Family Portrait
Christopher Santantasio
A week after Mom leaves, Dad tells us to stop asking about her. A postcard comes through the door slot. We recognize Mom’s handwriting, her crimped letters with their long tails. Dad snatches it away. We write her a letter back. We’re not sure what we did, but will she give us another chance? Dad says she left no forwarding address. We try asking if her postcard had a message for us, but—
“What’s wrong with that thing?” he says. His eyes are fixed on the wall clock. It’s working fine, as far as we can tell.
“Can’t you see it’s not ticking right?”
Dad grabs his toolbox and takes the clock apart. His long-fingered touch, delicate but not gentle with the tiny screws, sprockets, springs. We cook our own dinner, tuck ourselves into bed. The clock is back on the wall in the morning, but the second hand is gone.
He eats his cereal. He says nothing.
We watch him. He eyes the camera on the sideboard. Mom’s prized possession, or so we thought. She balanced it on the back of the couch to take our family portrait. We smiled with our whole faces, but it came out blurry. Dad took us all to Sears the next day to have it done properly. The day after that, Mom left.
He puts down his spoon, lifts the camera. Did Mom leave it on purpose, we ask, or was she in a hurry? Dad isn’t paying attention.
“This thing never worked right either,” Dad says. “Nothing in this house works right.” He carries it downstairs to his shop. After a couple days, he hands it back. We look through and see only darkness.
Later, we come home and find the guts of the television spread out on the living room floor. It takes a week for him to put it back together. Now the volume only works at the loudest setting. It drowns out all our remaining questions.
“What’s for dinner?” he yells.
Dad fixes the phone to purr instead of ring. He fixes the doorbell to shock whoever touches it. He fixes the filter on the fish tank and soon the water is a light, basil green. When Dad’s not fiddling with things, he’s watching TV. The dialogue of his favorite sitcoms fills the house. Shows about unhappy families where the dad is always right no matter how bad he screws up because deep down he’s a good guy with the best of intentions. He tries his best to be the dad everyone expects him to be, but he can never please them. Dad’s favorite part of each episode is the very end. The credits roll, and every mistake is undone.
Mom doesn’t send anything else, and eventually, we leave, too. “I’ve still got Flounder and Fisken,” Dad says, nodding at the fish tank. The water by now is dark green, viscous, opaque.
Dad dies. We return to clean the place out. We reminisce about all the delivery men who yelped when they hit the doorbell. All the friends we lost because we could never hear the phone purring over the TV. If the kids from Dad’s shows were real, what kind of adults would they have grown into?
A cleaning crew arrives, and in an hour, they’ve loaded almost everything into a dumpster. We tell them to pour the contents of the reeking fish tank into the toilet. We tell them to toss our family portrait in with the rest of the junk. They take it off the wall and something flutters out. The postcard Mom sent all those years ago. Dad scrawled over her message, but the return address is legible.
To Dad, the truth always needed fixing.
There’s a shout from down the hall. We run to the bathroom and see Flounder and Fisken floating alive in the toilet bowl. We scoop them into a plastic bag, fill it with water, and tie it off like the world’s nastiest carnival prize.
We’ve driven past Mom’s house before, but now we’re slowing the car to a stop at the base of the driveway. Our hearts race and our hands are clammy. Our feet peel reluctantly from the soaking wet rugs. We look into the back seat. The bag has sprung a leak. Fisken and Flounder flop violently in a thin pool of water.
It happens without discussion. There’s a pond just a few blocks down Mom’s street. We drive right to the water’s edge. We untie the bag, and with synchronized kicks, Flounder and Fisken arc high in the air, piercing the water like graceful bullets. They’re not pretty fish, but they’re tough, slick, and muscled. They don’t look back. They swim in synchrony like siblings, just the narrowest gap between their shining fins. They never needed a mother’s love or a father’s guidance. They never needed us. They don’t need anyone.
About the Author
Christopher Santantasio’s fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, Epiphany, SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. New work is forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review and Story Magazine. Originally from the Hudson Valley, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his partner, and edits fiction at The Rumpus. A finalist for the 2020 Janus Prize, he holds an MFA from The Ohio State University. He is at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.
Twitter: @crsantantasio
