Kid makes the best of that, teams up with daddy, buddies up so close to daddy’s friend upstairs that he starts getting divine whispers in his own ear, turns savior, turns doomsday prepper-in-chief, teaches us to build our Ark and prepare for judgment day, and what’s his prize when the sky falls down and proves him right? Dad dumps him too. Locks the kid into the promised land with the rest of us and heads down the mountain to die with the unsaved masses. Chose the world over his own kid, and said God told him to do it, which, as trump cards go, beats out
Now Theresa’s left him, too.
It doesn’t matter that she didn’t want to go; she’s gone. That’s how he sees it.
I couldn’t help it—I felt bad for him. I said, s
And you know what? Maybe it should. Everyone acts like love can save you, but love can’t save anything. So maybe we’ve got it the wrong way around, maybe it’s the saving that makes for love. Isaac saved us, and we should love him for it. He saved us, and so we belong to him. It’s kid logic, but you’ve got to admit that it makes sense, and that’s what I told him.
Still, I don’t like the way he looks at me now.
Without Theresa, there’s no one to ask about it, about whether I’m imagining things. The way his eyes follow me across the room. The way he saw me watching, and smiled.
I was just trying to be nice.
I’m pale like you now, pale and thin and craving the sun. You always called me stupid for skimping on the sunscreen. Everyone’s got to die sometime, I said.
I know how you died. Of course I know how you died. Why do you think I’m so good at this game? What else have I been doing since the last time you saw me but imagining how you died? I dream it, and wake up smelling disinfectant and puke, wake up tasting you, not the good you but the way you tasted at the end, like iron and rubber, like something poisonous. Sometimes I imagined I could feel it, some fluctuation in the universe, someone cutting the invisible floss that held us together, some infinitesimal weight lifting or settling—and how the fuck do any of those things actually
I didn’t have to be there to know how you died. Wasting away. Emaciated and skeleton skin but bloated with fluid.
Love,
Dear Jackass,
I guess you’ll never finish that novel after all. God, the
Not to be juvenile about it, or maybe