by Rush Eby
I’ve got to carry these ashes all the way to the ocean to keep Robert from haunting me. That’s what he said when I was on speaker phone from the hospice center. It wasn’t as formal as you’d expect, the guy’s last wishes; they weren’t original either.
“Pour me into the ocean,” he said like he was the first person to think of it. He said everything as if he’d come up with it all by himself.
“Don’t count your chickens before they hatch, Jonathan.”
“Good things come to those who wait, Jonathan.”
“You can’t have your cake and eat it too, Jonathan.”
Behind all the yelling were these bits of sage advice. Robert must’ve thought I’d never find out that nothing he said or did was original, especially beating his kid. Even then, the last thing you should tell a dying man is that he’s derivative.
The shoebox in the back of my Cherokee seems awfully heavy when I’m not staring at it. None of my radio presets work after about an hour on the interstate, and I’m too lazy to try to find out if music gets any better the farther east you go. I don’t think it does.
Robert wasn’t a nice guy, or a reputable professional, or a loyal friend, or a good Dad; that’s why I’m making this drive. The last thing he would have expected was for me to take a long weekend to dump him off some pier like the extra weight he always was. I’m not doing this for him.
Now I’m in a ditch. One disintegrating wiper blade later, and I’m in Louisiana looking out one cracked windshield at rising water.
I can hear Robert laughing in the back seat like he did when I touched the eye of the stove in second grade. He told me to, and I cried for almost two hours after I did. The whole time I just stared at my skin bubbling up, turning charred black like the edges of public-school burger meat.
“No use crying over spilled milk,” Robert said turning his back on me like the father of the year he was.
I’ve still got that scar on my hand, like a benign tumor always present to remind me how hot stoves can get and how far you should trust people. “As far as you can throw ‘em,” Robert would say.
I’m about to be in the middle of a God-made river ‘cause the water’s coming through the floorboards now.
“You got to get me out of here, Jonathan,” the shoebox says taking on the desperate tone of a someone who can imagine what it feels like to drown.
“Slow and steady wins the race, right Dad?”
“Get me out of here!” he shouts at me, the way he always did. Like I was just another thing in his way.
“One ounce of prevention’s worth a pound of cure, huh Dad?”
“One in the hand’s worth two in the bush?” I say.
“Two birds one stone, remember?!” I’m the one yelling now.
“Should I take a rain check, Dad?!”
“It ain’t over till the fat lady sings, right?!”
“It’s really raining cats and dogs out there.”
The Jeep starts to move as the brown water reaches my chest.
I start beating my fists against the steering wheel when I hear him saying how I’m a “chip off the old block,” how “every cloud has a silver lining”, how he’s got “bigger fish to fry.” Maybe I should just take it all with a grain of salt.
That’s how it was, and it never really stopped—those tracks he left on me. Scars or words, they’re all the same.
“I have to pour you out,” I say, lifting my head above the water line that’s still creeping up the inside of my car.
“All roads lead to Rome.”
This time he doesn’t say anything ‘cause the shoebox in the back seat isn’t in the back seat anymore, and everything it held is gone too. Swept away by heavy rain.
Very unoriginal.
Rush Eby is an American writer and novelist based out of Franklin, Tennessee. He spent his early adulthood traveling through Europe and Asia before enlisting in the United States Marine Corps infantry where he attained the rank of Sergeant. He has worked as a ghostwriter and copywriter. His first novel “Eat Me” is currently in pre-publication, and he is now finishing his upcoming book, “Fetish.”