Bronson Gao

六月十四日

コンビニ

父

I decided—against my better judgment—to buy a Father’s Day card today. Not that he deserves it. In truth, I don’t know why I came here. Maybe I’d feel good about myself for doing it, or maybe I just don’t wanna fight my mom this time; but these are the explanations I deceive myself with. Really, it doesn’t make me feel good that I’m doing this at all.

I drove to the drug store, and it was raining pretty hard. The lot was empty, and I could hear nothing but the sound of the storm. There was no music, I remember. The whole atmosphere felt agitated, but it might’ve just been me. I don’t like this shit, and don’t like being compelled to do it. Man, but this is still the best option, I tell myself, knowing full well it isn’t.

In the Hallmark Aisle is a girl. “Hey, you were in my English class, weren’t you?”

“Oh, yeah!” she says.

“Deadra, right?”

“Yeah.” Her face was pretty much erased, eyes glazed over until I said something. Entering her path, she watched the cards with a reptilian distance. She looked like she was the only thing that registered to herself; the rest of the world could’ve been less than nothing. She was a certain way of being for a moment, and who knows how long that was.

“Gettin’ a Father’s Day Card?”

“Oh, yeah…”

“Me too, actually,” I said. “Not that I really want to, though.”

She laughs. “Me neither, actually.”

She wrote this one piece that she read aloud for the class. It was this really brutal, eccentric stream of consciousness. It dealt pretty heavily with human degradation. I remember words like “auto-cannibalism,” something-something about the end of a human being in a pit of vulgar, gruesome sexual acts, really gory stuff. And she wasn’t shy about any of it, either.

I really admired it, actually. I still think about it sometimes, so I brought it up: “Hey, I really liked that thing you wrote for English, last year. ‘Skull Sugar,’ right?”

“Oh! Yeah… thanks,” she says. She rocks back from my eye contact at first, shocked, maybe even charmed. Everything about her face is strained. Even her hair looks stressed, cropped short into angular machete stripes. I can’t tell how much of the bruised gray under her eyes is genetic and how much is sleeplessness.

“Y’know, in peer reviews, I always thought it was interesting how you put, like, Japanese phrases in your writing. Do you still do that?”

“I haven’t had much time lately, unfortunately. Been busy. Oh, how was commencement for you, anyways?”

“Uh, fine.” She looks away for a moment. “What’s next for you, after summer? We haven’t spoken in awhile, so—”

“I’m goin’ to Ivy Tech, then I’ll prolly be transferred after I get, my associates.”

“Oh! I’m going to Ivy Tech too. South Bend?”

“South Bend,” I say. And as I speak, I watch her face shift a hue. It’s like seeing somebody just come back from the dead. I wonder if that was excitement. And now I gotta wonder what it was for. And then, my next question must be where I really axe everything, a dead kinda dead.

“I know this is short notice, but, I’m havin’ a graduation party this weekend if you’re free,” I tell her.