Bailey Davis
Daily Bread
Cate LeBrun
We read a book about kangaroos. We read a book about koalas and I squinted at the pages, the gloss of 2D fur smothered under my fingers like I could magic it all to soft. Like if I pet their good fat tummies long enough, they could and would, for me. The night he left we read a book about jumpy make-believe macropods. They roamed their good grass planet until these freaky little pollution aliens arrived. Spaceships shooting sadness lasers and farting giant plumes of vaporized garbage, packs of tiny fuzzball heads poking out of the gloom. Their giant eyeballs leaking hope. After that Mom taught me the Our Father because I didn’t know it yet. I closed my eyes and prayed like he was coming back because I didn’t know it yet. Megan kept reading the books we got with her library card since mine was we didn’t know where, then she said Whoa Nelly, SPIDERS, only I didn’t hear her that time because the words from the prayer and the garbage farts were making pictures in my head so loud I couldn’t swallow anything else. My fuzzy ears now rounded palms, now twitching marsupial shells, small handfuls of noise scooping in. Staying there. Give us this. Coming back. Forgive us ours. There wasn’t much room, with my ears full of fuzz. Only enough for the giant loaf of broken window in the kitchen, the glass crumbs all over the floor, Dad’s shoes gone and his hand radio quiet and his fist covered in half a roll of bloody paper towels in the back of some Uber. The twist tie of worship clasping my mouth shut. The view from the top of the stairs a long, long way down.
Fuzz in my ears. Tender folds of floating sound.
All of it like the tired wind through the two-pronged legs of the NO TRESPASSING! sign behind the 7-Eleven, the one Dad used to take us to for Saturday Slurpees, only this Saturday there weren’t any Slurpees because he left the single-speed but took his passport. The gold-crested punch of a prodigal kangaroo. Thy kingdom, coming. Some of it like the dull blink of Dad’s mail truck flashers, gulps of dirty light strobing the driveway, the shadow of his delivery crate piled high with steaming envelopes. Big and red and stuffed with probably sin.
From somewhere in the pulse of it, Megan. Somewhere, spiders. She wouldn’t shut up about the spiders so I finally opened my eyes and she looked me dead in the pupils and said They’re as big as your huge dumb face, in Australia. They’re as big as the sun.
That’s where Dad was going. Australia. HOME, he wrote on the torn sheet of printer paper, the wet shake of Mom’s voice like the drowning crack of an earthquake. The air from my listening lungs like the guts of two punctured birthday balloons. When he wrote HOME he also meant back to my half-brother John, a myth I hadn’t met yet and wouldn’t meet until I was 32 and collecting piles of myself in sand so hot and pure it would forever be the color of migraine. The color of a three-day expired travel visa with no plans to extend and no ticket to leave. As it is in heaven, then. Here. There.
Before all that was this. This was a handwritten not-goodbye. This was a Dad-shaped smear of gasoline and soaped up Irish Spring, the smell of his uniform launched up my nose where I wanted it to stay, probably forever. This was the imaginary too-quick hold of a one-arm hug while the smooth of my ears twitched warm against him. Sadness lasers shooting plasma beam tears. Words polluting everywhere but there, still. Baby guy, he whispered into my fur, not in his voice but in Pretend Dad Voice, the voice burrowed into the dough of my skull for whenever I needed it. Don’t worry, he said. He’d say. Don’t worry. They need mailmen there, too.
The day after he left, church. I pet the soft thick of my arms over and over and over. Dipped my claws in the vat of holy water and scratched my push-button nose, for something human to do. At the time that it happened, everyone held hands and prayed the Our Father, together. Only it was important that he wasn’t Ours; he was only mine and Megan’s. And all of it was for him. None of it was for him.
It’s all just slices of things, though. Prayers to the mouth of God and circles of moon on tongues, the crunch of broken glass and the taste of nothing, nothing, when they tell you it’s bread. When they tell you it’ll come back. That it’ll be there whenever you miss it. Everyone’s palms squeezing each other at the end of always, the way it goes, how it never doesn’t go. A fart-scraped trachea, the rotten weight of pummeled Earth surrounding: then, Amen.
Cate LeBrun is from the Pacific Northwest. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Doubleback Review, The Wild Umbrella, and The Hooghly Review’s Weekly Features. She lives in Austria with her husband and kids.