Nest

By Asha Dore

I woke when I hit the hardwood floor. I sat straight up and looked around: Giant bed. Rainbow dresser. Open window behind the bed. Hot salt wind. Morning. Where’s Dad?

I stood and snuck to the bedroom door. I peeked through the crack.

Someone let Bird out and he was flapping against the kitchen ceiling, cooing, his wings going whap whap whap. The kitchen’s across the living room from my door, so far away, so many steps. Dad must be in the kitchen. I held my breath and zoomed to the cold tiles under the kitchen table. No Dad, but Bird noticed me and landed on the table above me, his claws scratching as he hopped across the splintered wood. Where’s Dad? I whispered. Bird stopped moving. He cooed.

Dad was there beside me when I fell asleep, sucking my body into the pull of his weight on the mattress. Now he’s gone. He’s gone.

Bird hung his head upside down over the edge of the table, turning it sideways to look at me. He blinked. He flipped his neck back and forth changing eyes until I started laughing, and crawled into the open kitchen, put out my hand, and walked Bird to the living room. I stood on the back of the couch and reached up to put Bird back in his cage. Hot wind beat in from the open front door and someone scraping the roof. A stranger, I whispered. I peeked out the front door.

A sheet of brown leaves and acorns fell off the side of the roof and landed on the blue front porch boards. Dad’s head appeared upside down hanging off the edge of the roof. Dad is a bird. Dad is gone. He turned into a bird. What happened to your head? Dad laughed. Just like a bird. He hopped off the roof somehow and stood in front of me. He told me it’s okay and everybody’s safe and ohh you found Bird and put him away you saved him such a good job good girl you kept mister birdie so safe.

***

I woke when my date pulled his mom’s minivan into the driveway of Dad’s tiny, blue house. Bird had been dead for more than ten years. I stepped out of the passenger seat and walked in, expecting Dad to be sitting in his fat, cornflower recliner under the one yellow lamp, his eyes dark behind his big hippie glasses. I expected Dad to be pissed, to glower, to ground me until the end of the school year. I expected him to lecture me about teen sex and how his brother had his first baby when he was sixteen, and now that baby was a grown ass man addicted to everything under the sun because that’s what happens when you spend half your junior year changing diapers.

I expected him, at least, to be awake, but when I walked in the house was dark and silent. The dogs didn’t greet me. I heard the dishwasher swishing in the kitchen on the other side of the house. I slid onto the couch, right next to the front door. I lay on my belly, remembering my date’s fingers on the back of my neck, his fingers tapping on my spine one vertebrae at a time. I was almost asleep when I heard my name squeezed out through something like a cough, something like a scream.

At first I thought the scream was my brother, Ryan. It was so high, so breathy, a scream afraid of itself, a child unraveling against the night. I ran to Ryan’s room.

Ryan’s sat in his bed looking at his knees in the dark. What the fuck, I said. He stared at me squinting then woke up all the way. Dad? he said. We hurried into Dad’s room.

Dad lay on his side in the dent of his bed, his hand flat on the mattress in front of his face, a clot of blood leaking out the corner of his mouth. I used my shoulder to roll Dad to sitting. Ryan crawled on the bed beside me, and we didn’t talk just heaved and gasped while we pushed Dad to his feet, walked Dad to his old Lincoln Towncar, and while I drove, Dad curled on his side and looked out his window at the wet city.

It must’ve rained, I thought, a short Florida summer rain in December, the rain in and out in a half an hour or so, cutting through the thick heat, carrying with it the whole weight of the day. 

In the emergency room, Dad thought I was a nurse. He gave me a list of messages to deliver to his kids.

I’ll be alright.

Put that old venison out to thaw.

We’re running out of ham and pickles. 

Asha can drive Ryan to school tomorrow. It’s only a mile, she won’t get caught.

I need morphine. 

I’ll write a note if they want to sleep in.

A skinny young bald doctor stood beside Dad’s hospital bed and told me Dad’s prognosis is six months, Get some rest. Come back in the morning.

In the morning, I arrived in time to see Dad for seven confused minutes. He blinked at me three or four times, then leaned his head back and bit his bottom lip until it bled and his body bowed and shook into what I thought was a seizure, but actually his cracking esophagus shattered in his throat. Nurses and doctors ran in to help him breathe, but they couldn’t find the problem, Where’s the blood coming from, they asked.

He's drowning. I want to reach back through time, to tell them. 

So, he seized up, and they intubated but not before he fell into a brain-dead coma, then his liver failed and his body went yellow and ballooned. 

Hours later, Dad’s side of the family filled the room, our bodies drooping a little. Uncle Ron hugged around Mamaw’s arms like he was holding her up. Our almost estranged mother stood by the door hugging her own bare arms against a bedazzled spaghetti strap. Ryan and I stood shoulder-to-shoulder, not touching. We listened to the huff and hiss of the oxygen pump and watched a bloated, yellow version of Dad breathe through the machine, his body splayed, his arms and legs stiff and hanging off the sides of his hospital bed.

A young buff nurse waved his hands as he explained that it might take some time for Dad to die after he turned off the machine, then his thick fingers flipped the switch and pressed a few buttons, and the buff nurse stepped back to the edge of the room.

The family closed in, forming a circle around the metal bedframe. My brother and I draped our fingers over the white sheet covering Dad’s toes. Uncle Ron sunk two rough fingers around Dad’s left thumb. Mom stood beside Uncle Ron still holding her own elbows.

Mamaw sat beside Dad’s head on one of those little blue doctor stools, piecing out his hair with her long, red fingernails and paper skin. Bobby, she said. She called him by his little kid name. Just Bobby dying. Not the rest of him, not Bob the park ranger or Robert the fire alarm salesman or any of the aliases he used to travel around the world, selling and smuggling hard drugs before I was born. Just Bobby, the little kid who got into fights pretty much every week in elementary school. Just Bobby, the hardass little dude who rocked at math and sucked at spelling, who took a whipping with his daddy’s belt like a champ, who rescued every little animal he found in the North Florida wilderness, who loved Saturday morning cartoons and McDonald’s cheeseburgers and his mother.

Twenty minutes passed before Dad’s pulse went quiet. Ron looked at Ryan and Ryan looked at Mom and I looked at Ron and Ryan and Mom to see who goes first. Someone needs to cry or fall down or punch the nurse to start the room imploding. 

We looked around for maybe a minute before the last of Dad’s voice lurched out like a gurgly yawn. I sucked in my breath and step backward out of the circle.

Mamaw sat curled with her face over Dad’s head, petting her tears through his shiny brown hair. Ron touched Dad’s eyeball with each thumb. Mom stared at Ryan. Ryan cracked, his mouth in his hand.

The buff nurse dude touched my arm as I left the room.

I sat alone in an empty row of blue vinyl seats in the waiting room. I remembered my date the night before. We ate pea soup with his parents and watched The Godfather. Then we blew each other in the backseat of his mom’s van.

I closed my eyes to trace the memory of his mouth all over my body.

***

Three years later, I stand in the middle of the street looking at a bald tree, maybe the only tree in my hometown that lost its leaves that fall. The tree side of the sky was gray. Behind me, bright pink clouds follow the sun past the horizon.

Fat, dark birds fill the bald tree. The birds chatter and hop branch to branch, flapping and nipping each other’s feathers. Hot wind shifts the hair on my arms and legs. Dry air, wet ground. It had just rained. Behind me, the front door is open. Music flows out of the little yellow bungalow I’m renting with friends. A death metal song ends. Pause. Instrumental. David Bowie sings, Ground control. 

I squat to touch the hot gravel. The wind strengthens, lifting the hair around my ears. Like a silent alarm went POP, the birds lift up out of the tree and swarm above it like a living cloud, so quaint and pretty and somehow a total nightmare. Something hot runs up my spine and into my throat. I run inside. Ryan sits on the floor playing Dad’s old guitar with my roommate. Dad is really fucking dead, I said. He’s nowhere. 

Ryan’s like, No shit dude.

He tells me he’s packed and ready. I lift his suitcase and walk it to my car.

It’s been three years since Dad died, and Ryan’s moving out of Mom’s house early like I did, going to finish out high school living with Uncle Ron in Tennessee. We drive past the bird tree on our way north, but birds still infest the city, challenging our opposite migration. Ryan tells me, you know they sing to celebrate, like we do. One of my teachers told me that. And also, some of them are the loudest in the morning, all stoked that they survived the night.

In Tennessee, Uncle Ron is a shrunken version of Dad. Older. Smaller. Quieter. He leans over and blows into his saxophone. Mamaw lives with Ron now because back in Florida she put her coffee cup in the toaster oven one too many times, but she doesn’t recognize me, thinks I’m my mother. Mamaw tells me she doesn’t like me much because I cut my own hair. Mamaw doesn’t like that fool horn her son plays all day long, either. She prefers the guitar.

Uncle Ron tells me over burnt chili that he can be my new father, if I want one. I say, I have to get back to Florida. To my job, college. I mean I have to get back to my boyfriend, to sex, to living bodies slammed up against other living bodies. 

In the morning, I wake up to Ryan and Ron harmonizing their voices and Mamaw shuffling around giggling while she chats with ghosts. She asks, Where is Bobby then calls my brother Bobby, and nobody corrects her. 

***

The summer after Dad died, I attended a month-long summer program at Georgetown University. I took the bus from Florida to Washington, D.C., arriving hours early. I checked into my dorm and laid my things out on the bald, plastic cot. Two white button-up blouses, four white tank tops, two pairs of gray slacks, a pair of jeans, a bag of a make-up, an MP3 player, and Dad’s canister. I plugged my headphones into my ears and clicked on something electronic with drums. I opened a window, and cool air flapped through the room, knocked over Dad’s canister, spilling the gray chunks and blowing them across my clothes. 

NO!

I ran to the bed and scraped what I could back into the canister. I pressed the canister against the edge of the bed and slid the side of my palm across the mattress like cleaning crumbs off the kitchen counter. I couldn’t get them all. The white sheets were stained with grey smears. I pressed the canister closed. How do I keep them?

I walked in circles in the room, shaking the canister a little, listening to the noise of the blown bits of Dad. This was all I had left of him. A month before, Uncle Ron and Ryan and I played Free Bird from a battery powered boom box and released the rest of Dad’s ashes into the Gulf of Mexico, like Dad asked. I paced in circles in the empty dorm feeling like I couldn’t protect Dad, trying to figure out how to keep him secure, to keep him. Do I bury it? I thought of all the animals that died when I was a kid. Bird and a kitten I found meowing in the bushes at the park, too young to survive on her own. We buried four cats, a rabbit, and two hamsters, their bones in the backyard of Dad’s house under rotting crosses made of sticks bound with old rope. It didn’t seem right to leave him anywhere, alone. What was left of Dad needed to be kept and kept close, so when my new roommate came in, we used the medical tape from her first aid kit to wrap his cannister over and over and over and over.

***

The night after I drop Ryan off at Uncle Ron’s, I stand naked with my new boyfriend in the bedroom of my rented bungalow. He opens the window, and we watch wind knock over a coffee cannister filled with used condoms. 

Behind me, my boyfriend tears the lip off a new condom wrapper, rolled the condom on his dick, and tosses the new empty wrapper into the pile of wrappers and rubbers spilling out of the coffee canister. I bend down and scoop the debris back into the canister and while I scooped, my boyfriend lifts the hair off of my neck and twists it over my shoulder, twisting my body up and around until I stand facing him. He walks backward then knees onto the floor mattress. I lean in, and we roll onto the mattress, and when we unroll four years have passed and there’s a new boyfriend on the floor mattress beside me, or not a boyfriend, a husband, and I’m seven months pregnant and hemorrhaging. 

I wrap myself in towels and close my eyes with my palms against the cold bathroom floor. I remember the way the floor echoed as Dad lunged through the house looking for me when I was little and breathing deep afraid to confront the monster that lived in the toilet. I stood in the bathroom with one hand on the doorknob and reached my foot backward to flush the toilet then bolted to the other end of the house and under Dad’s bed, the bed with the dent, the bed where he’d die, eventually.

I hid under that bed, and Dad’s feet appeared in the doorway and moved toward me. He sat on the bed pushing the mattress down. I thought I had a daughter, he said. But the toilet must have eaten her. 

I sucked in a giggle. Dad sighed. She must be gone forever. 

The bed creaked as he stood, and I crawled out from under the bed. 

Hemorrhaging, I try to lie still on the bathroom floor feeling the cold tiles and the hot pain slamming across my abdomen and tailbone. The husband enters the bathroom telling me, The toilet’s overflowing with water and blood. The husband scoops me up and lunges through the house carrying me outside and slides me onto an ambulance cot. A fat hand tries to stick oxygen tubes up my nose, and I whack it away and ask for morphine like Dad did. I look at my husband then the EMT then my husband then the EMT telling myself who’s who over and over, telling myself if this goes to shit, I won’t be able to say goodbye if I don’t know who’s who. 

The last time I went to Dad’s house, there was no power and no water, and the afternoon sun blasted gold through the window in Dad’s bedroom. I stared at the small bloodstain on his bed. So small. It could’ve been from a papercut or a stubbed toe, not a tiny slice in Dad’s windpipe, not a whack through the breath, liver, and heart of a full-grown man.

The day after I loose the baby, my husband wakes me up for a blow job, and I am like, Thank god a distraction, and I blow him and blow him and blow him, and he can’t come and can’t come and can’t come and he pulls me up by my chin and bends down and kisses my breasts, his hands on my still round belly. I climb on top of him with no intention to do anything, just rest my body on top of his body, my head on his chest, the way I slept when I was an infant, my head under Dad’s beard, his body always sunburned and so warm. I climb on top of my husband, or I climb on top of my first boyfriend or the second or third. I’m sixteen or seventeen or nineteen climbing on top of some boy in the front seat of his dad’s car, fingernails in the bends of his shoulder blades. Or I’m climbing or fucking just sitting, just watching Ryan and Uncle Ron hug in the waiting room after Dad died. They twist into each other, melting the fragments of father.  I’m sitting in the plastic blue bucket seats in the waiting room, or I’m sitting on the floor of Dad’s room two days after he died. Dad’s clothes and shoes and incense and telephones and books are lumped together in lines on the hardwood floor around me. The clotted blood is gone. The bedsheets are gone. The mattress is gone. 

I sit in the middle of the metal bedframe. The hardwood floor around me is gray with dust. I close my eyes and listen for Dad thumping across the room, buckling his watch. Slapping spiced cologne on his neck. He picks me up, and I lean over his shoulders letting my arms hang. Scratch my back, he says, and I dig my nails into the bends of his shoulder blades. 

He carries me out the front door and sets me in the crook of a split tree trunk, and I lean back against the bark. This was the tree where Bird landed first, right before he flew away. We never actually buried him. He was a pain in the ass of a bird, a wily little thing, always escaping his cage to flap against the ceiling until he found his way out and into the front yard. One Sunday morning, during a yard sale, he did all this, and I watched it happen, not saying a word, just pointing at him while Mom and Dad laughed with a neighbor. Bird, I said, and Dad ran to the tree and tried to grab him. Bird bent his head to watch Dad reaching up. NO! Mom said, like a breath and a shout at the same time. Dad didn’t catch him. Bird lifted off through the Florida morning. 

Mom started up with the crying and carrying on, as she did, so I started up with the crying and carrying on, as I did. Dad scooped me up and held onto me. He and Mom took turns holding onto me, for a time

About the Author

Asha Dore is a writer and artist with bylines in The Cut, The New York Times, and Slate. Her work can be found at www.AshaDore.net and writingtruth.substack.com. She is the editor of Parley Lit and hosts the literary interview podcast, Totally Biased Reviews.