My Father’s Ghost

I was an adult when I saw my father’s ghost walking on my bedroom walls in central Minnesota, pacing back and forth, and back again. He was perspiring—to the point where even the Levi’s he was wearing began to drip with denim moisture. This was, needless to say, a unique event—marking the beginning in a world constantly punctuated by ends. 

Carefully and quietly slipping out of bed so as not to disturb him, I approached the minuscule orbs of my father’s perspiration that lay motionless on the cold hardwood. I cradled one of the impressively dense orbs of perspiration in my hand, slowly bringing it to my nose, taking in its bitter aroma—an aroma which could very well have clawed the life out of my olfactory bulb. I was not offended, however, but rather curious at this uncanny happening. 

Betraying my every intuition, I gently dropped the orb onto my dehydrated tongue and swallowed, nearly choking in the process. Still images—foreign ones—rifled through my head at the speed of memory. Each image a glittered pixilation—matched, perhaps, only by peering up at the sun during a horizontal snow.

My father’s ghost walked on my bedroom walls in central Minnesota when I saw an old man use a switch to strike sense into a six-year-old farm hand recently separated from his parents. A gnarled woman, garbling her words, expressed the need to deliver another.

A small boy, sitting cross-legged, in a cornfield over an overcast sky, dressed in a small boy’s tux, glancing up, imagining the glorious ascent of his mother—a mother more imagined than realized—a mother he had never had the pleasure. 

The orb grumbled in my belly as the image of, yet again, a small boy—the same small boy—beneath an airy sky, silently pleading to nothing for an opportunity for something other than this—a boy, who, calloused by, perhaps, a cosmic betrayal, would raze it all if only to hear a gentle voice utter: that’ll do. 

My father’s ghost walked on my bedroom walls in central Minnesota when, at last, he turned to me, and let a teardrop dense as Time free itself, slamming into the hardwood, leaving a low dip in front of my feet. I considered this blackened globule for a long time, knowing somehow, standing there frozen, that this one was not for me.