The Rubble of Longing

Nominated for Best Irish/English Flash Fiction 20/21 (BIFFY 50)
Longlisted (no shortlist) Reflex Fiction Flash Fiction Competition

A Jamaican nurse stops you entering the ward.

‘I think he’s gone,’ she says.

He’s still warm. Daily Mirror and flat cap on the chair. The machines are silent. You hold his wrist.

A smiley Filipino nurse swishes back the lilac curtain. ‘Breakfast?’

You shake your head.

‘Sorry!’ She tugs up her face mask.

The funeral director is swan-like. Elegant, pale, distant. You listen to her practised empathy, her suggestions. Manage your tears, lapping. Tie them up tightly in waterbombs.   

Later, you turn your father’s door key. Smell him as you go in. Don’t open the windows to let him out. Slide down the hallway wall and stroke the worn blue carpet. Sit there till your legs go numb.

You pull the battered stainless teapot from the sink and boil the red whistling kettle. Press your fingerprints into the coat of dust on the windowsill. Break into his oak writing bureau with a kitchen knife. Rifle through photos, stamps, receipts, documents …   

Examine the faces and broken cabins of your ancestors. Haunted looks and happiness are handed-down stories, recall tales of both told in your father’s Geordie voice. Hug a velvet cushion … 

Read love letters from the ladies in his life, Pamela and June! Fill the room with question marks. Fling out his cupboards. Linen, blankets, shirts. Undo his sock balls. Drink his precious Jameson’s.

You curl up on the butter-coloured rug. Feel his footprints. The ghostly ones. The silent ones that made no imprint, or so you thought. Let grief capsize you twice. Once for a father. Once for a stranger.

Dawn arrives on your face in cold peach shades. You find coffee and Coffee- mate.

Google: How to write a eulogy? Read: ‘Traditional eulogy for Dad.’

Laugh like you’re crying. You write down.

‘My father. Alan Dean Fox. Al. Foxy. Dad.

In his twenties, Dad was at Wembley cheering for England.

In his thirties, he became a master carpenter. 

Last month, age seventy-eight, he bought Nike trainers to play table tennis.’

You feel the five-minute chasm the eulogy must fill. Count on your fingertips the years you didn’t speak. Ask the rubble of your longing if another past was ever possible.