by Theodore Brady
A Skeletal Outline
My family stood over me when I died. I recall them along the periphery while I lived.
If asked, I could always confirm my son’s age, starting when he was five—the age of diagrammatical selfishness. He’d love anything, hate anyone, and the next day he’d pledge something to someone seen on TV. When I’d try to share his interests with him, he’d spit in my face and tell me to taste it. Later he’d hug my leg and assume I’d remember nothing.
My daughter thrived differently, starting when she was three—the age of destructive wonder. She’d ruin something she knew was important and request forgiveness before confessing her crime. I’d seen her punch her mother’s chest after having heard what it was meant to do. When we tucked her into bed that night, she gave us a kiss along with a warning: Keep Mom’s torso to yourselves.
We erected our family from a skeletal outline, agreeing it could be worth it if we kept track of all the pieces. We stood by and watched our son inflate, doubling himself at two, quadrupling at four. Those years arrived unplanned, but personhood seemed to agree with him.
Our daughter arrived later and without context. She never asked to be here and never wanted to leave. Her face could appear both playful and hateful, suggesting a need for delicate cultivation. I stayed home to raise her and used my duties as leverage. I demanded meals be vitamin-rich and hormone-free. I required eccentric massages and large-format intimacy. My wife declined and said she’d already done the heavy lifting.
More years seeped in, and our son progressed on his path toward enlargement. Cyclopean at six, he grew without permission. Seven, eight, nine. These ten-year-old titans, it’s as if the yearly birthday cake and ice cream had led to such gruesome expansions. Yet he expressed no violence. Only once did I see his fist near his sister’s face. She was trying to play house and her spurious domesticity upset him. He swung and missed. And at that age she was so unjustly swifter and struck back with a plastic frying pan, knocking our dear boy flat. I thought we’d need a shovel to peel him off the living room floor or leave him perished there.
I deferred to my wife to educate them about the more cryptic functions of their anatomy. I didn’t want to pervert anyone or be seen as perverted. Neither took to the birds or bees. Love they said. My children preferred love.
Sometimes beneath our marriage, my wife and I still convened. Below parenthood, we spoke of these yarns we’d spun from our loins. There is a rhythm between two bodies dragged over the border of middle age, pointing and counterpointing, immigrating to our fugue state. We said we would learn the names of enough state capitals and geometric shapes to help our children transcend their homework. We would teach them to drive and never ask where they’d been; a talent show, a football game, a parking lot fizzing with kisses and wine coolers—why would they tell us?
They would turn an smeary fifteen, a pocked sixteen, sticky and greased as the price of self-consciousness. My son stopped growing an inch below monstrous, but my daughter stood nearly six feet at high school graduation. For this she would be punished all the days of her twenties. In college my son studied to become a physicist while playing beer pong with brow-pierced girls and unbathed boys. When I’d asked about his habits, he said his revels kept him from inertia and other embarrassing states of matter.
After abandoning the nest, my weakling children called by the hour. They had their cups out, asking for more, more of whatever we’d given them when they were helpless at home. Now they wanted it mailed, as if the discreetness of their dependence propped up their self-sufficiency. As if they couldn’t see my scalp emerging from my hair’s last weeds, what the public saw around my crown and mid-scalp, what their mother revealed to me with the use of two hand mirrors. My daughter would admit she saw it, too, what was happening to me. She called it the Jaws of the World, as if real teeth had bitten something dignified off the top.
Later my son said he couldn’t drink single malts and still make it to his diffraction labs. He became a high school chemistry teacher to save us on tuition. My daughter gave up sunlight to become a computer whisperer, her eyes abandoning their blues for grays as she tallied blips of site traffic and resurrected dead hotlinks. And there she sat at Christmas dinner, pale and folded over her plate, with her head swung up to face me, witnessing how far back my hairline had stepped into the lion’s mouth. That night my wife exhibited a holiday friskiness. She was kind of kidding, looking spooky as her head went under the blankets, a caroling ghost revealing how life had passed me by during those seasons I’d spent holding mirrors to my bald spot.
There was apparently more life. My boy had a boy. My girl had a boy, too. They became the people you meet when you wake fifty-five. My daughter had married a man shorter than she was—a full foot—as if to prove she’d at last conquered the Jaws. My son was already divorced, but as if to prove he’d once found love, he often brought his child around. And one night, as if to prove I’d grown older, my wife flicked my groin with her finger and said goodnight. I apologized and hurried to spoon her on our forgotten anniversary.
A new year entered our home. Another holiday corralled us around the table to watch my son drink a gift bottle of scotch while discussing his boy. My daughter sat with her three-year-old in her lap, listening. Both listening.
His son was eaten by a wave from the lake.
He’d been chasing a dog my son had just bought.
My daughter clapped once before she cried at the end.
Her son lived long after.
Before my sixtieth, I cut my hair down to the nubs. My wife liked it and forgave my decades of clown-swept combovers. My son approved, too, and his wife nodded. His former wife. They were trying again; it wasn’t to be, but they slept together in his childhood bedroom just to be sure.
I became the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
My wife worried one day when she saw what I’d made in the toilet. It took six months to arrive with real pain. My grandson saw me frowning through a crack in the bathroom door. He said I’d probably been jinxed before he was born. Seven is the age of mellow skepticism.
My wife apologized and still made love to me, holding me down until it was love.
I held her in my jaws. My whole world.
We’d gone far with family planning, far enough so my wife would not be alone when conclusions arrived. My son was there, and my daughter watched my pulse with her boy who said I looked dead. My wife pinched my chin in front of them, as if to set an example of how I should be handled. I lay beneath her, unable to ask if she could come closer.
My family stood over me when I died. I fell from their periphery while they verified my age, stated my destination. When asked about my interests, they’d review what they’d seen and recite what I’d said. Later they’d say less and that’d be enough.
They’d assume I’d remember nothing.
Theodore Brady is a writer working out of Chicago. His work has appeared in The New Guard, and his stories have received recognition from a number of writing awards, including the Story Foundation Prize (semi-finalist 2023), the Machigonne Fiction Prize (semi-finalist 2021), and the Fresher Writing Prize (finalist 2020). During the past fifteen years, Theodore has taught writing and worked alongside other writers, designers, and educators to promote the literary and plastic arts of the Midwest’s lesser known inhabitants. He is drafting his first novel concerning the Great Recession’s impact on Chicago.