Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

Mom was walking through the kitchen, on the way to the utility room, for Dino’s other pair of pants. She took maybe three more steps and then she stopped, like re-listening in her head, and then she looked back to me.

“Say what?” she said.

“Dad,” I said over my next, intentionally big, slurping bite. No eye contact.

Mom looked into the living room, like to be sure Dino had cartoons tuned in, not us.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Juney,” she said.

I hated her calling me that.

I plunged my spoon into the bowl again.

“I saw him the other night,” I said, shrugging like this was no big. “He’s different now. Better.”

“You saw him where?” Mom said, giving me her full attention now.

What she was thinking, I know, was the neighbors just had someone get processed out of lockup, and now they were standing out at the fence, watching the little boys who had moved in next door.

“Right here,” I said, nodding to the kitchen. “He was going back to the utility room.”

Mom just stared at me some more.

“Your father never did laundry,” she finally said. “I don’t think he would come back from the afterlife to run a load of whites.”

In the living room the cartoon swelled and crashed, and we both listened underneath it for the heel of a foot spasming into the carpet.

Dino was okay, though. Sucking on a yogurt.

“He’s a fancydancer now,” I said. “You should see him.”

Mom, even though there was never time for this in the morning, sat down across from me, skated both her hands across to hold the one of mine that was there.

“That’s why you were asking about him,” she said.

“He’s my dad,” I told her.

“You look like him,” she said back. “I never tell you because I don’t want to make you sad. But I remember him from elementary. If we were back home, everybody would be saying it.”

This made my eyes hot. I looked away, took my hand back.

“He’s coming back to help make Dino better,” I said.

Mom wouldn’t look away from my face.

“How would he find us, all the way down here?” she said, her voice like she was letting me down soft, here.

“We’re his family,” I said.

Mom nodded, looked past me, into the living room, and I realized then that she didn’t miss him like I did.

It was why he’d shown himself to me, not her. It was why that bead had hidden itself in the ducts under the house, not stuck around for her to—

And then, all at once, like crashing over me, it hit me: I’d scoured every inch of every room of the house , sure. I’d even drawn our floor plan out, reducing the inches to millimeters on my ruler as best I could, to make sure there weren’t any hidden rooms, any closets that had been boarded over by some past renter.

It was all there in my science notebook.

And, while I’d looked out in the pasture for evidence—only finding a ceremonially buried tetherball pole and the other usual trash of people having lived here once—I hadn’t taken into account the most likely place a person who was dead might want to live, to be close to his family: under the house.

We were up on cinderblock pylon things, not settled onto a concrete foundation. It was why the landlord had come over our first winter: to crawl down there, rewrap the pipes that had no other insulation. He said the varmints would chew it off again in a year or two, but we’d be good for the cold. And we had been, mostly.

“What?” Mom said, seeing some version of all this wash over my face, I guess.

“The bus,” I said, rising with my bowl.

She took it from me, studied me for a moment too long, then flicked her head to the outside world, meaning go, school already, and like that, me and Dino were hand in hand down the rut-road to the bus stop, the dogs pacing us on the other side of the chainlink.

This time, when the kid from my PE nudged Dino over into a kid I didn’t know, trying to get the game started, instead of my usual repositioning, my usual guiding Dino over to my other side, I lit into this kid without even saying anything first.

The bus driver had to pull me off. The kid was going to need a note for PE today. Maybe all week.

I hadn’t even heard the air brakes hiss to a stop behind us.

Dino was just watching me, standing there with my chest heaving, tears coming all down my face.

“I’ve got him,” the bus driver said, his hand to Dino’s shoulder, and I nodded thank-you, was already running back along the chainlink, scraping my fingers over the rough wire the whole way, the dogs rising to the top of the fence again and again, snapping and snarling.

I ran faster, more headlong, and was just to the side of the house when the front door opened.

Our car started on the third try for Mom, and she didn’t know she should have been looking behind the house for me. I was at school. It was just another day.

You look like him, she’d told me.

I could see him back home, too, just like this. My dad, at my age. Hiding behind my grandma’s house, his face wet, the mountains opening up behind him.

But I could also see him standing from that, taller and taller, his shadow feathered and already moving like a dance.

The reason he was only showing up now to help Dino, it was that it had taken him a long time to walk all the way down here.

“I won’t let them hurt Dino,” I said into the side of the house, but really, I was trying to make sure he could hear me through the windblown cracks in the skirt.

Inside, the cartoon in the living room was still playing.

I sat down on the propane tank and ate my lunch three hours early and watched the skirt of the house for a response. For a finger reaching through. For an eye, watching out. For an older version of me, here to save us.

You could pull the skirt of the house out easy, I found. It was just tin or aluminum or something, corrugated like cardboard, but it would flap back into place as soon as you let go. So, I went out to the tetherball pole, leaned it over like pulling a flag down, and rolled it in about a thousand switchback arcs to the house.

Then it was just a matter of guiding the top of the pole in through a crack and working the wheel so the pole could hold the flap open.

That it worked so perfect told me I was on the right path.

But I still couldn’t go in.

He was my dad, yeah. But he was also dead.

I walked back and forth in front of the house. I looked as deep into the dark as I could without crossing the threshold.

I squatted there and said, quiet because ghosts hear everything anyway, “Dad?”

I bet every Indian kid who’s lost a dad, he does this at some point. I don’t know why it’s special to Indians. But I think it is.

He didn’t say anything back at first, but when he did, I wasn’t sure if it was in my ear or in my head. Either way, it was like he was using my own voice to do it.

It wasn’t my name he said, or Mom’s, or Dino’s, or even hello.

What he said, what I heard, it was Look .

It made an instant lump in my throat. I fell back, sat in the dirt, the muscles close to all my bones grabbing tighter on to the bone.

Look.

I leaned forward, thought that was what he meant, but then a rustle behind me pulled my head around.

The rustle wasn’t the top cuffs of boots brushing into each other, and it wasn’t a rattle being held deep in a hand, to hush it.

It was a dog, standing there, big strings of saliva coming down from its mouth.

It was halfway between me and where the tetherball pole had been buried. The reason it was just standing there, it was that it was probably questioning what it had done to deserve a gift like this. It was waiting for me to just be a mirage, a dream.