He was never that fairytale telling type dad. He never told me stories, I only heard them about him. My grandmother once told me about my father’s bunnies. He lavished his love upon those meager little tenderlings as if they were from his own womb. This would be their downfall, she told me, as they were so dirty one afternoon — so dirty because he took them outside to play in the mud as all little boys are wont to do — that he took them down to the basement sink to give them a good wash and he confused the laundry detergent, lye, and bleach for shampoo and mixed up the little creatures their bath and one by one those bunnies grew limp, so soft and still that they didn’t move and my father, so small and young of a boy, didn’t know what to do so he placed their lifeless little bodies in a nest of a baby blue towel and then went upstairs to pack his suitcase and run away, knowing that if the crime was murder, the punishment would be far worse: a beating that made you feel dead while being alive.
I have often wondered if the sting of the sins of another can resound and stick around like bleach stains on a baby blue towel. I close the space between the moles on my lover’s back, tracing a constellation of lines, making connections where there aren’t any. I try to be so gentle; I lean down and kiss the skin with eyelashes. I worry that the cruelness that resides in my family will find a place to settle within me when I least expect it. As my father’s daughter, I will kill the things I love without realizing it and spend my lifetime rescuing turtles in atonement, because that’s what he does now — my father — when he’s out driving and sees a small box turtle crossing the road he’ll pull over and put his hazards on, get his gloves from the glove box, and he’ll pick the turtle up gently and place it down on the other side of the road. He’s done this several times and is well known for it now in my little hometown. It still does not erase the story of the bunnies, or his other mistakes, in my mind.
I nestle further into the softness of my lover’s back, nameless here because I always break them, they always leave, but for now I’m here with him being gentle and soft, deserving of the love I so desperately need to sustain myself. If I press myself into the present, the past cannot get me, cannot remind me of cruelty, of loss and grief. The words I speak in this moment will be sweet and kind. They will not falter, nor run away, in fact, they aren’t words at all, I’m just listening to the sounds in the room, the soft breathing, a silence which is different from the silence of the dead bunnies wrapped in blue. This is a silence I take with me. This is a story I tell.
