A Warning
My husband told one of his jokes, one of his extremely committed puns, a dad joke for a man who would likely never be a dad, if we were to face how things were, which at that point, we weren’t. I went along with it and left to do the shopping. I was rounding the corner of the park when my dead dad cleared his throat and my dead dog barked.
I turned around but they weren’t there. The dog had been gone for years but my dad had passed just a little over two months before. There was no one else, either, no one whose own personal sounds could be responsible for my sonic mirage. I felt unsettled but turned back in the direction towards the store.
“Kitty!”
I whirled. My father was the only one who had called me that. The only one who was allowed to, actually.
Still nothing, no one. I felt disappointed and then worried. First I thought about mentioning it to my therapist next session but then I wondered if it was the sort of thing that could get me committed. I considered my approach while I stabbed my feet up the slight incline to the better grocery among the cheap options. I absentmindedly followed the list I’d been given, thinking that perhaps if I smoothly transitioned into what I’d seen by talking about how much I’d been thinking about certain episodes from when I was young, times when my father had done really good things, when he had been terrible. Perhaps it would make sense to have had these, well, not exactly hallucinations, not really, when he’d been visiting my dreams, sometimes angry, sometimes just quiet.
I was well into this internal justification by the time I paid and left, pulling the packed wheelie cart behind me past the park. And there he was, lower body like a red superathlete from an Etruscan vase, upper body by Frito-Lay, and there was the dog, shaped, after years of assiduous begging at a permissive table, like an ottoman with a butthole. I started and the cart crashed to the ground. I heard the crisp mush of eggshells and forgot to despair, because there they were, standing very still. They were statues, actually. There was usually a spindly abstract sculpture of a man with a dog in the park, something made by a local art student, but now it was them, unmistakably.
“Come over here, Kitty. Sorry, I can’t meet you in the middle,” said the man, my dead dad. I looked around and there was no one. “It’s ok, I have something to tell you.”
I left the fallen cart in the sidewalk and walked to where the statue was. They were fully stationary but I pet the dog. I couldn’t bring myself to touch my dad. The last time I had touched him was to run my palm over the black hairs on his bloodless arm while his body lay in its coffin.
“So I came to warn you,” he said, his bronze eyes and mouth unmoving and facing ahead. “The things that are coming, they’re terrible things, and I need you to know. I want you to know you can still stop it.”
“Dad, what’s going on? You’re…”
“Dead?”
“Well, yeah.”
“That’s true. I knew it’d be a little creepy, but you find out all kinds of things when you die, it’s wild, no spoilers, but this one thing I learned, I had to come here, try to take shape, so I could tell you.”
“Are you talking about climate change?”
“No. I mean, that’s bad too. I’m talking about him, a guy, a bad guy. But you can stop him.”
“Dad, what are you talking about? This is so oracular and weird. Who?”
“I know, I know. It’s a guy you haven’t met yet.”
I realized I was crying. “I miss you.”
“I miss you too honey. But here’s the thing, you’ll need to stop this guy or everything is gonna get a lot worse for everyone here.”
I felt the crush of grief in my gut, my chest. “Ok, tell me what’s going on.”
“I will, but I need to go now. I’ll be back tomorrow.” And the statue was itself again.
