing it and question if he had ever made a difference. The son had to serve her. He had to prove to her that he had learned what she had tried to teach him, that he would spread her message as deeply as the poison had seeped within her. To wraith was not a choice but a defeat. To scream would be an abomination. At 3:45 he bit the inside of his cheek and answered an email saying that he would be in a meeting at four in the afternoon. With a tock it was 3:46 but the world kept spinning and the son was left to bare the weight alone.
The Holy Ghost sat in the corner, silently mulling in the antique cerulean rocking chair. The day was bright and beams of light dripped a paler shade of yellow on the walls. The sky was blue. It was peaceful here. The fireplace had six-inch tapers on the white mantle, a crushed rose lying between them like a sacrifice on an altar. The Holy Ghost rocked steadily, pacing her movements as to keep time steady, to ease the father’s ticking watch, and the sun from setting too soon. The Holy Ghost eased and rocked as if her heart beat within the father, pulsating wildly against his lungs.
The father sank to the floor in front of the portraits of the children. He held his empty glass tightly and bit his lip. The Holy Ghost rocked slower, trying to steady the pain. When the tip of the rocker touched the floor a pang shot through the father like a spark on ice. He twitched with the jolt but did not look away from his wife’s children. He put the glass down and got to his feet. He stood close enough to the portrait of his son for his breath to fog the glass. The father lifted his hand to touch the son’s face in the most intimate way he could fathom, through a pane. He pressed his fingertips onto the boy’s frozen cheek. The Holy Ghost watched the man desperately trying to connect with an image on paper.
She arose from the chair as the wind in the room died and the clouds overhead ceased to blow. She walked slowly, aware that time and space, life and death are merely states of consciousness in which we choose to take part. The father put his forehead to the glass, keeping his hand on the son’s face. Oil from his forehead sullied the frame and his tears dropped like burdens to the ground. The Holy Ghost lifted her frail peach arm and placed the stems of her fingers on his back. She felt him breathe, she could feel the oxygen expand in her dilapidated organs, her extremities tingling with the kiss of air.
The father steadied. Two hundred miles away the son shivered with a chill and touched his hand to his face. He looked over his shoulder. There was no one. He continued to hold himself, cradling his cheek like a child in a hammock as his desk lamp burned in the dark. The Holy Ghost held the Father, and the Father held the Son somewhere between waking and sleeping, between the light and the dark, feeling pieces of flesh that they all recognized from very long ago.
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