Sam Simpson, Editor
March 14, 2011
Filed under Entertainment
I am eighteen-years-old and, for nearly two decades, my entire life was a lie. I write this to let you know of the fantastic adventures I have been on during the last five months—some so amazing that they’re hard to believe.
I found this out when my father, a normally stalwart man with salt-and-pepper hair and the hands of a man who worked for a living, was laying face down in a Carvel ice cream cake at the kitchen table the day after my eighteenth birthday. I could see his shoulders shaking and it took me several moments to realize that he was crying.
After tapping him on the shoulder, he pulled his face out of the melting mess of chocolate and vanilla ice cream, smears of blue icing streaked across his face like war paint and those little mystery chunks of chocolate whatever dotted his face like bloated, salty freckles filled with tears.
“Dad, what’s wrong?” I asked, pulling out my chair to sit next to him while deftly grabbing a handful of ice cream cake as he rubbed the cake and tears from his eyes. I ate it from between the cracks of my fingers like I did most of my food—mostly peanut butter and honey sandwiches, and avocados—watching his actions as though he was holding a gallon of gasoline and a lighter.
“Sam,” he said, sorrows saturating his voice like the weeping of ten thousand orphaned doves watching a dog chomp down on mommy. “I’ve wanted to tell you for so long. I just didn’t know how. So I got you an ice cream cake—”
“A very delicious ice cream cake,” I noted, licking my knuckles and squeezing more from between my fingers. I rested a comforting hand on his shoulder.
He stared at me in disbelief for a moment before he continued. “I had the terrible secret your mother and I have kept from you written on there. I also had the woman at the Dairy Queen write down what our terrible secret meant now that you’re eighteen.”
“O-o-okay,” I said warily, reaching for another fistful of cake. “And what dark and terrible secret have you been keeping from me?”
My father had no time to answer before the roof of the house caved in with a loud bang. Debris flew everywhere, knocking holes in the wall and busting glass from the sliding door and the windows. Outside, my cats screamed and ran, and my horses neighed, whinnying and pawing the air in defiance.
In the center of our demolished kitchen stood a tall figure, shrouded in dust and hanging fluorescent lights. I couldn’t help the high girlish shriek that came out of myself, or the pee for that matter.
“Hello, Sam,” said the figure in my kitchen.
“AAAAAAH,” I replied, cleverly.
My father said nothing because he was utterly unconscious and pinned down by the overturned kitchen table.
The figure stepped forward out of the dust. A shock of white hair sat on his head, while his creepy, spindly body wore what looked like metallic lederhosen over what appeared to be a spandex hero’s costume. A manic grin came over his mouth and revealed teeth that looked more like bathtub tiling than human enamel. “Are you ready to meet the gargoyle in the ocean alley?” he asked ominously.
“AAAAAAAH.” I couldn’t help wondering where my siblings were, why my neighbors hadn’t called the police yet, or why Gary Busey was in my ruined kitchen and my father had been crying in some ice cream cake.
He advanced another step, his focus completely on me, burning a hole in the very core of my existence. He was showing me that there was no way any deity could save me— that the human soul is deep and black and merciless and helpless and infantile, all at the same time—that no matter what I did, I could never ever outrun the evil that would one day dissolve at my entire existence. Until he saw the ice cream cake.
A look of childlike merriment absorbed his features as he picked up duel handfuls of cake and ate it from between his fingers. The action was so foreign, yet painfully close to home. I wondered where I had seen it before, and it struck me.
I looked down at my clenched fist, oozing melted ice cream and blue icing and multicolored sprinkles.
Looking up from his double-fistfuls of cake, he grinned at me with those horrible, large teeth. “Like father, like son,” he intoned darkly.
“AAAA—I’m a girl, though,” I said.
He squinted at me quizzically. “Are you sure? You look like a boy.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well.”
It was awkward there, for a few minutes. He continued to eat the melted ice cream cake and I fought away the urge to cry-fight him. Besides, everyone knows that in cry-fighting, you’re always the loser. Also, Gary Busey is insane, and I didn’t feel like risking my limbs to that pile of madness and two-by-four-teeth.
“So,” he said, after a long time eating cake and surveying my house. “I guess you want to know how I became your dad—”
“Not really, no.”
“Your mom was hot, like really hot. And we went to high school together—”
“Oh god, please shut up, and no you most certainly did not.”
“She was just SO hot—”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
“Just, like, UNF-hot. SOOO, so, so, so hot—”
“STOP IT. STOP.”
Gary looked taken aback for a moment, then rolled his eyes. “Jeez, touchy. Fine.” He started off for a while and I became concerned. Then he returned, as though he had never crashed through my kitchen ceiling and said, “Hey, you like Pottery Barn?”
“Gary Busey, how did you crash through my roof?” I asked.
“Great,” he said, completely disregarding my question and smiling manically once more, “I am in such a Pottery Barn mood right now.” He walked back to the gaping hole he’d managed to create, wiping his hands on the legs of his lederhosen.
I turned to take care of my father, who was now standing and brushing himself off. He looked no worse for the wear, except for a cut across his forehead that bled quite a worrying amount. I grabbed him by the sleeve of his shirt and looked at him desperately for answers. “Dad, Gary Busey just exploded our house and he thinks he’s my father.”
“He is,” Dad said coolly, if not a little bitterly. “He was a fling before me and your mother got together, and she promised that he could have custody of you after you turned eighteen. And so, here we are. Sorry.”
“I—. What are you—? HOW? WHY?” I babbled.
“SAM, COME ON. WE’RE GONNA GO TO POTTERY BARN AND THEN WE’LL GET YOU A TUXEDO AND A HAIRCUT,” Gary Busey called from across the room. “Boys shouldn’t have long hair,” he added in a mumble.
I grabbed the front of Dad’s shirt with both fists. “Don’t make me go with him. DON’T.”
He pried my hands away and shook his head sadly. “Sam, it’s time that you met the gargoyle in the ocean alley.”
Behind me, Gary Busey let out a shrill whistle, and the clawed paw of a dragon lowered into the kitchen, opening palm up as a platform for him to stand on. “Sam, come on,” he repeated.
Dad turned away and stood in a corner. He was letting me go, and how unfortunate it was.
Embittered by his rejection, I turned on my heel and crossed to the dragon palm and Gary Busey. How dare the man whom, until recently I thought was my father reject me, cast me out. I would teach him, I swore. And then I swore out loud when I stepped on a steak knife that had been thrown on the floor in the explosion.
“Jeez, man up, Sam. I’m not gonna have no sissy for a son.” Gary Busey could not tell that I was definitely a girl. This was the freshest of the hells I had come across in my time on Earth.
He whistled again, and the dragon, a giant copper and orange beast with leathery wings and purplish-red spikes over its brows, lifted us out of the rubble of my kitchen and allowed us to crawl into the small shed on its back. “So, Pottery Barn,” I said. “What’s it like? I’ve never been.”
My only answer was Gary Busey’s frantic screaming and teeth clicking.
Loading ...
Comments
All comments are subject to approval by the adviser to The Knight Times.
Leave a Reply