Joshua Hren
Horseradish

<< continued from Part 2

"Hey. Who's there?" said the neighbor, Rick Wolfowitz, from where he stood, his small body buried in what appeared to be jogging wear-I'm still working to decode the occasional attire that proliferates out here, in the sprawl beyond the city. "All right. That's it. I'm calling the cops. Intruders!" he said, adding an artificial laugh that heed and hawed for a half a minute. I waited for my father to trade with him, to bow to custom and swap jokes, but the repayment never came.

"Shh. Shooting star tonight," I said, sounding as much like my father as I could. Proud of my proximity. After a moment Rick shuffled off, searching the heavenly bodies reluctantly as he went.

"Dad," I said, "I never touched my wife. I mean. I never laid hands on her like that."

He started to stand, his broad shoulders flexing, his whole body thickening in the cold. I pulled the collar of my secondhand parka-the blue one Sophia bought me for Christmas last year-up around my mouth. Wondered whether it was still my turn. Took the coat off and offered it to him. My father is balding, has been since he adopted me, roughly. He rubbed my mess of hair and said, "You don't know what you got. You don't." He pinched the zipper and ripped the whole coat away from where it hung, lifeless, in my mourning arms. He tossed it up and over the railing and I stood tall fast, my legs asleep, and we watched it descend, watched its hood catch on the clothesline hook, its zipper catch the kitchen light below and beam like a comet line, for a second, from silver to gold, before it collapsed into the window well.

"You were a sweet boy from the second you came out. The only one in the family who sleeps. And you always liked the nuzzles and the kisses like your mother. You always used to want the hugs. But I saw you don't now any more," he said, giving me Babica's judicial eye, that impossible orb of merciful justice.

"I maybe never gave you enough. Affection," he said.

"Dad," I said. " Oce. "

"Don't," he commanded me, cuffing my wrist with his hand. "Listen. Maybe I never did. But listen. I don't want to hear how you never touched your wife like that. How you never laid your hands on her. I'm not interested too much in what you didn't do. But I've been wondering one thing for a long time. Do you e ver touch her? Why am I going to die without ever having held a grandchild? Are you two."

My arms stuck out from where the coat hung like a poorly-clad scarecrow, and I swear I saw him look up, a terse search of the sky, as though he hoped a fearless vulture would descend upon me and feed on my overtaxed liver.

"I threw the salt shaker again. Fourth set of them we've gotten. Arbitrary. But it's a habit is what I mean. And this time I," my throat narrowed. "Shattered the. Stained glass."

Earlier that day I'd combed through the weedy grass, trying to gather what I'd shattered, cutting my pointer finger on a chunk of it.

"Again?" he asked, his fingers finding just the right muscled areas of my hand and squeezing there where affection melded into punishment.

"The stained glass was the first time," I contested.

"No kidding," he said. "There was only one window like that to break."

I dared not pull my hand away and in fact felt at home there, trapped there, in his hold. I stared at the reddening sections of my flesh, at his forceful thumb, the one carpel tunneled from pressing buttons at the brewery, and said, "When I was eighteen, just before I moved out, I'd come out here on this porch and want to jump off. Without a parachute mostly. This was the way I'd go. Once I brought plastic bags up here once and tried to gage the proportion to my weight. In the end I couldn't tell whether they would hold me and I chickened out."

"I'll buy you a new set of salt and pepper shakers," he said.

"Actually, the ones I threw, they're metal," I explained, "made to last."

"I'll work with you to put some stained glass back in that window," he said, "though how we replace that kozmos-star Babica loved, or what we'll put there in its place I don't know,"

After a long pause he asked, "What you got in there now?"

"Nothing," I answered, ashamed that I could not at least putter out, "Plastic."

"And where is your wife? Where is Sophia? You left her in that cold house?! And with the draft too?" he asked, letting go of my hand after he had cut off the blood flow sufficiently. I looked at my hand, my limp and lifeless hand, at the hand that had done this to me. I searched for a scar, a mark left by his fingernails, his compression of compassion and punishment.

" Sophia," he said again, "your bride." Her name. Her name.

"I. She's at a mutual friend's place tonight. I'll. Call her in the morning."

"Call her tonight," he said. "Tell her to come here. I'll go into my room and keep quiet. I'll be asleep. If she comes I'll be able to sleep," he said, speaking this last bit on behalf of my mother. He came at me with a tone familiar, one that had been closeted for many years: the primordial command. "You help me with the porch. Next summer. You promise. And I'll go down with you tomorrow and mend that window."

"Yes," was all I could conjure at first, until I managed "She's-I don't have her friend's number. She turned off her cell phone. Trust me I tried," I watched the words to be sure they came out respectably, no tear in their chin-up eyes.

"Look," he said. "And you touch her," he said. You take your hands and put them like this," he said, pulling my rubbery arms, my sleepy legs slackening. He put my hands around his waist, led them to the small of his back, and at that point my chest was against his, my stomach concave against his convex. I smelled. I knew. Skins of sweat had been smothering my body and shedding ever since he said her name. He smelled as he always had-a faint tinge of grease and an undying aftermath of chamomile, which by some mystery was now part of his constitution, as real as the black hair follicles that looked now wolfish, now feline in the neighbor's flickering security light. And he pried my snarly hair away from my forehead and he found my forceps wound that looked like a knotted cross, and he pressed them there, his lips, his gristly chin against the outer lids of my closed eye, keeping the moistening that started to run, keeping it inside.

I knew I could make no return. To him. I knew I could jump, then, and call up from below my supplications, begging alms from the same man who raised me. And so I started, but his finger caught on the collar of my coat, and he redirected me down the stairs, following me a pace apart, coaxing me toward the garden with barely a nudge.

I darted at the little discarded nails of horseradish that had scattered in patterned chaos around the unburning bush. Like a famished hen finally given feed I pecked down and picked them up. Gathering them into my still-numbed, half-bloodless hand, I felt him yank me back up, all nonchalance. As I stood there startled, wavering, holding out the horseradish, my nose knowing the first pangs of its sweet reek, I watched him study the nails, arrange them on a bare patch of frozen clay in the same cruciform as the star of the stained glass window.

"We'll use this for the window," he said matter of fact, obviously stating the obvious. "You broke the lead and the glass, right, I'm sure?" he asked, and I nodded. "Look, here. These are like the lead, when you line them up, they can run through the molded glass. Vsemogocni Bog the sky's falling. Stars are born from the earth. Vsemogocni Bog.

" Let's get on over there now. I'll get the soldering iron. I'll get some old beer bottles and the shards of that old vase. You know, Babica's olive one that you broke when you were young. I'll drive. You look like a drunk though you're a sober little sob tonight, son, you are, aren't you?"

He waited for me to slump toward the car. He stood there. Loosed his glasses from his breast pocket, the thick plastic pair from some twenty years before. The one he had gone back to, recently, in retirement. Licked each lens with a short dab and stretched out his T-shirt to wipe them clean. Then, as I slumped toward the car and creaked opened the door and negotiated my limbs inside, he, turning late, faced me straight on. I turned around. The crumb of comet that had smoldered in the living room and wafted its light and warmth through his house shone from his glasses like the noonday sun. Its embers reflected blithely off of my father's lenses, one of which I had shattered, or he had, with the hug. He hung out his tongue, spat a chunk of glass out and closed his clear-lensed eye, missed the way the chunk descended, lighted, afire until lost in the pavement. Maybe he wasn't ready to see me whole, wholly. Maybe he knew I wasn't ready to see him see me. The divided lens glistened like the stained glass of a Gothic church and at it I stared adoringly, unsure what the eye on the other side could make out, exactly. Neither of us knew who had shattered it, neither wanted to blame the other.

He ducked into the house in haste, seemingly only for a few seconds, his arms full of bags well-fed with shattered glass, nose of a soldering iron sticking out, surrounded by the unnatural nails of horseradish.

We drove down the lifeless, lightless streets, our burning bodies shivering through the car's frugal heat, and as I opened my mouth to speak words of closure my stomach tensed, still hurting from my father's earlier affection. I remained silent. I held my gut, somehow thankful for the queasy feeling trembling me, for the way it distracted, then directed me back toward him, toward the moment he held me until I hurt. He dodged a red-light runner without ceremony, without looking back though it thumped us in the rear, and soon I heard his heavy frame collapse into the seat to the same sound it made when he descended, beat at the day's end, onto his marriage bed. Then a sounding, either a sob or a sober laugh, muffled by his fisted right hand.

I asked to be purged entirely of the words I would have uttered, whatever they would have been, as spoken they would have been a sacrilege on this night, on this night, on this silencing, shooting, starred night.

>> click to read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

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Joshua Hren has published articles, poems, translation, and short stories, most recently in Adelaide, Cobalt, and Windhover. His first story collection, This Our Exile, was published in January of 2018. He is founder and editor-in-chief of Wiseblood Books, and teaches literature, fiction writing, and philosophy at Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina.

>> Back to Issue 22, 2019