Nightmare Fuel
The Pamphlet
“Although our father Gary was a closed, unknown donor when he was alive, he agreed to the terms.”
Our father’s name was Gary, so we’ve been told. A man of generally good health, mild allergies, a pleasing disposition. He was half Caucasian and half Polynesian, though we do not know any exactitudes, any pinpoints on a map; we do not know the way his tongue may have rolled around words. Gary. Survived by two younger sisters, ages 36 and 40. Gary would have turned 47 this year had he lived, but he did not. Soon, we will meet him. These are the facts of The Pamphlet — the only father facts listed — and we do not challenge them.
Things Gary may have passed on to us: ears, for one. They must be his. My mother’s ears and her mother’s ears and her mother’s mother’s ears are all round, crinkled as fiddlehead ferns, attached at the earlobes. But my ears are angular, pointed. The skin folds over at the tops of both my left and right, and my mother jokes that this is the doctor’s fault, that he yanked me right out of her, pinching. Other possibilities from Gary: a lousy right hip that pop-pops in the winter, a mustache I have to bleach twice a month, a blistering red on my cheeks induced by alcohol, the sharp and distinguished way I pronounce the Ts in words like “button,” “cotton,”…
