Aliens

Seth Gleckman

You were new, from Montana, name-called Mars because of your red hair, and hated your father, which I found out when I peer edited your passionate paragraph about Mr. Wormwood from Matilda, and while that could have made me resent you—for having no appreciation for something I’d give anything for—instead it made us friends.

I remember that Saturday sunset we sat on the grass outside the entrance to the community pool my mom had lost her key to and for the first time you asked me about him. Usually, I’d lie. It had always felt less embarrassing to pretend I had a few memories of him. In school, I wrote Father’s Day cards like everyone else, putting an acrostic poem in an envelope, drawing him a picture he’d like—one year an armadillo, another a tractor—picking out a football sticker from the teacher’s pile to seal it all inside.

“I don’t remember a single thing,” I said. “Not even his voice.”

My mom told me it was deep and that he laughed at his own stories as he told them. That made me imagine Santa Claus, but in photographs he was beardless and skinny.

“My dad’s nuts,” you said, as you picked some grass and tossed it over your shoulder, a couple blades brought back by the breeze landing in your curly hair. “That’s why we moved here. Because there are better treatments in California.”

Before, you’d called him angry. And though that sounded awful, I never understood why you acted like he was gone. No one can be angry every second of the day. There must have been glimpses of something else. But nuts? Being nuts is like having green eyes.

“Is it working?” I asked.

“No,” you said. “I mean, to other people, it probably seems that way. To people who don’t really know him. He’s calmer now, I guess.” You looked at the pool and I thought for sure you were going to suggest we hop the fence, and in my head I was already coming up with excuses for why I couldn’t do that—that my knee hurt from playing basketball (it didn’t), that I’d heard there were cameras in there (there weren’t)—but instead you stood up and wiped the dead grass from your jeans and said, “It’s hard to explain, but now he takes forever to say things. Like he’s got someone in his ear giving him lines. Even his smiles are like that. Like, by the time he starts smiling, the good thing’s already over with. It’s so awkward.”

I considered this for a moment and then nodded, pretending to understand. It wasn’t his fault. It was the war that had done it. And this made sense to me, and I have a feeling it made sense to you too, that it always had. But at the time, I didn’t know that—I thought maybe you just didn’t understand him as well as I did, despite my never having met him—and so even though part of me (the part that stayed inside during recess to pose questions to the half-listening teacher about volcanic rock or the cycles of the moon) wanted to ask you what it was he still smiled about, I had a feeling that if I dwelled too long on that topic, you’d suddenly realize he wasn’t so bad after all.

“Just like that,” you said, pointing right at me.

“Sorry,” I said, although I wasn’t sure what for.

“Whatever, it’s fine.”

I felt like crying for most of the walk back to my house, so I focused on breathing and counting my steps to distract myself, just like my mom had taught me, and that’s why I only caught bits and pieces of what you said during those few minutes, until we reached my door and I finally looked back up at you and noticed that your eyes were red.

“I think I’m forgetting most of what he was like,” you said, as I rang the doorbell to let my mom know we were back. When she answered she asked us what was wrong, and we both said in unison that we were just cold.

It’d been quite a while since I’d imagined my father, but that night I did. And for a change, I didn’t imagine anything good. Not the two of us at a ballgame or talking about girls. Not his proud eyes when I brought home an A+. Not him teaching me where to grip the steering wheel or how to use aftershave. Just he and I arguing. Him telling me I was good for nothing and slamming the door in my face, and me running to you to tell you all about it.

Seth Gleckman is a high school teacher in Sonoma County, California. He's had fiction published in The South Carolina Review, Permafrost, and others.