You Almost Never Walk Anywhere With Your Father Now
but when you do, it’s always late at night, his voice on the phone in your ear, in your head, and now it’s pleading not shouting, and you find yourself pulling on a jacket, grabbing your car keys, cruising through your quiet suburb, summer sky wide open like a wound, into the city – the city where you never go at night now you’re a father yourself – the directions burnt into your synapses, bringing you to the house with no front garden where you grew up playing football on the street outside, cast-off jumpers for goalposts, and you use your key to get in – the house has a smell that’s new to you, a scrofulous, dirty smell instead of the bitter onions you recall from silent childhood dinners – but the place is empty, cold, nothing cooked here in a while, so you leave the car there and jog-walk the short distance to The Stag’s Head, still scarred dark brown and smoke-marinated inside: your father is keening in the snug, alone, beside the payphone, and you think the barman might be one of the lads you went to school with – but if he’s middle-aged now, what does that mean for you? – and you and he each take an elbow and lever your father onto his feet, and you can take it from there, supporting him through the empty streets back to the cold house, and you listen and nod, get him into bed, lie and say you don’t know where she’s gone either, then drive home to where she is, your mother, having finally made her escape, nursing a late, late cup of tea and the last purple bruise she will stand for turning yellow in the dawn.
Fiona McKay is the author of The Top Road, AdHoc Fiction (2023), and Drawn and Quartered, Alien Buddha Press (2023). Words in Bath Flash, Janus Literary, Lost Balloon, Gone Lawn, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, The Forge, Ghost Parachute, trampset, and others. She lives in Dublin, Ireland.
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