by Calvin Cummings
My Dad's Watch
At probably the lowest point of my idiot grief, I started visiting a whore who eventually stole my dad's watch. When I figured it out, I confronted her and she pleaded with me, told me she didn't have the watch anymore, had already sold it and (I assumed) mixed what she got for it into what were now empty water bottles littering the close-by avenue. We made love again (I know that's not what it is with her, but let me call it that) and I got carried away and choked her kinda. Then I was the one apologizing. She let me be held by her.
I wonder if you're like me, if you know exactly what it is you're doing but do it anyway and hope acknowledging the wrong and apologizing will make up for it. And do you look for your mother in every woman, no matter if they've ever touched a sewing machine?
She got out of my car into the rain. It wasn't rain but snow. The snow wasn't snow but misfirings in my drug-crumpled brain which make the world a television with a bad signal. The snow glittered all inside my car. I squinted out the passenger-side window at the nearly-obliterated horizon. A black sliver that might have been her receded against the pixelated brightness and store-shaped shapes. I wondered how far she’d got, if I could chase her down, if I could apologize again, get what I needed to put a little cork in this particular hole in my heart.
I spent the rest of my late father’s money on different wastes. Some guitars, a vacation to the Everglades, rare trading cards that tanked with the market, and hotels and massage parlors, to deal with all the stress.
At these hotels, they played music only a hotel would play. Something glitzy and popular that I didn’t recognize as anything but the thing that should be played in places like this. People walked with their good lives across the lobby, went upstairs to make love and sleep deeply and return to their jobs, these Directors of Operations, these Special Counsels to the Board. Under the incandescent-mimicking LED Edison's, indoors, protected from the hell-level concrete heat of our armpit summer.
My dad was so smart, so funny, so tall. God would have been jealous of him. I did nothing but disappoint him, and now I didn’t even have his watch.
They tore down his house to put up an apartment building. The tree out back, where he put up a tire swing (which he later destroyed and burned in the fire pit) still stood crookedly at the edge of the property, beside a pile of leftover and forgotten gravel.
After some stilted conversation with the woman behind the dentist-white desk, she asked, “So, would you like to tour one of the units or…?”
“Sorry, no. I couldn’t afford a place like this,” I told her. I smiled to make her more comfortable. “Not anymore.”
***
The Prophecy
Daniel woke to a text from Jake, someone he hadn’t spoken to in years:
I had an insane dream last night. You and your wife and daughters lost your home in a fire and needed somewhere to stay, so we offered to have you stay in our attic, which we had recently renovated. You were hesitant but eventually agreed. A couple months into your family staying with us, I smelled smoke in our house and went up to the attic to find a small stuffed animal on fire in the corner of the room below the stained-glass window. When we asked you about it, you sort of brushed it off, like it was just one of those things. Then it happened again, only this time it was a chair. It got to where Heather and I always had to be there, in case another fire started, and as more fires did start and were put out, the room filled with blackened corners and spots on the carpet. Your wife also wasn’t your wife, but this influencer I’ve seen online, and she was filming her forward facing camera vids in the house, talking about how to discipline children best, her children's Amazon wishlists, etc. I woke up before there was any real resolution. Isn’t that weird? Where are you now anyway? I hope things are good. If we’re ever out West, we’ll look you up.
Daniel tried not to take it prophetically. Jake didn’t know anything, didn’t have any sense of what had been going on. Jake, also, gave multiple women gonorrhea in college and lied about it. Jake couldn’t possibly have his own life figured out. Jake's dream was a reflection of something far more sinister in Jake’s life, bubbling up out of his own unconscious pool, and to think otherwise would be nonsense. Also, he had a child's name: Jake. Jake!
Daniel took a shower and prepared for his Saturday, which he planned to spend at various hardware stores, the Mexican restaurant beyond the train station, just generally out of the house.
When Daniel's daughter caught fire, as in, was a human girl one moment and a melting candle the next, he immediately blamed himself. This was the inescapable reality, from the second the first orange tendril shot out of her screaming tongue to the final swipe of ash into the dustpan: he’d received a warning that he hadn't heeded.
At his wife’s request, he called the police and asked them if an officer should come by.
They said, “Only if you want one to. For insurance.”
“Should I want one to?” he asked.
The line crackled and the operator sighed.
“Do you think you should want one to?”
The question hardly even sounded like words, but more noises arranged in space. He looked at the blackened chair.
“I know I will need to throw out this chair,” he said.
From somewhere in the house, his wife said, like she had just found something, "Dan?"
With his phone still attached to his ear, Dan turned towards the staircase's black mouth.
______
Calvin Cummings is a writer from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. His work is featured in or forthcoming from Volume Ø, SARKA, Haskell Industries, Soft Union, Blue Arrangements, and elsewhere.
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