Comedy
My father, while walking, slips on a banana peel and falls on his face.
“Ouch!” he says.
Tragedy
My father, while walking, slips on a banana peel and falls, breaking his neck and dying instantly.
He doesn’t say anything.
The Absurd
My father, while walking, slips on a banana peel and falls, breaking his neck.
Before dying, he says to me:
I always say, don’t look for meaning, meaning that what I want to say is unforgivable and can’t even be put into words, or at least into words experienced as such, and I want to tell you that. I am not your father, though I raised you as my son, but I am your brother. Your real father, the gene kind, was a box of sheets of paper that were blank at first, but I have since written on them to give meaning to your birth, as a brother protects brother.
As a baby, we thought you had colic, you cried so often and for no reason. It wasn’t until Mom discovered our father flipping his pages over you like feathers, deep in the middle of the night, in an attempt to be comforting to his son, that we realized the cause: Our father, you see, was so feminine, everything he touched turned to water.
Around the time you turned four, Mom kicked our father out of the house we were living in at the time. You probably don’t remember it, but you loved playing in the backyard garden. We would pick fresh carrots together, and you wondered how something coming out of the dirt could come out not-brown. I told you that there was so much life underground, and life has so much color, you just can’t see it all is all. I didn’t tell you that our grandparents were also underground, and that they, by now, probably lacked any trace of color.
Anyway, Mom had kicked our father out of the house. Or, rather, she took him out of the house and took him out of his box, sheet by sheet, and lit a match to each one. His caress on her fingertip made her weep instantly, often causing a match to be snuffed. She found ways to do it, keeping her face turned away, so she wouldn’t see, wouldn’t stop the burn.
When she was done, she buried the box our father had come in, putting inside a note, so she says, but she has never said what it said. She did say that she had intended to put our father’s ashes back in the box, but the wind that day made that impossible. He must be halfway to China by now, she used to say.
One day, he’ll be back, but different, and we won’t recognize him so we will sneeze and wince at this dust in our eyes.
And we will cry, our body’s way of keeping that dust out, of keeping clean.
