Vapor Field Face

At this point, it really wasn’t serious, but I was laying awake in my hole, distressed. The hole was the closet space in the basement that had become my bedroom as my father renovated the upstairs. It was an odd setup- it was sort of an alcove set into the wall that was big enough for a bed, and Daddy had built me a special ladder to climb up into it.  He told me it was like I was climbing into a treehouse, or like I was a music box ballerina. I would put on performances for my 5th grade classmates when they would come over, in an attempt to be less embarrassed. 

My older brother slept on the ground at the base of the hole. He would’ve been there on his mattress that night- the whole family lived on pieces of the basement floor during that period. 

We’d just moved into a hell of a “fixer upper,” banking on my father’s gift in carpentry, artistry, and vision to transform any humble material into something precious. This night, the half demolished house was filled with his absence. He was at the hospital in need of gall bladder surgery. I can’t remember if this was the night of the operation itself, but I knew he was in the hospital with something wrong with his body, and he hadn’t been home for bedtime. We were worried for him in the natural way you are when an illness culminates into an operation, but we knew this was safe, standard, and that it would fix him. 

I was very sure that it would all be okay. Last time everyone was this worried was when doctors had found a tumor on Mama. Upon hearing the news that it was benign, I told Daddy “I knew it, God wouldn’t do that to us.” 

I felt the same certainty in this moment. However, there I was in my hole, feeling profoundly unsettled. Not because I thought the operation wouldn’t fix him, not because he wasn’t in the house, but because I had begun noticing while laying there that I couldn’t fully picture his face. I could tell myself about his face- he had jet black hair, bright blue eyes, thick eyebrows, strong, hollow cheekbones. Everyone said he was very handsome. I could piece together a face with those sorts of features, but the more I tried to concentrate on it being his, the face dissolved into vapors and dust, melting and distorting like a Spongebob ice cream cone. The more I tried, the more futile it became. 

I lay in the darkness of my hole feeling the pressing, cavernous absence around me until I finally heard the door open, and my father walk in. In an instant I was down my ladder and in his arms, relieved to feel his solid body and try again to memorize the details of his face.

In his procedure they found tumors, the cancerous kind, proliferating throughout his body. He was gone within a month.