All That’s Left to Say

Matt Barrett

The day Will died, he admitted to a secret: he’d had a second family. His children surrounded him in the home he’d raised them in, with the same clunky TV playing his favorite show.
          “Yeah,” said his daughter. “We know.”
          “You know?”
          “You told us. Like—a hundred times.”
          Will tried to remember but couldn’t. With the tubes in his nose and beeping machines— the needles taped to his knuckles caked in blood—he figured he had an excuse.
          “We met them once,” said his son.
          “You met them?”
          The two of them nodded. He studied their faces: two blurred ovals with blurred brown hair. He convinced himself they were beautiful.
          “So,” he said. “What’d you think?”
          “What’d we think?”
          If Will died now, before he could say another word, he wondered how his children would remember him. He hoped he could leave them with something—a bit of wisdom or thought, an image they might consider, years from now, instead of the man they saw lying here before them. He imagined death as a tunnel tied to a string. When he was young, the string was taut, balanced, so he could sit in the tunnel without moving. But the string had frayed and the tunnel began to turn so his body slid to the other end, where there was no coming back.
          He reached for their hands. His children’s fingers grazed a tube.
          They were good kids, Will thought. Good, but passionless, aimless—all of the lesses—ambitionless. The kind of kids he knew would spend the rest of their days untethered to life’s responsibilities. Forever childless, single. A part of him wanted to say he’d only had two families to make up for the ones they wouldn’t. Another part was more restrained.
          He chose to say it anyway.
          “If you two ever had families, maybe I wouldn’t have needed a second.”
          “Dad,” his daughter said. “We both have families.”
          “You do?”
          “And houses with kids. Your grandkids. Remember?”
          He didn’t. But he could only assume his grandkids’ faces were just as oval and blurred.
          “If I told you,” Will said, “that one day the other family just appeared, would you believe me?”
          He still remembered the day it happened. Will was thirty-eight. His children were five and seven. He had a wife who loved him, who he loved in return. When he went to get the paper, a van pulled up with a woman he did not recognize and two kids the same age as his own with a dog in back, and they had such pretty faces, this family he had not seen before, that when the woman said, “Come on, honey, we can’t be late for work,” he stepped inside and went to work and came home that afternoon to eat dinner with the children he’d always known and repeated the cycle the very next day, to drive to work with this other family, who kissed his head each morning when he stepped out of their van.
          “That isn’t how life goes,” his daughter said.
          But it was. Or at least that’s how it went for him. One day Will was young and thin, then he opened his eyes, and he wasn’t anymore. Once, he was satisfied, happy, finding himself in the same small office, performing the same small tasks, until he looked at the walls and wondered where the hell he was. Even now, he couldn’t remember who stuck the needles in his hands, and it was equally plausible he’d woken up from a beautiful night catching lightning bugs outside his childhood home just for these needles and tubes to appear.
          “I have so much more to do,” he said, not that he could think of anything now. But the feeling was there—of having dreams and hopes, ambitions still left to discover. He pictured his kids at his funeral, struggling to come up with something to say. How many funerals had gone silent, when even the cliches couldn’t cut it anymore? Herein lies a man. That is all that’s left to say.
          Will’s breathing slowed and his children turned to a line on the screen, instead of his own eyes. He had wanted to name them Alphonse, after his father. But first he had a daughter, and by the time his son came along, his wife had settled on Simon. Sometimes, when he dreamt of them, they were both named Alphonse. And in these dreams, they were five and seven years old, and he was still thirty-eight, living on this quiet street outside Philly. And each morning they were happy to see him off, so he could perform the same small tasks and eat dinner with them in the afternoon before the sun settled beneath the trees and soaked the world in a warming shade of blue. Life was always supposed to go that way: this continual, daylong journey to see that light blue glow, but now the tunnel shifted upright so his back laid flat against the sides and his feet rose off the ground, and it was a whole lot like taking the slide as his daughter’s final words echoed in his head.

Matt Barrett holds an MFA in Fiction from UNC-Greensboro, and his stories have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Sun Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review miCro series, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions, among others. He is currently working on a novel and putting the finishing touches on a short story collection.