Happy People Live Here

by C. Sean McGee

9B

  The Father sat on the edge of the bonnet sipping his coffee and watching as two birds fought with one another over some seeds he had picked off of his bun and thrown onto the ground. Both birds were pecking away on the ground but one of them, the larger one, the one that looked dull and ordinary, kept getting picked on, and for no good reason too. The smaller one, the one with a dainty body that was spotted beige and yellow on light brown feathers, it got riled whenever the bigger, duller bird came close. It would lift one of its wings into the air abruptly like some fascist salute, much the same way that The Father’s mother before she hanged herself, would show him the back of her hand whenever his budding nuisance drew too close to her wilting patience.

  The Father always imagined that birds were the kind of beings that always got along. There were the mean ones of course; the ones that swooped upon the heads of children as they played in parks, but those types of birds had faces that looked as mean as their intention.

  Birds like these, though; they were the type that fluttered about like a dried leaf, carried by a gusting wind; the kind of leaf that sweeps past your hand, but never into it. And The Father, in his life, had never imagined that something so colored and small and so charming could be, without any just reason, so aggressive.

  As he locked the driver’s door, he stood gazing at his reflection in the mirror. He wasn’t an old man and he in no way felt as young as others might have claimed him to be. His face though was weathering. It looked more dented and lined than the one he remembered once wearing. Inside, though, he felt the same.

  When he was a boy, his mother locked him in his bedroom. There were no windows so it was hard for him to know how long he had been locked away. It was long enough though for his hunger to make him so dizzy that when he did finally eat, just a little bit was enough to fill him up.

  Every time his mother locked the door, he’d stand right before it sulking and sniffing lightly after his tantrum had dulled and his eyes would slowly settle to the darkness in the room until he could see perfectly, the outline of the handle of the door. And he would stare at the handle for as long as it took for the handle to turn.

  The feeling he had as a boy, watching the cracked porcelain handle in the pitch black room, waiting for the door to open was the same as he had now, standing in front of his own reflection, staring but not looking, and waiting for something to happen.

  He was waiting maybe, for himself to feel how he looked, for some change to happen in his body like the onset of a fever; something to let him know that he was no longer a boy and that he had become a man and from there, a husband and because of that, a father.

  He wanted to know, “what does a father feel like?”

  He stared and he stared, hoping to know.

  Time, though. This he could feel.

  He could feel time in the morning when he got out of bed, and his muscles and his bones; they creaked and cracked like the walls of an old house on a cold night. And it felt as if the pieces might all fall apart as they churned over one another and then, when he was on his feet, it would always feel as if a piece was out of place as if it were missing.

  Like when The Mother hinted that there was something wrong, that he wasn’t like he used to be. When she hinted that he was cheating on her and that he had fallen out of lust when in truth, time had taken from him, the lust that in his youth was so plenty.

  And he felt time, not in the cruel turning of her affection and from it, the resentment and anger it would spurn, but in the shame that warmed his blood and the back of his throat; the shame that watered his eyes and whitened his knuckles; the shame that metamorphosed into rage; the shame that he could not admit to her, of being less than a man.

  He could hear time too. He could hear it in the way that he spoke. But more so, he could hear time in how he complained. Where once there was a cynical whimsy in his negated derision to waking up, now, his early morning moans, they sounded out like the dropping of an anchor, with the weight his of disappointment, splashing against the tide of his exhaustion.

  He could feel time; he could feel it in the cracking of his bones and he could feel it in the void in his masculinity. And he could hear time too; he could hear it in the excuses that he gave to his lover and in the aggravating silence that ensued.

  When he was a boy, he knew what it felt like to be older than what he was though he had no recollection of what that actually felt like, being a boy.; as if he had ever stopped being one to become another.

  He was always so accustomed to feeling how he felt that he couldn’t imagine every feeling any different. He could assume, though, that he was older; by the gaunt look on his face, the lines across his forehead, the stains on his crooked teeth and the furrow across his brow, that which framed a stern and unchanging look upon the shame which lay crumpled and tucked away somewhere beneath.

  But what did it feel like to be a grown-up? What did it feel like to be responsible? What did it feel like to love only one person, and what did it sound like, when you told them the truth? What the hell did it feel like, to be a father?

  He knew what it felt like to be sick. He knew what it felt like to have a fever. He even knew and remembered what healing felt and tasted like; that abasing flavor like licking the spit from the bottom of an ashtray.

  He knew what summer felt like and with it, autumn, spring, and winter.

  Hot days, cold days, long days, short days, boring days, good days, shit days, right and wrong decisions, love, anger, regret, remorse, revile, more love, love fucking love; glad to have it and wishing it were gone.

  He knew what all of that felt like. He knew what it felt like to be punched and kicked and to be shouted at and cursed upon and he knew what it felt like to be spat at and pushed around.

  But for the life of him, he had no idea what it was supposed to feel like, being a father.

  He didn’t know if he was feeling it now. It might have been something so subtle, like the onset of a drug, slowly kicking in. Maybe the more he looked, the longer it would take. Maybe in his anticipation, he might have missed a signal, he might have been looking the wrong way this whole time.

  The Father stared and he stared until his eyes were seeing everything around his reflection and not his reflection at all. He had felt this way, his entire life as if he were waiting for a door to open and for someone to welcome him, into his own self.

  What was it supposed to feel like, to be a father?