The Dark | Chelsy Diaz Amaya
We are making cement, my father and I, our foreheads angled toward the sun. The cement mix oozes out of the wooden frame on the ground like it’s protesting the heat. I used to watch my mother garden here. Too much money spent on watering, my father had shouted over dinner, years ago, grains of rice spilling from his mouth, and so much coughing. I used to wish he’d choke for real, but kids think things they don’t mean sometimes. This man and I, we take more cement mix and more sand from the lot, and we make two things into one. When he turns the brass faucet for water, it objects with a lone creak. There is so much we wait for and so much we never receive. He says he’s reminded of Saturday mornings at the orphanage, the only day of the week the children didn’t drink diluted milk. In one of the rooms of the house, my mother wears black and cries for her garden while she makes lunch. She will pour three cups of juice and dilute all but one. Everything this man has prayed for has come at the wrong time. He heads to the basement to figure out what’s going on with the water. I follow him because that’s what I have always done. He must remember his other daughters in my reluctant steps that trail behind him, like ghosts of relationships he’ll never repair. One of them must be thirty now, around the same age his father was when he died from drinking, and he asks my mother for a beer along the way because you can’t be an alcoholic if you hate alcoholics. In the basement, the air is so humid I can almost see the water particles if I don’t blink for long enough. He starts whistling a tune and I flash my cellphone light so he can inspect the pipes. After a minute my arm shakes. He tells me his friend at the orphanage used to wet the bed and had to hold the mattress over his shoulders under the sun as punishment. If the nuns saw his arms quaking downward, they’d add another minute while all the kids chanted insults. He says this instead of saying hold still. We’ve been growing apart from the moment I was born but I still speak his language. By the time he catches the small leak, we hear thunder. He throws a wrench across the dark room in anger. He scurries to the window where the rain pelts. It’s so quiet I do not believe in gravity but in change. The cement mix turns into grout. A thing becoming another thing. How quickly it happens. This man was a boy in an orphanage and then became a father. We sit together, father and daughter, and the lightning creates scars on our faces. We hear my mother belt out for us that lunch is ready, and I remember the German Shepherd who would steal my food that he bought for me as a surprise years ago instead of saying I love you. All that noise can wait. Side by side, we both breathe in. He leans, resting against the wall, and tells me he danced once in Manhattan, in a club, studio something. They took the party outside and danced in the rain, like a movie. It rained so hard the streetlights went out. He tells me that night he had left with a friend who caused a multiple car accident near Queensboro Plaza, and there’s a long pause between this fact and his next word, and that silence, the one I recognize as song. My father isn’t the kind of man that asks you to stay with him in the dark; he tells you what it means to have survived it.
about the author:
Chelsy Diaz Amaya is a writer and teacher in Utica, New York. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook University. Her Pushcart-nominated work has previously appeared in DIAGRAM, Tinge Magazine, and The Masters Review, as well as in other publications. She was a recipient of the Money for Women in Non-Fiction Prize from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.