Organized Parts

Words by Lindsey Villarreal
Art By Claudia Tong

I don’t remember how I came to the realization that my father’s body was dismembering itself. It wasn’t in a bloody, painstaking kind of way just a slow and casual disinterest in being a body in the first-place kind of way.

At first it was a finger. An index finger to be precise. Fat and
bloated on the ground. My father didn’t realize it was even there so close in proximity to where it had fallen off his hand so, I was called into locate it. 

He called me one day not frantic, not urgent, more curious. Like it was something as trivial as when he used to call over and over again about his jammed icemaker.

“The damn thing is broke again!” Like I could do anything about it. When I picked up that first day he lost the finger I wasn’t even sure it was him on the end of the line seeing as we hardly spoke anymore. Our relationship had always been hard to navigate and strained. As I’d gotten older, we seemed to find less reason to dwell on the personal and calls got less frequent. He also

changed his number often because he was so paranoid at the thought of past enemies coming to exact revenge on him. My father had wronged a lot of people back in his day. Including me. So, I had to double check it was him plus it was loud where I was.

“What? Dad is this you? I can’t hear you,” I yelled.

That day I was at a local waterpark with a few acquaintances. At the base of Splashtown’s highest inner tube drop. The highest built drop in the state mind you and I was about to fly straight down it. I waited for his response. Nothing.

“Dad.”

“Yeah, yeah, I said my finger. It’s gone. It’s missing.” He spoke low and straightforward.

Strange for him if you knew what he was like which was unlike this.

“Your finger?”

“Yes, my finger.”

“It’s gone. Like, off your hand?”

“That’s right.”

“…”

“Hello. Did you hear me? About the finger?”

“Okay well, I’m at a waterpark right now Dad. I don’t know what to tell you. Did you look for it?”

“Yes, I looked for it. I’m just calling you because I didn’t know who else to call, okay?

Sorry I’m bothering you. I’ll let you get back to it,” he paused for my reaction which was annoyed. Of all the days for this stranger of a father to lose an extremity it had to be on my one day off.

“No. Dad. It’s fine. Where were you when you lost it?”

I asked if he was okay in far too many different ways until we hung up the phone. It was clear that he was not okay and I’d have to make the trip home that day. I never knew how to solve any of his problems from so far away and
I was busy attending to my own routine.

Figuring out the daily life of someone else only really works if you see them daily. Needless to say, it was very hard to focus on waterpark fun after that. I got out of line for the inner tubes as I cleared my locker and said my goodbyes to Karen and Arturo my very attentive, activity seeking acquaintances who were always asking if I wanted to go on a hike in the canyons or attend Shakespeare in the park or something sweet and mundane like that. The waterpark was one of the first times I’d agreed to join them so I could see the disappointment on their faces as I told them I was leaving. It was unlikely I’d be invited to do mundane things with them again.

“Do you really have to go? If the whole finger is gone, don’t you think it’ll be impossible to find? What are the chances it’s even there still like, with dogs and all that.” Arturo whined.

“I mean, he is my Dad. I really think I should go and at least help him look around for the finger. Right?”

“Right. Yeah, I guess,” Arturo answered.

“C’mon she’s being a good daughter. You’re a good daughter.” Karen reassured me.

I left that day feeling inconvenienced yet again by my father. A father who wasn’t even around much when I was growing up. My Mother was always the present parent. The nagging parent. The loves you so much they’re yelling now type of parent. The one who does all the real work. My mother was strong and hardheaded. She and my father had been estranged for so long that the mere thought of what he was even doing these days enraged her. I called to tell her that I was driving into town for the night.

“You’re coming all the way from Austin? For what? Just to help your father find his finger? You’re really going all out for that man, aren’t you?”

“Mom, it’s like a common courtesy. If your finger fell off, don’t you think I’d stop

whatever I was doing and come help you find it.”

“Well, that wouldn’t happen now, would it? I would never be in that same position because I am extremely responsible for myself,” she huffed.

She was always finding ways to prove to me that she’d outperformed my father in life.

That there was something she had been able to accomplish that was greater than him. They had separated when I was eight and not gotten completely divorced until I was sixteen. As the only product of them I’d heard complaining from both sides but especially from my mother who never liked to admit that she’d spent those eight years of their separation hoping she could repair the parts of my father that were irreparable. The parts of him that would just never fit together stayed outlines of long forgotten needs in her hands for far too long a time in her life so, I understood her concern for me.

She stayed quiet for an almost inhumane amount of time then said, “So, do you want dinner or what?”

“Sure, okay.”

“But I’m not making anything. I’m exhausted.”

“I’m exhausted too!”

“From what? What do you do that exhausts you?” She questioned.

I didn’t have an answer for that.

“Can you order me that salad I like from Needlers?” I said. “I’m hungry right now but I guess I’ll be there in a few hours after I stop by Dad’s. And I’ll need to stay the night.” I gave her clear directions on the salad. No cheese. No onion. I’d be there by six so that I could get in and out of my hometown in record time. I was there just to find the finger, sleep, then I’d be out by morning. “You think your own mother can’t make you a salad?” she replied.

What with traffic and a few stops at truck stations to lather my chaffing swim short area with Vaseline the trip actually took about three hours. By the time I reached my father’s small, run-down looking home it was dusk and the crows were perched atop his roof like a tell-tale sign of what I’d find when I went inside. His home hadn’t always looked this way. I remember when he bought it. How shocked I was that he’d been able to secure this marker of adulthood on his own after spending the majority of my teenage years acting like a teenager himself. Barely escaping with his life in a motorcycle accident, or a mistaken arson or an attempted assault. Each time he'd come out mostly unscathed. Another scar to represent the detours turned dead ends. 

Back then I’d just graduated high school and he used the house as a suggestion that I’d be missing out on something fun he’d planned for me if I moved to Austin. “There’s two extra bedrooms and everything. Ceiling fans in every room. It’s prettyyy niccceeee.”

Outside of the house now I put the car in park and sat for a moment as I geared myself up to deal with a conversation that went in circles and then sometimes nowhere. As I dragged my feet to the front door, of course, there, in the driveway, was the finger. Clean and detached. No meaty pulp at the end and no bone sticking from it. Just a perfect little sausage link. Brown and bloated as it sat just near the tire of my father’s long out of commission Dodge Ram. A truck he’d been meaning to sell for years.

I picked it up and turned it over in my hands a few times. I couldn’t get a grip on the situation. It was really a piece of my father’s body I was holding. It was strange and exhilarating somehow. Almost as if I had some element of control over a person who I’d never been able to control in the slightest. 

As I walked up the pathway littered with debris from long abandoned home improvement endeavors and fast-food wrappers that didn’t quite make it to the bin, I got a little more nervous. I held the finger in the palm of my outstretched hand about a foot in front of me. A small toll for entry to the unknown. I was afraid I might find something worse inside. A father in pieces divided on the recliner perhaps.

The screen door hung askew on its hingesboding nothing more promising than my worst thoughts. I could see the front door was open beyond that and the void of the entryway seemed a seething mouth with teeth expanding and contracting. Finally, I was forced to jump back at the sudden presence of my father’s giant tan mutt of a dog. The dog’s tail wagging insane as he greeted me with suspicious barks. This was my father’s only real companion these days. “Get back Thor! That’s just your friend,” my father bellowed from inside the house.

Out emerged my father. He looked worse than the last time I saw him. His hair unkempt and his eyes wild with confusion at my arrival. I hadn’t seen him in maybe six months. Even the two hours away I lived seemed a lot to travel for the man. I excused myself from his life by telling myself I was busy with work or that I had an active social life or a dog of my own to attend to. I did have all those things. But I also had enough time.

The dog headbutted me angry at my lack of attentiveness.

“Thor? I thought his name was Hulk?” Thor/ Hulk looked up at me equally confused.

“Yeah, yeah Hulk. That’s what I meant. Hulk’s his name.”

The dog seemed used to having two names and retreated behind my father when he decided I was clear for entry.

“So how you doin’? You still getting those early morning runs in?” he smiled.

My father was adept at ignoring bad situations and I was just as skilled at ignoring him.

But this was different.

“What do you mean Dad? Stop changing the subject. I’m here for this.” I held out the finger for him to see. He struggled to bring into focus what was in my outstretched hand. In those days he’d just begun to lose his eyesight and his vision had declined even more it looked like as he leaned his head in close to my hand.

“What is that?”

“It’s your finger. The one you were telling me you lost.”

“Oh yeah, that.” He swayed on his heels like he did when he was nervous.

“You’re doing the nervous thing you do.”

“Well, here I guess I should show you this,” he said as he turned inside. Inside the house was a mess. With his back to me he ambled over discarded trash, dog toys and clothes both clean and unclean to find the coffee table. It was only then in my shock at his state of living that I realized he’d been hiding his hands from me. They’d been shoved deep inside his pockets. When he turned around two more fingers, and a toe were in the palm of his hands. They were all clean and precise. No blood. As if someone had just popped them off like clay.

I was speechless for a moment, “Dad— Why is it so dirty in here?” The question threw him off guard and he stammered to find a sound that would be appropriate for both an excuse and a response. Then, he was quiet as he looked down at the ground. Anywhere but directly into my face. “Does… does that hurt?” I asked. He thought about it and then looked around trying to figure out an answer to a question he hadn’t even asked himself yet.

“No, no, I’m fine. I’m glad you came. Where do you think we should put them?” He wanted to put them down again quick I could tell. I held the lone index finger in my hand. Now it seemed like nothing compared to the fresh popped parts he carried apart from himself.

“I suppose the table is as good a place as any?” I suggested.

“Yep. The kitchen table. Good thinking,” he said as he moved then set them down in a little pile. He placed the fingers together gently. Leaning his face in close so he could glimpse them better and place them nearer one another. He placed the toe to the side of the fingers. Then he turned back toward me, took the driveway finger from my hand, and placed it across the other fingers. I didn’t have the words for what was now in front of us. A Kandinsky piece, maybe.

Abstract but oddly organized. A veritable tic-tac-toe, even but that was too literal. We both stared at his body parts spread clean for us on a scalloped placemat I’d bought him three Christmases ago. Neither of us spoke for a while. A cop show, probably COPS, blared loud in the background. “They look like I could just get them back on if I wanted, right?” he said.

“Have you tried that?”

“No.”

He picked up the pinky and dusted it off a bit then fit it to his hand were there was an open meaty gouge as if a mere puzzle solve was the solution. But there was no way for the finger to reattach. He put it back down careful to observe its delicate alignment with its compatriots.

“We should keep track of them, yeah?” he finally spoke.

“Yeah, yes. So, we don’t lose them.”

“Anymore,” he said.

“Anymore,” I agreed

He went to get a notebook with some blank paper that had a local car insurance agent’s

face on it. Adriana’s, Ricardo’s, Fulton & Fulton, I can’t remember which one it was now. I took

the small pen attached to the notebook and I started to write down what we had. He was right.

We needed a record for ourselves.

Left Hand: One Index finger. One Middle finger.
Right Hand: One pinky finger.

He still had his thumbs. That was good. He could still kind of grab on to things with them like he was now. I’d read an article once about how important the opposable thumb is to humanity. And apes, I guess. The article was called, ‘All thanks to the thumb!’ Or maybe I’m making that title up. It was something cute like that. I reminded myself to lighten the mood with it later.

He leaned back at an awkward angle, clutching the end of the couch with a new unease I’d never seen on him before. This man had been through plot lines too wild for fiction but now I felt a sudden wave of worry I didn’t normally feel for him. That somehow the rest of his extremities would wriggle their way off him tonight seeing as it had only been a few hours since I last called him. Although my father was also a very unreliable narrator in general so for all I knew he could have been without the fingers and toe for days or weeks. Maybe months.

“Take off your socks,” I said.

“The floor is cold.”

“Just take them off, Dad.”

He reached down and I had to help him as I surveyed the damage. I wrote down the last entry for the night:

Right foot: Pinky toe.

“See? Still got the left ones.” He beamed.

I’d planned on being back home in Austin the next night at latest. Someone I’d met through someone else, I couldn’t quite remember how, was a DJ and they were playing a set in a bar I also couldn’t quite remember the name of only where it was in approximation to my apartment. I was sad to miss it. But that night I decided I would stay in town a little longer. My dad resisted this notion at every turn. The corner of his mouth furling up at one side and down on the other as he smiled but shook his head, ‘No’. This was something my face did too. This reaction means, ‘I am touched you have offered this solution to my problem and yet I could never outright take you up on it even though I most definitely want to and am too proud to say yes.’

“No, no. You go back to your stuff. I’ll be fine here,” he mumbled.

“What stuff is more important than this?”

“I don’t know. Just whatever stuff you have.”

“Dad, this seems pretty dire. What if your lips fall off and you can’t communicate? Or your ears fall off and you can’t hear? What would you do then? How would you get a hold of me?”

He thought about that idea for a moment. Touching his cracked and dry lips as he looked off into the corner of the room. “I think the only thing I’d be sad about is my eyes.”

“Yeah, the eyes would be bad, but I guess they’re attached by like, fibers and tendons and other eye attachments.”

“Hmm. True.”

“I don’t know Dad. Look, let’s just deal with the problem in front of us now.”

“You got it. Hey, do you wanna sleep here? It’s late. I can put the sheets on the couch for you and everything. I just gotta… find the sheets. I’ll wash them. Just wait.”

“No, it’s okay. I just wanna sleep in a bed at mom’s. She has a guest room.”

“I have a guest room.”

“Hers has a bed in it, Dad.”

“Okay, okay. Just offering. Whatever you wanna do.”

I drove the forty-five minutes to my mother’s house that night. I did not eat the salad.

The next morning, I sat on the phone at my mother’s kitchen table trying to schedule a doctor’s appointment for him as my mother busied herself unnecessarily with a sudden cake

she’d forgotten to make for her bible study that evening. She stationed herself at a nearby counter so she could hear everything I said as I spoke with the doctor’s office. I was on a long hold as she piped in mid cake prep—

“Why do you have to be the one to take him?” she asked.

“Who else is going to do it? It’s not like he has any friends to give him a ride.”

“What about your aunt? Or your Tío Manuel? He’s got a car, doesn’t he?”

“Dad and Tío Manny hate each other. Manny gave him a black eye last Christmas, remember? And Aunt Mina works.”

“Well don’t you work?” My mom was really working all of her frustration into the batter now, “I just don’t think you need to dedicate all of your time to this. He’s been fine this far, hasn’t he?” she mixed.

“Mom, I’m here. I came just for this so, just. Let me do it.”

A nurse came on the line, “Yes, we can see your father tomorrow. Doctor Iman says it sounds urgent.”

“It sure is Kathy. Thank you so much for seeing my dad and being so helpful last minute like this.” I really knew how to lay it on thick for the service and health industry. I hung up the phone and watched my mother as she whisked the batter like she’d never whisked before.

“I think it’s mixed mom!” I yelled.

“Oh, be quiet and get back to your martyrdom. I didn’t plan on making a cake today, alright?” She grumbled as she folded in some snacking almonds on the counter which, I don’t think had planned on being a cake either.

My mother was hard to relate to but time with my father felt like a long-winded recap. It was near impossible for him to find anything exciting about his future. As far as he was concerned, he was just living minute to minute. Surviving for the sake of survival. Making it one day to the next. Any platitude that came to his mind was his mantra. I had vague memories of him teaching me to draw from the Sunday comics when I was maybe six or seven years old.

We’d lay on the floor and trace over Snoopy, then the Peanuts Gang and Cathy even though he hated Cathy. But really who didn’t hate Cathy? I remember giving up when I couldn’t match the weight of the lines with only a pencil. He’d take the pencil from my hand and stub the lead of it onto the side of the newsprint dulling it just enough to get a thick line around Snoopy’s dark and weighty ear. “There,” he said, warm and resolute.

He used to be a person with interests and hobbies. He’d been someone who played baseball for his work rec league. Someone who had opinions on bad television. Someone who made time to be disagreeable. Whatever the thoughts were, they were his and I yearned for that version of my father that maybe had never existed at all. A father in time somewhere in my own memories. I wanted to say to him, “This is the moment! The moment you turn things around. Make a list of your goals and aim for them before you lose the chance to!”

But I decided not to muse on ambition to a man who was slowly unraveling.

#

When we got to Doctor Iman’s office, we waited for over an hour in a small receiving room with a corner view. The office was on the eighth floor of a medical center and I looked down as people wheeled outpatients and pregnant women to their vehicles. A woman looked up and found me staring. I waved. She didn’t. “Can you hold these?” My father stretched his arm toward me as he was carrying around the loose little offenders in a Tupperware now. Overnight another toe had fallen off and weirdly a nipple. I was glad he’d taken the liberty of placing them all in a frosted Tupperware container to keep them in one place but I think it was largely, so the nipple wasn’t visible. I held the Tupperware as he scratched his nipple-less left pec.

“It’s itchy in the places they’re gone,” he scratched.

“Maybe we can ask for a cream or something.”

“An ice-cream? Yeah, that sounds nice.”

“No, a cream Dad, for the itch.”

He nodded. A little sad I could tell that I didn’t mean an ice cream. “Oh shoot. Did you bring the notebook?” I asked.

“No, I thought you had it.”

“It’s fine,” I took out my notes app. When we got to the waiting room, I typed up what we’d lost then added the other left pinky toe and nipple. It was about twenty more silent minutes between us until we were finally led to an exam room and as the doctor entered the office, I felt I’d missed my opportunity to express any true sympathy to my father. The kind of words exchanged in an uncomfortable waiting room when there is absolutely nothing left to say.

Instead, I was quiet and now those twenty minutes were gone and done.

“Hello Señor!” Doctor Iman bellowed, “Forcing me in on a Sunday, are you?” Doctor Iman was a lithe and tall Indian man. Moderately attractive with a warm greying disposition he seemed overly friendly and eager to please. Not standard these days for a general practitioner in my opinion. Nice doctors were a thing of a Rockwell painting. Imam had an almost too attentive bedside manner. He sat on a rolling chair and used his rather long extremities to waddle-roll over to us like a disabled spider. He nodded in my direction with a polite head bow. “Nice to meet you. The daughter, correct?”

“That is my official title, yes.”

“Funny too. Well, what seems to be the problem here? The nurse said you had some problems with some, dislocation?” he said as he read the form, “I don’t quite understand what that means?”

I handed Imam the Tupperware and as he popped the lid off, he paused. A light air of disgust washed over his face as he stared into the expanse of the plastic food ware. It was a long look into another dimension or a vision of a place where people’s hands grew from the crevice of skin between one’s gut and upper thigh. A least that’s what I imagined the doctor saw. He glanced at my father. First, at his hands which now looked like little paws. Shorter and stouter than before. “Lift up your shirt please,” Imam said. My dad obeyed. In the place where his nipple should have been only a brown circular disc was left. A tan pronouncing itself as if he’d left a penny sitting on his chest to see what the sun would do. Then, “and now your shoes.” I knelt on the floor in front of my father and gently removed one shoe and sock after the other. In the left sock dangled three more toes. Only the big toe remaining. I handed the sock away from me but neither my father nor Doctor Imam took it from me in kind. My dad stared at the outstretched sock, now knowing what the extra weight was at the bottom of it. “Shoot,” he said as he bowed his head.

The three of us stood quiet for a moment.

“Shoot is right,” Doctor Imam said. “Will you excuse me a moment.”

He left the office, closed the door behind him and the sound of shuffling fabric on the other side could only have been the doctor trying to shake the oddity of the situation out of his clothing. I knew there wouldn’t be much help after that.

We rolled out of the medical plaza that day in a wheelchair. A few x-ray copies in hand showing no explanation or reasoning for my father’s disembodiment and some antibiotics in case of infection was Doctor Imam’s only solution to the situation. I looked up as I pushed my father across the ill-lit parking garage. In the windows of the main building the only light on was Doctor Imam’s office. It was a Sunday after all. In the silhouette of the window, I could see Imam and his nurse, probably Kathy, staring down at us. Neither of them waved.

#

That night instead of going home to my Mother I stayed on my father’s couch. I felt awful at the thought of him spending this night in particular alone so, I found it in myself to clean up the house a little and carve out a sizeable space on the couch. He used a crutch they’d given him at the hospital to hobble around as he gathered the one extra sheet he owned for me to use as a blanket. I propped up the couch cushions behind my head as Thor hopped up and laid his head next to mine. As the television blared a rerun of a familiar sitcom I stared up into the ceiling. My fathers last wife of now nearly a decade ago had taken back every piece of her furniture. Including some of the more basic home features like the light fixtures. On the ceiling was a gaping hole with exposed wiring from where a ceiling fan once spun. I pulled the sheet

tighter.

“Are you going to be okay out here? Is the air condition too much?” he asked.

“No, I like it really cold at night. I think I’ll be okay.”

“I like it cold too.”

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re gonna be okay. I’ll keep staying a little longer.”

He looked like he was going to cry. As the years had crept up on him, he’d gotten to be more emotional. For someone who I’d never seen truly cry he teared up a lot now. “Okay. I’m sorry about this,” he said. “I know you have your life and everything. Who’s taking care of your dog? What’s his name again? Muchacho? Molé?”

“Close. Mochi. A food name. My friend’s Karen and Arturo went to go grab him. He’s staying at their house for now.”

“Mochi,” he sounded the word out like it was too foreign to say any louder. “What’s that mean again?”

“It’s a little Japanese rice cake. You had one before. Remember when Aunt Jackie brought us some back from her trip?”

“Maybe? Did I like it?”

“I think you liked it.”

“That’s good.” He teetered back on his heels again. Waiting for me to say something.

When I didn’t, he picked up the remote and lowered the volume and he grabbed the toes on my exposed foot. He lifted my entire foot up to stare at it. I let him even though it felt strange and

too intimate. Then, he placed it back on the arm of the couch, gentle, patted my leg and hobbled off to bed.

#

I have this recurring nightmare. I’m driving, more or less happy, down a highway or a freeway. I don’t know how it is that I’m happy, all I know is that I am. There’s a feeling of carelessness to my body in the dream. There’s no traffic. Just the sound of the air passing by my ear on the driver’s side. The window is cracked just a bit and it’s windy. There aren’t even very many cars on the road but all of a sudden, I’m stopped with a sharp blow to the chest. The dream ends there and there’s nothing more. I don’t scream. I’m not frightened. There’s no sound.

Everything just goes black, and, in an instant, I know I’m dead. I woke up feeling the weight of the dream on me and of course I couldn’t sleep after that. It was only midnight, so I called Karen.

She picked up after three rings and immediately engaged, “So how is it? Stuff still falling off him?”

“A few parts today, yeah.”

“Jesus, it’s so random. Do you think it’s hereditary?”

I looked at my own toes my father had touched earlier. I wiggled and stretched them out wide, grateful for their presence and now worried about their absence.

“I don’t think so. I would say it’s more his own lifestyle choices.” At least that’s what I had just decided in the moment while talking to Karen.

“Well, if you’re out there going to doctors and whatnot couldn’t hurt to schedule something for yourself while you’re at it,” she said. “You know see what’s up with you.”

Mochi barked in the background, and I listened as Karen scolded the dog to get off the couch then complained to me that he was very determined after this possum in their yard. Mochi was a yappy little white terrier. He was a great dog for me though he seemed to annoy other people.

“Rat catching is his brand. He can’t help it,” I said but Karen wasn’t listening. I could hear her chasing the dog into the kitchen now. Aroused from sleep, Hulk perked up his ears until the muted barking stopped. Arturo took the phone from Karen. He was eating something, “Karen is right. Just watch your own parts. You never know with this type of thing. Contagion and all that. You never know.”

“Contagion! We just watched that movie,” Karen said in the background. Mochi kept barking.

#

For a while nothing else fell off my father and I sat in his company in the following days watching reruns of old eighties and nineties action films while we waited for another limb to drop. Every time a building blew up, I glanced over to check that nothing had mistaken itself with the chaos of an assault rifle. Every few hours I would check in on the body to see if the body was still a body. Was it losing any further tactile abilities? Was it growing new limbs where old limbs wanted to be? After a while my father became annoyed with my over interest. “I’m okay, okay, just watch the movie,” he’d squirm. Part of me felt he was enjoying this all. That it was a ploy to get me to come home and spend more of what minimal time we had together.

The best thing about being home for most people is spending quality time with your parent as an adult. Learning the quirks that make them just as unput together as you are and feeling validated. Then, however, realizing these exact idiosyncrasies are indeed why you are as unput together as you are. When nothing else happened for about a week we settled into our normal annoyance with one another. Commenting on someone changing the channel too soon.

Never agreeing on what to eat. I wished I had anything else to say to him other than scolding him for his cleanliness or inattentive attitude toward his own waning health. At that point in my life, I was done wanting to know anything deeply personal about him. I already knew what was inside of him. Deep regret over his choices in life and little thought on what to do about it. There was no other remedy I could offer the insides of my father. All I could focus on was maintaining the outside.

One evening I found him in the backyard near his old barbeque grill. It had been nice, once I suppose. Silver chrome. Dark finished grating inside. A gift from a stepchild of his I’d never met, and he didn’t talk to any longer. Now the grill was rusted and underused. He was standing in front of it tipping a bag of charcoal but only pouring the dead coals on top of the grate instead of underneath. I rushed over and took the bag from him, “What are you doing?”

“What? I’m just trying to get it started?”

“Why? You’re doing it wrong.”

“Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“You’re gonna hurt yourself and besides this charcoal is old and dried out. It’s never going to light.”

“Yeah, okay I got you,” he moved like he had been ready to leave the house for barbeque necessities all along, “Let’s go to the store then.”

“Dad, I don’t, why do we need the grill?”

“So, I can cook you something. Make you a hot dog like I used to.”

“You never cooked me hot dogs? I don’t even eat hot dogs. Do we even have hot dogs?

No. Just, put the bag down.”

“Oh. Okay. Well— I, I don’t know okay, never mind.”

I felt bad for combusting on him. I moved the bag of charcoal out of the way and shut the lid of the grill. I placed it on the ground and took a deep breath then, sat down in a lawn chair with a giant hole in the bottom threading where the seat once was. There was just enough thread left for me to sit somewhat seeing as soon, like my father’s body, the chair wouldn’t be a chair anymore. Then, in an alarming instant, he lunged at me.

“No, that’s broken!”

My father’s hands, as much as they could, gripped my forearms tight prying me up from the lawn chair. I struggled against him, my entire body tense with shock as the feeling of the loose skin where the fingers had once been felt terrible to the touch. The meat where the rest of the bone lie inside his hand was raw and red. I squirmed away from him as he yanked me off the chair. In the midst of the scuffle, I threw my body into the screen door accidentally and fell backward inside the house, landing on the tile and thereby bursting open the screen door lining.

A gaping hole the mirror image of the lawn chair’s hole now hung loose. I stared up at him from the floor, shocked at what just happened. He’d never lost his cool on me like that. Never been physical with me before. Even though it wasn’t a reaction meant to hurt me, it seemed instead a forceful way of protecting me from something that hadn’t even happened yet. His face was slack with fear. In fact, I’d never seen his face take that shape before. The lines around his eyes and his mouth hung open in stark regret. Thinking back, it was a look of frozen terror. I pulled myself up from the ground and checked for cuts and scrapes on my arms. Nothing. Still, he stood in fear.
More scared than I had been. I thought he might have another heart attack.

“Dad? I’m fine. See. I didn’t know the chair was broken,” I moved the chair closer to him and folded it up so it could exist out of our way. He looked at me with big wet eyes and then grabbed me close to him and cried. Closer than he ever had before. So close that even when I was a child, I don’t think I remember a hug that grand. That secure. The kind of hug you give to check that the person you’re with is still there and breathing with you in tandem. The kind where you might have to let go before you can start living again because all time has stopped. When he pulled back from me, he heaved giant sobs from deep within his chest and I gasped.

One eye was dangling by a moist thread from his eye socket.

#

In the next few weeks, the body intensified its separation. Now the other eye was out too. The tendons both eyes were attached to just slipped right out of his skull counter to my projection and somehow, he could still see. The long lizard tails hung from the eyeballs as he held them in his unstable palms. It took me a minute but soon, as the rest of his hands fell off, he encouraged me to hold the eyes too. I placed them around for assistance. It became kind of fun.

That’s how we came to find out the rear of the fridge was such a gross place and how we found an old antique clock his mother had given him before she died. It was shoved at the very top of a dusty garage shelf lined with old tools and lawn equipment.

“Can I have this?”

“Of course, it’s yours. What am I gonna do with it? Tell time?”

I smiled. This clock reminded me of the interior of my grandmother’s house. Full of tchotchkes and dusty fake flowers. Looking around my father’s garage now it felt familiar. Even though I could hardly recall the past at times, it seemed to ignite something happy inside of me. I fiddled with the arms of the clock that were still functioning, “I just need to figure out how to get it fixed and I bet it’d make that cool chime sound it used to make?”

“You remember that?”

“The midnight chime? Of course. I could never sleep in that house,” I said.

“That shit scared me when I was a kid too.”

“Straight out of Poe or something, right?”

“What’s that?” He pushed one slimy eye closer to me to assess my reaction.

I forgot my father wasn’t my mentor or friend in the time we’d been spending together and he didn’t have a reference point for well-known Victorian Gothic tales. He didn’t go to school much after high school. If he had any cultural reference points it was music. He could tell you every Black Sabbath album from 1970 to now.

“You know, like, Edgar Allan Poe,” I said. “He writes scary poems and stories. The Raven. The Tell-Tale Heart. Did you ever read that in school?”

“Yeah, you know in high school I think maybe we did. It’s where the guy can hear the heart beating and he can’t find it?” He asked.

I nodded, impressed, “That’s right.”

“I like that kind of stuff. Like real, visceral.”

I looked up at him as he pronounced the word. I hadn’t ever heard anything that observant come out of his mouth. “Yeah, visceral is a great description for it.”

He smiled, proud.

“So, what did he do at the end about it? About the sound?”

I paused. It had been a long time since I’d read any Poe. “You know, I don’t remember what he did at the end either.”

#

It wasn’t long before forearms fell off at the elbow. Then, feet at the ankles, then calves at the knee. As a Tupperware would no longer suffice, we had to get creative. In the garage we found some old shelving. I grabbed what tools were still left and with the help of my father’s loose eyes we propped what was left of him up in his armchair where he was able to instruct me in building a very basic shelving system that sat just inside the corner of the kitchen. It took us a whole Saturday to build, and I didn’t even mind the time spent hammering and adjusting as my father told me where to place a nail or where to measure so that the boards would fit together just right. We ordered take out and I fed him Lo-Mein between hammering, seeing as both arms were gone now, and he mentioned that carpentry had always been his backup plan. “Why didn’t you ever just go all in if you liked it so much,” I asked.

“I don’t know. I guess because it sounded hard. You gotta get all the supplies and stuff and that costs money. And then sometimes you have to be creative when say, the customers want some real specific kinda design or something. I don’t know that I had the energy for all that.”

“Yeah, I guess I wouldn’t have either.”

“You’re a creative person. What’s stopping you from doing whatever it is you want to?”

“What do you mean?”

“I guess, didn’t you used to paint, draw? Do you still do that? I don’t see you do stuff like that anymore.”

He was right.

“Sometimes I do.”

“Why not more?”

No one had grilled me about my passions in some time. “I don’t know I guess I just think about all the things I could possibly be doing and all the things that I want to do and then it all gets piled up in a big to-do list in my head before I can ever actually sit down and get any of it done. And then I look up and it’s nighttime or a week later and I guess… I guess I’m just tired.

Does that make sense?”

“Perfect sense,” he smiled. I averted his eyes before it could get any weirder.

Understanding each other was new territory for us. “There, I think it’s finished now,” I mused as I took a step back to admire the work. “Where are all of our little friends?” I asked. My father grabbed his missing ear from a side table and gestured toward the dining table. I double checked my notes app on my phone to be sure of what we had.

Left Hand, Right Hand, Left Arm, Right Arm up to elbow.
Left foot, Right foot, Left Calf up to knee, Right calf up to knee.
Two Eyes, one ear.

We’d been placing the ear around more and more. Two nights ago, we set the ear outside on top of the grill then pushed the grill toward the back fence to listen in on this spectacular fight between his teenage neighbor and what we supposed was one of her many lovers who seemed to know he was one of many. My father still had lips, thankfully, so he recounted the entire enraged encounter back to me. We giggled as we ate our dinner.

I took the ear and then walked between the table and the new shelf and placed all of the body parts up there like victorious trophies. Thick and bulbous little reminders of what each of them had done for him. I held his eyeballs in front of the shelf so he could get a good look. “I didn’t even know I had a scar on the back of my leg. I don’t remember where that came from.”

“Sports injury?” I asked.

“Nah, it’s too thick and…” In an instant he was in tears. My hands were suddenly wet with salty emotion. My inclination was to run and get a napkin, but I thought that felt too interfering at the height of the moment. Instead, I just stood holding his eyes as the tears pooled over my feet. I positioned the eyeballs away from the shelf and toward my face so he could get a good look at me while I talked.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“This isn’t right. I don’t know what else I can do for you?”

“Yeah, I know that. I’m sorry, I guess that’s what’s making me so, so— I don’t know.

You should go back to doing the things you want to do. I’ll be okay here. You can go.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. I’ll figure out this out by myself. You just go.”

“There’s so much left to figure out though. What about food, and doctors’ visits and gross, like, the bathroom? How will you do all that?”

“I got myself into this situation. I can get myself out.”

“Can you?” I asked. He moved his shoulders to what amounted to a shrug. The eyes in my hands were drier now. I placed them on a small glass dish on the new shelf and went to thekitchen to grab a napkin and wipe my hands. “Can you turn the TV on?” He asked. I flippedthrough a few stations before I found a documentary court drama about a serial killer inWisconsin. “And can you point my eyes at the TV?” he asked. I walked over and pointed the

eyes in the direction of the TV.

“You should go.”

“Dad.”

“No, I want you to. I’m not saying forever. Maybe just for now. For tonight. Go stay at your mother’s. Tell her hello for me,” he said quiet and small.

“Is that what you want?”

“Yes.”

I gathered what little belongings I’d brought with me and tied my shoes as the serial killer denied plausibility to the TV judge. I put on my jacket and walked toward the door. “Just for tonight?” I questioned again, just to make sure.

“Sure,” he answered.

I nodded. “Bye then.”

“Get some rest. You deserve it.”

“See you tomorrow, Dad.”

“You got it.”

I closed the door behind me. I walked slow and deliberate. I looked back into the house where I could see the outline of his torso through the curtains. My father, now just a lonely torso propped up in a dingey brown leather Lay-z-boy. The yellow light outlining what was left of him through the curtain seemed so final all of a sudden.

As I reached the end of the driveway I looked down at the ground. Another finger was there in front of me. It was very dark so I couldn’t see well but from the experience of the past few weeks I was sure it was a finger. Maybe it was even in the same place I’d found the first. For a moment I thought we’d misplaced one of my father’s extremities.

Until I reached my own hand down for it.