⠀⠀⠀I’m 18 and I still can’t drive. But I hate staying inside, so sometimes I will walk one or two hours straight to the next city over and then add another three to account for all the zigzagging I do in between streets. I’m in Burbank again, the only city I ever walk to on a Wednesday night. I left too early, so by the time I ask my mom to pick me up, it’s not even dark yet. I like leaving late so that while I wait for her, I can just walk in the darkness listening to music, only able to see from the Christmas lights up on the houses. But it’s January now, late January, so seeing any leftover Santa Clauses on the lawn just makes me sad.
⠀⠀⠀Well over twenty minutes have already passed, and she said she would pick me up in less than that. Now it’s dark. And all I’m doing is sitting at a lonely park staring at a gas station and some running teenagers, wishing I were still on my high school’s cross-country team.
⠀⠀⠀Ten more minutes. And my stomach falls. I pull out my phone and text my sister, who I know is asleep, because that’s all she ever does now.
⠀⠀⠀Hey, did Moi leave already?
⠀⠀⠀Again.
⠀⠀⠀Hello.
⠀⠀⠀My stomach falls farther and all I can think about are freeways and car crashes and tire screeches. But I started thinking like this way before my dad died. Back when he was just getting sick again, a 45-year-old man with a cane because cancer was hollowing out his leg bone and he didn’t even realize it. None of us did. He had a tattoo on that leg and my 7-or 8-year-old mouth suggested that maybe the tattoo was the thing that was making his leg hurt. It was his newest one, but by no means recent. He agreed, and said maybe that was the case, letting my sister and I believe in something we didn’t even know was false. My sister wants to get a tattoo of his birthday. And I want to get a tattoo of him somewhere too. I was thinking my leg, to remind me of the time I walked in on him crying about his, or maybe on my stomach, because cancer deteriorated his colon and since it’s genetic, I know it’s going to do the same to mine. It’s just a matter of time.
⠀⠀⠀I remember his viewing. How the body in the casket didn’t even look like my dad. My dad wasn’t beardless, or malnourished. He wasn’t green. I didn’t know that after someone died, they kept dying. And it makes me wonder, what does his shell look like now. He’s been trapped under the earth of a cemetery I don’t even know the name of for almost eight years. Maybe he’s not green anymore. Maybe he’s beige. Or black.
⠀⠀⠀After my parents divorced and my mom moved into my grandma’s house, I had a dream. It was the first of two nights, and the first of a million days. My dad was supposed to pick up my sister and I that afternoon because it was his turn for custody. He wasn’t even sick yet, wasn’t even dying yet. But I dreamed he got hurt. We were on an island, just the three of us, my mom, my dad, and me. We got separated from each other somehow but when I finally found my Dad again, he was fighting Darth Vader on the Death Star. And I watched as the dark lord of the Sith cut off my Dad’s arm. Just watched. When I woke up that morning, I wouldn’t stop crying for him to come pick me up. Then every time he was a little bit late getting us from school, or going to get groceries, or anything, I thought he was dying. I thought he was dead, and never coming back.
⠀⠀⠀When my dad’s body first began to break and he had to stay overnight at the hospital for the first time, I asked him a question. “Are you going to die?” And he looked at me. It was pity and it was worry and it was disregard for the tubes coming out of his arms all mashed together on his face in a response that was supposed to be reassuring, but it didn’t even matter, because my dad never lied to me. “Not yet.”
⠀⠀⠀It turns out yet came pretty soon, because they moved his hospital bed into his mom’s house, and we all took weeks off of school and work to sit there with him as he died in the place where we grew up. One of his high school students brought him a stuffed lion, and I can’t even say it was a “get well” gift because we all knew why they let us keep his bed at my grandma’s house. My dad and I had just watched the original Planet of the Apes and when he was still able to speak, he asked me what I wanted to name the lion. We decided Cornelius.
⠀⠀⠀But then his limbs refused to move, and his skin sank around his bones and his mouth stopped producing saliva, so that every time he wanted to speak someone would have to take a wet sponge and dab it around his lips and tongue. He would try to talk to me sometimes, but his voice was so faint and his words like mush that I could never understand him. I could see the frustration in his eyes, but it always faded to dullness because he was too tired to even get mad anymore. So sometimes we didn’t speak, and instead I would sit down with my guitar and play him my best version of “Stairway to Heaven” while my uncle sat there looking at me with that same pity, because he knew that was the last song I would ever play for my dad.
Rhiannon Chavez was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, by parents who taught her to love all things geeky and nerdy. Rhiannon boasts that she is the only person she knows, besides her high school film teacher, to have learned almost everything about Star Wars. She is a freshman majoring in Creative Writing and hopes to write novels for Lucasfilm one day. When she is not writing, she spends the weekends with her cousin and sister playing Dungeons & Dragons and causing a ruckus.
Main Squeeze Literary Journal 