Guarding the Broken Gate

2nd Place in the Free Flash Fiction Competition Twenty-Five

Even Dad can’t joke his way out of dying.

My sister called; she was fierce. Adamant. I must see him – he’s my father after all. I protested, she pleaded. Begged. Twenty-five years is a long time to not know him. I have reasons, of course – their weight a ton of rocks that he should be carrying, not me.

The sticky train heat is a lullaby, rocking my head. I’ve packed travel sickness pills and a high-rise pile of sandwiches. At the port, I shake myself awake and aboard the ferry, a kiss of khaki sea spray wets my face. As we sway across the waves, I remember my chubby child-hands around an invisible wheel, steering the ferry into dock.

At the harbour, the sky is a sheet of darkening silver. I buy a child’s umbrella from the news kiosk, the canopy declaring I love Rain – that’s all they’ve got.

Outside his butter-coloured bungalow, Dad’s guarding the broken gate. He’s craggy and heaps old, tumbled-down eyes still holding that larrikin song I remember. Breath squeezes from my chest. We stand, frozen. Calcified hurt and pride the barricade between us. Years concertina, the roadmap of his face so familiar. Every broken vein.

‘Hello, Dad.’

Nothing. Not even a twitch. Rain spits. Blushing, feeling ridiculous, I pop open my little kid’s umbrella.

Then.

He reaches out an arm like a gnarly branch, tugs me towards him.

Booms into my ear, ‘Son. Son!’

There’s a landslide inside me. I breathe in his pilling green pullover and the tobacco smell on his neck. My heartbeat’s next to his. I shake. My glasses fog up. Tears bloom on my father’s jumper. We break our hug. Dad creaks the gate open, without our eyes meeting or a word spoken. Our footsteps crunch along the gravel path.