Heather O'Neill - Daydreams of Angels

You would not ever believe how many different species of beetles there are. They have these entire complicated cities with their own miniature subway systems and roadways and underpasses. They have mossy little condominiums where they can have babies. It’s really like another Tokyo under my bare feet. They do so much work! They are busybodies. They are just like me: too busy to make trouble.

When I get back to the apartment, there are a bunch of naked people drawn in chalk all over the cement in the front of the building. Jay must have drawn them. He isn’t a very good artist or anything, like he can’t do animals or horses, but he is very gifted at drawing naked people. The drawings are doing really dirty things too, like oral sex. A man who lives across the hall from us shakes his head when he steps over them. I rub out the chalk people with the bottom of my running shoes as fast as I can.

As I walk into the building’s cement courtyard, I see another one of my brothers. Sparrow has a black nylon sock tied around his forehead. He is practising kung fu moves, which involve kicking his leg up as high as possible in the air and yelling, “Assassinate!” and then stranding straight, putting his hands together in prayer and making a bow. An old lady walks by him nervously, afraid that he’ll karate-chop her, I guess. But it’s Sparrow who screams out, because an empty plastic bottle hits him on the head out of nowhere. I look up to see Robin throwing garbage off the roof of the building. When he sees us noticing him, he yells out, “Assassinate, my ass!”

“Get down from there!” I call up.

“Assassinate, my ass!” he yells back. I have to run for cover, with some other people who live in the building, as an empty tin of beans comes out of the sky like an asteroid.

Robin only comes down when he runs out of garbage. Then I can finally get all my brothers together to tell them off at once. After I’m done yelling at them that they are scaring and seriously disturbing all the neighbours, the sun has already gone down and it’s chilly. The night sky is an air conditioner.

I say we should all put some turtlenecks on and pretend to be worms. We stand outside in the yard with the necks of our shirts pulled all the way up over our heads. We wander around yelling that we lost our heads, until someone calls from a window that if we don’t shut up he’ll call the police.

It’s early Saturday morning and we all get woken up by the landlord banging on the door. He is mad because we keep our shoes lined up in a neat row all the way down the hallway past everybody else’s doors. He throws a pair of shoes at my dad. My dad catches it and, before thinking too hard about it, throws it back at the landlord and pings him on the head.

“I’m taking you to court again. You’re a lazy, filthy welfare bum.”

We all eat breakfast really quiet. Nobody wants to think about going to court again. Nobody wants to think about how bad my dad’s feelings have been hurt. It always makes us really sad that our dad doesn’t have a job. We don’t like to bring it up to him. We like to pretend that we have never really noticed that he doesn’t go to work every day. If ever he gets into an argument at the grocery store or with one of the neighbours, they just tell him that he is a welfare case. Then his cheeks get all purple and you can see all the red squiggly veins in them, and he feels ashamed and, right away, he wants to go home, where he sits in his bedroom with the door shut.

My dad also makes us go to the food bank for him because he is too embarrassed to go himself. We pull the grocery cart down the street and present the welfare stub to the woman at the front table. We don’t mind.

Sometimes when he is awake, my dad puts on his fur hat and gets on his hands and knees and snarls like a wolf and chases us around the apartment. We always play the big bad wolf and the four little pigs. Even though there were only three in the original story. We are never sure whether we like this or not. When he catches us, we are always laughing and crying.

My brother fell over a chair while my dad was chasing him. He ended up with a bloody nose and a black eye. Child services came over and we had to re-enact the whole game for him.

Later that day, to make things more cheerful, we beg our dad to see his bow ties. My dad says that when he was a young man, he used to work as a salesman, but he never liked to wear ties. They always made him feel like he had a noose around his neck and that he was strangling himself. So he would wear bow ties. I think that he has the most top-notch collection of bow ties in the world. He has them all laid out at the bottom of a drawer that he sometimes pulls out for us to see. There is a red one with white polka dots. There is a yellow gold — coloured one. I don’t know what bow ties look like anymore, but they can’t still be making them like this. They look like the world’s most gigantic wrapped candies.

He worked for a company that made fancy silverware. There were little roses carved into the handles of all the spoons and there were forks that had handles that were shaped like leaves. We love hearing stories about our father’s magnificent cutlery.

One other thing that you should definitely know is that he used to play the trombone. When he was at elementary school, he won a medal for being the top player out of all the students. He had wanted to be in the International Symphony Orchestra, but he wasn’t quite good enough. So instead he got a job in sales.

Finally he takes out his bow ties and he lays them on the bed like they are exotic butterflies. We spend half an hour trying to decide which one is our favourite.

My brothers beg and beg him to let them wear them. But my dad says that they each have to wait for their first office job and then he will give each one of them a bow tie.

I’m not sure what I am supposed to wear to my first day. My dad is really old fashioned. I don’t think he thinks that a girl is supposed to work.

Maybe I was the last of the four of us that was born. It was as though there wasn’t enough material left to make another boy and so I got made. I’m like the last funny cookie on the tray that there wasn’t enough dough for.

Now it is Saturday afternoon and time to go out. My dad always has sore feet because, like I said, he has Type 2 diabetes. The other day he found a wheelchair in the basement and now he wants us to push him around in it when he goes out. He says that he doesn’t have to stop at red lights because he is handicapped. He yells at us to push him right out into the middle of the street even though the cars are all honking at us.

We push our dad around to see all the different people who will listen to him when he talks. My dad has a friend from the bakery and he is able to get my dad really huge jars of maraschino cherries for cheap. We cover our ice cream in maraschino cherries. It’s like clowns were caught in an avalanche and all you can see of them is their noses. We have maraschino cherries in our orange juice in the morning. We often think that we are so lucky that our dad is likeable.

He knows the owner of the little pharmacy. We like stopping there okay. When we do, we read all the different Hallmark cards. We especially like when one of them happens to be a little bit dirty. And we like to read the backs of all the paperback murder mysteries.

But our very favourite place is the pawnshop! That is where we head today. There is a bookshelf and, instead of books, the shelves have tiny teacups with flowers painted on them. We kneel on the floor and look into the glass cabinet. I always like to look into glass cabinets because it is similar to looking into an aquarium of amazing things.

We have to get off our knees and move to the back of the store when a real customer comes in and wants to sell their crappy television set. One thing I learned from hanging out at a pawnshop is that people all think that their television sets are worth more money than they actually are. The reality is very hard for people to accept. Especially since they have spent so many happy hours with their television set. And a television set is really so much like one of the family.