Phil scratches his shriveled crotch through his Spiderman briefs, sitting at the coffee table with a brown, undersized “BEWARE OF POO” monkey shirt stretched above the thick hairs on his belly. Lying next to him on the couch is a pink-robed woman with her skin and hair split in different textures of smooth and wrinkly, soft and wiry.

“Thanks, Mom,” he says with a smile, indicating the bowl of cereal and glass of orange juice in front of him as he grabs the spoon, observing his wild tangle of facial hair in its reflection before taking the first mouthful. Some drops of milk blot down his shirt, making brown spots near “POO.” When his bowl’s cleaned of milk and chunks, he downs the orange juice in one pulpy chug as spittle runs from chin to chest. He then drags his shirt over his mouth and asks, “Hey Mom, do you know when Dad is going to get here?”

Mom’s eyes crank from the football on T.V. to Phil, grainy static in her corneas and electronic crackle in her breath. As she shakes her head, her corrugated lips croak, “Stop asking me that. Please.”

“But Mom,” Phil says, “It’s still Summer Vacation. Dad promised he’d be with me all summer, remember? So when is he going to be here today? Did he tell you? I want to go to the zoo!”

Mom shakes her head again, gurgling, “Just do whatever makes you happy,” before turning her attention back to the game.

There’s a ring at the door, rattling Phil from his seat. His heart swells at the back of his throat as he says, “See? I knew he’d come today!” He scrambles to throw on shorts, socks, and shoes before rushing to the silhouette behind the blinds at the front door.

As Phil’s footsteps scamper from one end of the house to the other, Mom turns her head to a frame holding a color-dry picture of a man with his arms folded over his chest. “I’m the one keeping him from being like you were,” she mumbles to the picture, throat clenching. “He’ll always be my sweet little boy.” Her eyes then flicker over a selection of pictures of Phil in the backyard. In each picture he’s dressed the same, no matter how tall he gets or how thickly his body hair grows. With a sparking gasp, she continues, “It just hurts to do this.”

Upon opening the door, Phil’s father towers over him in a brown long-sleeve button-up shirt tucked into tan, belted slacks drooping over black loafers. Dad raises a two-fingered salute from his thick black hair, his smile devoid of crow’s feet and dimples.

“Hey, son,” he says, throwing his arms around Phil.

“Dad!” Phil shouts, smothering himself in Dad’s chest. “C’mon, there’s only a few more days left of Summer Vacation.”

Dad raises one arm around Phil’s shoulders, guiding him out the door. “Yup, so let’s not waste any more time.”

As Phil steps onto the front porch, his foot sticks in the concrete. Looking down, he sees that the driveway is gray sludge full of rocks. Mom’s Oldsmobile is sunk halfway down the tires, whereas Dad’s feet float at the top. The grass beyond is melting into itself, the dirt path leading to the sidewalk is an opaque glass, the sidewalk itself is a gray sludge similar to the driveway, and the asphalt is bubbling black. “Dad,” he says, “When will the ground stop looking like that?”

“Don’t know, Son. Been that way for a while.”

Phil removes his shoes and socks, both hairy feet sinking and popping in the ground with each step. “Yeah. Um, could we go to the zoo today?”

“Why the hell not? I’ll let you lead the way.”

“Alleyway shortcut,” Phil says, tossing up clods of concrete behind him as he runs ahead. The grass splashes up his heels and onto the next layer of concrete, Phil running past the row of neighboring houses with their windows still a foot higher than the top of Phil’s head. Roger next door is riding high on his mobile lawn mower with grass peeling up from the earth and sticking in the tires. Roger waves to Phil, though Phil continues running up to the wilting streetlight pole and then down the next street, Dad huffing and puffing right behind him.

Before he can make one last step out of the concrete and onto the milky glass of the alleyway, a portion of air swells outwards and a hand rattles out of it. “Hey buddy,” says a bearded man through the tear in space, “do you have any smokes on you?”

“Damn it,” Dad says, stepping over to the man with a threaded needle in his fingers and his sleeve rolled-up. “Hold on, Son, this will only take a quick second.” Dad then pulls a tan sheet of leather out from his arm and pastes it over the widening hole between them and the beggar. The needle runs in and out of pockets in the air and sheet, and the man disappears from sight. Dad rolls his sleeve back down, cutting the loose thread with his teeth.

“What was that?”

“Nothing. Just worry about getting to the zoo.”

“Okay. But where did you get that leather from? It looked like you pulled it out of nowhere.”

“Phil, I’ve had a rough day at the office. I could use that trip to the zoo as much as you.”

Phil shrugs his shoulders and proceeds to run down the glass alley with Dad in loose pursuit. They make a left turn down another alley, Phil slipping on his grass-wet feet. He pulls himself back up, ignoring the split in the glass made by his now-bleeding knee.

“You okay, Son?”

“I’m fine, Dad.”

They round more turns in the alleys, several chain-link fences housing dogs with legs that reach the height of Phil’s sternum and basketball heads that bulge out of their meat-studded bodies. Their barks bite at Phil’s eardrums and they force their stumpy muzzles through the fence gaps.

“Hey! Hey!” Dad shouts as he throws his hand back and bats one dog’s nose with full force. The dog whines, slinking back into the yard as Dad returns holding his newly-peeled knuckles. “See? You’ve got to act tough when things like this happen.”

“Yeah, you told me that before. Is your hand okay? It looks hurt.”

“Stop worrying about me. Move on.”

Phil shrugs his shoulders and runs ahead, spotting the outcroppings of tropical trees and grass roofing over a towering fence. Past the last couple of houses, across the liquid tar of the road which bubbles between his toes, he stands at the base of the fence with Dad striding behind him.

“Oh,” Dad says with the cloth of both pockets dangling at his sides, “I’m short on cash for tickets. I’d hit you up for some pocket change, but…”

“You’re kidding,” Phil says. Then, plugging his fingers and toes into the fence with a rattle, he says, “Follow me up. We can make it inside if we climb, and we can climb back out if anyone tries to catch us.”

Two faces pop out of the air, one at the height of Phil’s belly and another at his eye level. The smaller one says, “What is that man doing, Mommy? Who’s he talking to?”

The other responds, “I don’t know, sweetie. Just keep walking and he won’t bother us.”

Phil continues his climb upward, Dad saying to Phil’s back, “Don’t worry about them. I’ll fix them up and see you in a second,” as Phil ignores the ripping sound. The iron links rattle and sway with each pull and push. Fingers and toes swell with pain at the inner knuckles that support his weight until he grabs the rusting bar at the top of the fence, his feet scrambling after his hands until he throws one leg over and drops the rest of his body in after it.

He pulls himself up from a swelling hip and watches the progression of gangly children standing at eye level and parents who are further stretched to stand at Dad’s height. Cameras swing from their necks and some of them drape zoo merchandise shirts over the shirts they walked in with. He hobbles over to the first set of bars he sees, looking at a group of lions with expanded bellies, full-blossoming manes, curved-stake teeth, and legs comprised of conjoined flesh bulbs.

“Can you believe I went in there once?” Dad asks, standing next to Phil with both arms folded over the top of the bars. “Went in with some friends and some chairs and whips. Frank was put in a wheelchair after that. Thank God the worst I got was a scar on my right arm.”

“Can I see it, Dad?” Phil asks, looking at a patch of black stretching down from the cuff of Dad’s right sleeve with torn white on the edges.

Dad pulls both of his sleeves down. “Not the best time for that.”

“Oh, c’mon,” Phil says, and he shoves up Dad’s right sleeve. His eyes blink to the rest of the brittle black arm and his mouth drops. Dad shoves him away with a shout, but as he struggles to draw the sleeve back down, his arm drops from the sleeve and spills black ash and loose skin on the wet concrete.

“There you go, Son,” Dad spits, holding the stump in his sleeve as it disintegrates. “Just what you were looking for.” He drops to Phil’s level, the blood vessels in his eyes expanding and bursting until both corneas are bright red. “I wanted you to be happy, goddamnit. I wanted to spend a little more time with my son before I had to leave. You wanted your Summer Vacation? Well you just blew it.”

Phil recoils with eyes widening and jaw dropping. His head sloshes around and he sweats through his armpits and belly, the belly sweat moistening the “POO” on his shirt. Herds of heads fade into the air, the adults at Phil’s eyes and the children at his gut. “Just leave him be, Mary,” one of them says. “What is he freaking out over?” asks another. “Is he okay?” The rest of the air peels to smaller forms of everything around him. All of the taller adults and children are peeling with it.

Dad tears off his brown shirt with his one free hand, ripping off a sheet of his skin from his ash-guts and pasting it over a wide gash in the air. “Well don’t just stand there!” he shouts, “Get over here and help me sew this back up!”

Tears in his eyes and a tremble in his throat, Phil croaks, “No.” He runs over to Dad and digs his fingers into the frayed ends of Dad’s skin to tear the rest off as all ash crumbles to the floor.

Around him everything continues to peel away and the liquid ground solidifies. Shortened children hold to their shortened parents. A glance toward the lions shows them with their forms shriveled from their previous bulk and their manes tampered down with their fangs no longer extending from their mouths. A pair of security guards rushes to his sides to pull him up. “You’re going to be alright, sir,” the one on his right says as they carry him to the entrance. “You don’t have to cry now. Everything’s going to be okay. We got a call from your mother. She says she has a lot to discuss with you about your father.”

With a sniffle, Phil thinks, But I don’t need to. Dad’s dead. Maybe he has been for a long time. As the tears dry and he starts to walk on his own, he continues, At least I know now. There is more stuff to learn, too. Scratching his tangling beard, he has one last thought: Learn everything I can, before I grow up.

—

Edmund Colell‘s first published story, Bath, appeared in Verbicide Magazine in February 2010.