two* (Patreon)

Two *

Fear and Desperation are part of love. My father was dying, and I didn't want him to die. So, I made a plan. I made a ghost.

I collected the ingredients. The memories. Recordings of his voice. His love. His fear. His quiet hellos. The way he said my name.

The spooky echoing laughter at his own dumb jokes.

Ghosts can pass through walls. Strangers can hear ghosts late at night. I had so many ideas. Desperation has so many ideas. I spent hours at my computer, trying to program something that could rattle chains on a stranger's computer, half a world away. Something that traveled the internet and left cold spots. Can you feel that? Put your hand right here.

Soon, my little brother Simon started to help.

It made sense. We were on our own in that small town. Every day started with a visit with our father, and then it was just the two of us in all of Malagash, left to our own devices.

We wandered. Long winding roads of clay-red asphalt to map. The crashing Atlantic ocean to walk beside. Fields and vineyards and dirtbikes. A broken down dried old house, the roof caved in like an exhausted spine. Malagash, Nova Scotia.

A memorial to an old salt mine. Tunnels hundreds of feet beneath us, some collapsed, some open and filled with the sound of pick axes on salt. Coughing. Chains rattling.

We wandered in the afternoons. Simon and I. Out of place. Not talking. Just being there. Learning the fields, and the piers and the ocean. We dared one another to touch the electric fence around the cattle. To grab the razor shells with our bare hands on the beach. We took turns seeing who could walk the quietest through the long grass. Who could sneak up on the other. Close your eyes and try to hear them coming.

Simon, in his bare feet, finally won.

And at night? At night I taught Simon how to use a database. How to help archive the recordings in my computer. How to tag the entries. He caught on quicker than I expected. He's sharp.

I hadn't noticed that about him, before. But if I am being honest, there was a lot about Simon I never noticed until our father started dying.

So, we spent our days wandering. We spent our nights huddled over a laptop.

We were a team. We collected every bit of our father that we could, and we tried our best to build a ghost. Or to keep the bits alive somehow. Floating in a jar of formaldehyde. Or some strange glowing radioactive juice. I don't know what we were doing. We were injecting vampire blood. We were placing stones over his heart, in the casket. These were pieces of a meteor that glowed and promised everlasting life.

Desperate stupid fantasy.

Simon found ways of indexing the recordings that surprised me. I surprised him right back. I showed him recordings that I made in secret.

Our mother and father, talking in private. My phone hidden on a shelf. Parts of our father we never got to hear. Things we didn't understand. They needed to be saved too.

"I thought you'd be mad," my father said. "About stopping the treatment. I thought you'd be angry with me."

But my mother's voice was warm.

"No you didn't," She laughed. "No. I feel… I feel closer to you. Now we both know. It is okay to want to die."

There was no answer.

"What do you think it'll be like for you? Will you keep going? Keep on truckin'? Telling your dad jokes? Smiling that beautiful smile at angels half your age?"

"I'll tell them I'm married," he said.

"Oh no," my mom laughed. "This is a divorce. You'll never see me again."