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#i love rher so fuckin much guys
inferioritycmplx-a · 3 years
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god toko’s normally just so harsh and upset but when she smiles, ACTUALLY smiles which is so fucking rare she just becomes the softest goddamn lookin human on earth and i MELT
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everydayducksoup · 2 years
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Beautiful
an older short story I wrapped up for fun after an old teacher shot me an email about my writing. I'd totally forgotten it was in my drafts till now
My father reconciled with me when I was 43.
He was 85 then-- we hadn't spoken in years, not since my folks divorced in '91, and even then a short while afterwards I blocked him on everything when I transitioned, in '07.
He found my number though, and called. I was surprised by how well he really took it- I'd been doing voice training for ages now, and spoke like some bad facsimile of daisy duck, but he pretty much took it in stride when I said I was his daughter and not his son's ugly-sounding girlfriend. He brushed it off admirably quickly, telling me about this movie he had seen with will Smith in it at an old friend's house out in the boonies and how it inspired him to call.
He seemed to like calling, to my chagrin. He liked reconciling, I guess he likes working towards something especially, after all the time he had retired and mostly alone. He would call and tell me he was picking up new hobbies- knitting, fishing- until he tried to bring up radio again and hit the nail right when I told him that's what I worked in.
"Didn't know they let young ladies on the boats now, vida mía."
"Well, a lot of girls I work with are like me, so we're not so much let in as getting in there anyhow."
He was terrible at it-- all store-bought material cause he didn't know a solder from a magic staff, all secondhand junk even then cause he was cheap as shit and probably still drinking some, like my grandmother before him drinking rum and colas well into the grave. But he loved to do it with me. It was this giddy feeling after all those years of nothing first in person and then not, of wads of single-bills at Christmas to make our stepdads envy him and trying to get mom away and alright after drunken calls at midnight.
Mom, she was long-dead by then, she'd died of measles because our mummo was superstitious and she'd never got her shots. Anyway mom never liked it when we got all into technobabble, and he was never really so kind to her either, so I don't know if it would've been a comfort to her that we'd been calling together.
He never used the radio otherwise. That's what his girlfriend said, after the funeral when she was giving me all of his stuff from their crappy little army house next to the canal. He didn't like going on the airwaves and talking to guys his age or ten years sort of younger, but he would QSO every other day at 7:30 and talk to me about a whole lot of daily nothing's, news and thoughts and sights and politics and small complaints.
We were planning an eyeball QSO in September, up here in Oregon, maybe, or in Puebla where his brother lived.
"Does tío Heriberto know I'm not a guy, though?"
"Pshh, mija, I'll take care of it, alright? He's not gonna say shit to you. You're my fuckin daughter."
His accent made it sound funny, a little off. The northern trill of it pushing it theatrically to "dawgh-rher", paradoxically innative to both nations. Colón, Colón, Colón.
He wanted to meet Zoey, my wife, and she wanted to meet him really bad-- not having had a father, not having met many men a father's age so comically nonchalant about the way she made her living-- and they both wanted to get a picture at a wrestling match together, as some sort of inside joke I never understood.
"Tell him up here we've got the Barrs in Oregon and they're the shit, Mika."
"And tell your XYL that down in Puebla we can go see La Mascara Sagrada's stadium and that he could take every single Barr without a blink, okay?"
When we came down to Panama for the funeral, Zoey told everyone she did accounting. We had a fight about it, in the women's bathroom at the Kol Shearit--
"He wouldn't have wanted you to have to lie about it."
"It's his fucking funeral! He's dead! He's fucking dead, Mikaela, he's fucking dead forever!"
Zoey used to be a soldier. We'd met though it, through radio, when she ran the CB stations in Afghanistan and I was up in Texas paying my way through college by tuning them up for old rich idiots to use on yacht parties.
Zoey told me one day- in a conversation not at all about my father- ages after, that she had been sick and tired of restrained emotions.
We'd always stayed together. We broke up after the funeral and it didn't even last the weekend, we made out on the plarform at PDX and everyone though I had been proposed to, because Zoey was wearing white. Someone airdropped us a video of it, and in the video I am crying, just a little, if you zoom in close enough.
"I remember you-- do you know who I am? I was there when you were born, and you were just *this* small. You were the exact same as a kid. Strong, you were a very strong, strong baby."
I watched the movie about a month after my father died. I'd asked my uncles and aunts about it at the funeral, they'd heard about it from him, who had told them most of the saga up till there when he was getting up the will to do it.
"Mika, are you alright?"
It was a bad movie.
"Come on, come on. Cry if you need to, yeah."
It was a really, really bad movie.
"*Jesus*"
It was hilariously manipulative, poorly written, lazy, referential.
"Zoey. Zoey. Zoey."
"What do you need, baby? I'll be here with what you need."
It was derivative and horrible and a waste of Will Smith's casting cause he didn't even talk for half the runtime and offensive to disabled and to grieving viewers because the writing was so fucking horrifying trying to kick up with escalation of arbitrary bad things to happen to someone.
"Zoey, Zoey... know I love you."
"I love you too baby."
I didn't see the end coming. (The writing was that bad. It was fucking cheap and stilted and horrible.) At the end, the three actors thing gets fully fucking abandoned and they just kind of vault it into fantasy, they fucking build a bullshit question mark to tack on at the end.
But it had made him reconcile with me. It had made the last two years of my life, and of our relationship. I couldn’t hate it. Just by principle.
“Yes, a strong baby, but you didn’t use that strength— wouldn’t hurt a fly, just the kindest, kindest soul. Like he had no hate in him”
“In her, tía, in her.”
“I’m not that strong, Zoey.”
It was always funny when her hand stopped on mine. Like someone had run out of paint for a room in the middle, tried to match it hard but never got quite right, a shade shy of a dark enough auburn, a tone off of the right red to tone. I hated when somebody couldn’t tell the difference—maybe it’s better that we never managed to get through the “wedding” thing, that way. I was always neurotically sure they would mess up my makeup and I’d look like—well, like my father.
Zoey’s laugh was a balm. She never tried to make it any quieter.
“No, you’re not. You’re just quiet,” she paused. “Quiet and beautiful. Thank god you could be neither over radio.”
Which God she thanked I couldn’t know, but, god. God thank you.
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