Daddy by Anthony Imm

You complain that we won’t find Daddy’s Civic the entire way to the junkyard.

When we arrive at the lot of gutted cars, you lull behind me like a shadow. A sickle moon stamps the night sky, glowing pale white like my flashlight. The wind is cold; I zip up my jacket and put the hood over my head; I can feel my lips drying, chapping like the ridges of a dry desert.

This place is cleaner than I expected. Sure, every car is rusted as hell, so brown and gray that I trip up lichen with metal. Some rats scurry around here and there, maybe out of a gas pipe or a hood. Reed grass grows out from below the corroded car tires, their plumage thick and heavy. But the cars are stacked nicely on top of each other like Tetris except the rows don’t clear. They just keep going higher and higher. And the path in front of us is shaved clean of any grass.

“It’s cold as shit,” you say. “I’m going to freeze here.”

I turn around to face you but you aren’t there. When I look forward again, somehow you are meters in front of me, scratching at a shattered headlight of a crushed red Toyota. I decide to not ask you how because I know you won’t answer. Even though we live together, when I shout at you to come out for dinner, you rarely reply back. You don’t even come out. Only when I text you, you respond with k and come out after ten minutes. You keep your door unlocked all of the time after Daddy died, and you’ve been gaining weight. Haven’t felt pretty since that haircut you got. It’s only a matter of time before you quit your job.

I decide not to reply back to you, to agree or disagree about the weather.

Daddy was well-groomed, a man with a large stature and a welcome belly, but an even greater heart. He had a scruffy neckbeard that protected his cleft chin, and his eyes were blue like yours, the opposite of mine. He was our ethics professor, but he was also the father we never had. That’s why we called him Daddy even though he had bright brown hair, even though my eyes were almond-shaped, and no one would ever consider us father-daughter. It just felt nice. Felt nice to have someone like him. Don’t you know?

I met Daddy after I met you. Two months into our situationship, something we never resolved (and now I’m left retranscribing every heart emoji you send as platonic). A semester course you suggested I take. Ethics. Something about Nietzsche and Kant. Some bullshit made up by white men.

When I told him that I knew you, his face lit up. He didn’t even smile a single time during the lecture, but he smiled. He smiled at me. And I can still recall the way we learned about each other’s background. How he was French and his grandparents had to escape Nazi Germany by riding on a wooden boat to America. I told him how I was Korean, and my parents left the country after the government redlined our profiles for supposedly being communist. Daddy said he could relate to my story, the pain of leaving a land whose roots are embedded with my lineage. How uprooting myself for some foreign land, to reroute and restart, how it all must’ve been painful. I didn’t realize it, but by the end of our conversation, I was crying. And after he brought me to a pho restaurant to console me, I found myself awake at his apartment. Fully-clothed. In his bed. When I reached for my phone, I caught a glimpse of him dozing off on the floor with only his jacket covering him.

I could only admire him. How the sunlight curved off of his nose, his jawline, and landed on the floor as a droplet. I shifted myself so my shadow blanketed him. And it felt nice. All of it. His duvet, the smell of wood and cigarette paper. His pillow, soft and peach-yellow from sweat. His room, twinkling with motes of dust.

When I saw him again the next week, he introduced himself in Chinese, but it was okay. Because mistakes happened. And he’d been the first person to ever even try.

 I lower the brightness of my flashlight and point it at you. At night, your features appear duller. Your skin glows, but your blue eyes are bright like a cat’s in a night-vision camera. Your button nose is small, something Daddy always liked. Your thin Sharpie eyebrows. Your brown hair, frayed and seared in orange at the tips. Daddy always complimented you, that your features were like lemon and water.

We search through what seems like a hundred cars, but there is no sign of Daddy’s Civic here. None of that yellow bling we used to fawn over. That shine we went inside of to ride to the beach or the mountain.

I take out a cigarette and pass one to you though you don’t smoke; it’s proper manners. Smoke ghosts out of my mouth and haunts the junkyard, hazing the water-bitten cars. This is our third visit to the junkyard, I remind myself.

“We aren’t going to find him here,” you groan. You kick pebbles at a lipless white sedan, and they plinko inside of its mouth, ping-pong back and forth against the metal. It’s only been an hour, and you’re already bored. I can’t deal with you sometimes; it just feels like I’m doing the work, like I’m the only one still mourning his death.

I grind the cigarette into a paste and suck out the remaining tobacco. I chew it like eucalyptus leaves and spit it out when I get dizzy.

You already want to return to the pleasure of sensory stimuli, of buzzing televisions and crackling heat pipes at home. Daddy spent four years preparing us for the real world, and you toil with selfishness. I raise my middle finger at you, but you don’t notice in the dark.

Daddy’s been dead for two months now. During a ski trip in the Alps, he caught a severe cold, then died from leukemia. You couldn’t attend the funeral because you said you were too busy working. I knew it was just an excuse because you couldn’t bear to see him dead, but I managed to go. His family greeted me kindly, caught in the lie that I was only a close student of his. His real daughter looked eerily similar to you.

At his casket, I held his hands, always warm and red, but now cold. He was so beautiful. I could feel it, through the blued veins and chapped skin: he still remembered us.

“Just a few more minutes, Marina. We can’t give up now. We can’t, we can’t,” I say. The air smells like scrap metal, is frosted with November dew. A siren wails in the distance, but maybe it is just a fawn being killed by a wolf.

“You’ve said that five times now.”

“I know, I know, but come on. We’re so close. He’s here somewhere. He is, I know. I know.” I sound like a broken record, but I can’t stop it. Every time I find a yellow car, my heart drops. Every time I smell something woody, like that choke of expired cologne he always wore, I turn around and stare at the person until he melts into a crowd or turns a corner.

“Cut the crap. We aren’t going to find him, come on,” you say.

Every time I flip through our journal of photos, I wish I could burn your face off. You are in every single one. Next to Daddy when I’m next to him. There isn’t a single clean picture I can keep without your presence. But you’re fine. You are. Because you were so selfish you never wanted to take a photo, always asked a stranger nearby. But somehow I was always expected to take one for you two.

Every time I think about you nowadays, I don’t think of Daddy. I just think of you, and I hate that, because I know you don’t think about me. You only think about me in the context of Daddy.

“Sometimes, you know, you’re so fucking childish, it’s annoying,” you lash out at me. I ignore you, walking towards another section of the yard. “But you keep doing shit like this. We aren’t going to find him. We both know this. You know this,” you rant while trailing behind me. I ignore you again. “And you know what? I’m sure fucking Daddy doesn’t even care that we’re doing all of this. He’s dead. He’s fucking dead. And we need to move on. Please, Yujin, we need to move on. We can’t keep doing this. There isn’t a point. Let’s just leave him in our memory.”

“In our memory?” My voice is muffled, a lump caught in my throat. “Do you know how important that Civic is to us? To me? How can you just say that?”

“Because we both know we won’t find it.”

“No,” I snap. “No. No. You don’t even fucking know.” I pivot and walk up to you, so close I can feel the peach fuzz erecting on the tip of your nose. “You know what, I don’t even care. Go.” Our heavy breaths mix together. And I stare into your eyes. Those blue eyes. So white, my Daddy said they were like pearls of the sea. “You can go. Leave.” I point behind you, and your eyes falter. “Leave! Get out of here! Go! Fucking go!”

You screw your eyebrows, then cover your mouth. “You’re going insane, Jesus. Fine, I’ll leave. I can’t talk to some shit like you anyway.”

You pivot and walk away from me. In only a few seconds, you become a silhouette. And in a few more, you become the dark. My heart is racing, and I still can’t project for some reason. But I face the night sky, and I scream until I can hear myself.

We met each other at a frat party in freshman year. I’d been invited by a friend who I don’t keep in touch with anymore. She had left the party fifty minutes before I met you with some white guy who fawned over Arabic chicks. The party was the college typical you expected. Red Solo cups. Rap music blaring from every speaker in the house. Marijuana smoke so abundant it choked out all of the oxygen. I played Beirut with a guy wearing a checkered shirt, but the game never finished because he got distracted by another girl. Light rays careened off the walls. And the smell of alcohol infused with piss was migraine-inducing.

Someone turned the music up, and I tossed a pizza roll in my mouth before slipping off into the backyard. Fireflies dotted the freshly-shaven lawn. You were already there, sitting on a thick branch of an oak tree. I don’t know why, but maybe it was your face. That serene disposition on your face. The corners of your lips upturned but your eyes still like glass. Maybe it was your hair, how it moved in the shape of the breeze. Whatever it was, I followed you up the branch, and you asked what my name was.

We both gazed at each other, the sweaty edges of our T-shirts stuck together from how close we were sitting. We didn’t stare the way we’d stare at a shooting star or a car crash in an intersection, but we stared the way we’d watch a clock tick-tick-tick or a lake silently ripple from a fallen leaf.

There, in the hum-drum droning of the music from inside, you told me Japanese horror stories, and I told you Nordic folktales. You told me you wanted to become a part-time float spa tester and full-time geneticist, the juxtaposition sweet on your tongue. You held my hand as leaves peppered the plush grass. We exchanged numbers, and after the party, you brought me back to my dorm room.

The next day, I found strands of your hair on my pillow. I put my arm out through the window, and let each thread slip out of my fingertips. I didn’t want to throw your hair out, I wanted each piece to return to earth the way we all did after death.

That’s what Daddy told us, that ethics exists only because death exists. Without death, there wouldn’t be a point in having friends to make memories for. There wouldn’t be a point to what we did. To the way we shared our stories. To the way I fall back on bed and still remember how you looked the first time we met.

I sit on the roof of a yellow taxi. It’s 2:00 A.M. You’re not here, but I know Daddy is. I will find him, at least. His Civic was a bright yellow, the kind of yellow you thought of when someone mentioned summer. Hazy but prickly, soft but precise, laser-cut. The glossy metal ping-ponged sunlight wherever it ended up. Daddy drove us everywhere, the air conditioning always turned to the strongest degree no matter the season. He brought us to Maplewood. To Greenwich. To Philly. To Union City.

In Union City, he bought us short fries and steak at a diner. You were upset because of something and stormed out of the restaurant. Your gray jacket spooled down your back and slipped onto the floor as you left. The ceiling lights buzzed like radio static.

“Don’t go after her.” Daddy tossed a fry into his mouth. This was senior year. “Riddle me this, Yujin, what’s the nicest thing a person can do?” He was a philosophical man.

“What?”

“The nicest thing a person can do, go ahead. Tell me.”

I took a sip of my lemon soda to clear my throat. “Well, I once helped an elderly woman cross the street. I think she had dementia. She forgot how to walk and stood silently in the square, so I helped her step-by-step get across. I almost got hit by a car.”  

“Nice,” Daddy said. Fog coaxed the windows. I couldn’t see you anywhere outside. “Well, I once killed a cat of mine. Tabby was his name.”

“That’s not a nice thing,” I remarked.

“Sure, it is. He was in pain. Some sort of feline epilepsy, apparently. He was barely surviving, and the poor thing couldn’t even relieve himself properly. It was better to kill him than see him suffer.”

I nodded, surprised by his compassion for death as a form of peace. Daddy always had interesting thoughts, unique in the way he perceived the world. I mulled over how I could connect my own story to his but couldn’t find a way.

“Well,” I asked, “how did you kill him?” I imagined you kicking at pools of water outside, the street all blurry and bright.

“Euthanized him at a local vet.”

“Why?”

“Because that would be the most humane way.”

“But why would it matter? Why would it matter whether he was decapitated or drugged? His fate was the same regardless, and he wouldn’t remember anyway. He’s a cat. And dead.” I readjusted my seat, and the legs squeaked like a rusty hinge.

Daddy couldn’t find a way to answer my question but patted my head instead, proud of what I asked apparently.

He paid for the meal, and when I went outside to find you, you were lulling in front of a bodega across the diner. Holding a cigarette though you’ve never smoked before. The 24/7 sign flickered above you and filtered each strand of your hair yellow.

The night expands like an exposed artery. Everything is bitterly cold, I can’t tell if I’m standing or sitting anymore. The moon has gone somewhere else, can’t make out even its silhouette behind the clouds. I try to shine my flashlight on some cars, but it’s so dim, it hurts to look.

I suck my upper lip and taste metal.

Maybe I’d been too harsh on you. It’s complicated trying to explain myself. I always envied how Daddy gravitated towards you and your smiles and your hiccups and your fits. He excused every one of your behaviors: sticking gum in his beard, filtering sand out of your soles in his car, chewing with your mouth open, always staring towards someone but never at them. Daddy never corrected your youth-rooted habits. Biting nails and eating them. Chewing on erasers. Sucking on floss like menthol strips. I remember I called you out once, and he’d told me to accept you for the way you were because you were still growing even though we share a birthday only a week apart.

When Daddy asked to hang out with us, you’d say yes only about half the time. You were full of excuses. Attending an internship conference. Job prospects. You majored in chemical engineering yet profited off of your graphic design minor. Somehow, you charm every person in the room. You only have to speak once to convince a person to ask for your social media or phone number or e-mail address. I majored in East Asian studies, interned at a hospital, only for you to get a job. Whenever I spoke with Daddy alone, you’d always somehow slip into the conversation, unnoticeable like a vanishing glass of soft wine. He’d suggest we both take his car after he stopped using it. He’d suggest we visit Florida with him, eat froyos made from tropical fruits. Even when you weren’t there, he always treated us like a pair. Every “you” meant you.

When I finished my classes and strolling through the leaf-peppered campus became boring, I always went to his office, warm and subtle. Even if you weren’t there, I’d talk to him because I needed someone to listen. Yes, you could listen, but you were rambunctious, sporadic, leaving parties suddenly or ignoring my messages for weeks; it wasn’t reliable to trust you. Daddy, with his cup of Americano, always held my hand close and cared.

College was two years ago; it’s now the new millennium. Maybe you’ve changed. I don’t know. I don’t talk to you about much besides Daddy. I guess he was the reason why we stayed together.

My flashlight dies, so I chuck it to the ground, the sound of glass shattering muffling into a whimper. An airplane cuts through the night, exposing a wound of nothingness. I’m lightheaded, my stomach burning, but I can’t stop walking. Dirt sloshes under my feet. I can’t see that well, but the light within my heart only grows brighter. A light you can’t see, can only sense. My vision blurs, and I can’t tell if I’m crying or laughing.

When I blink to clear the haze, it is Daddy’s Civic in front of me. Like a miracle. Naked, wimp with a skeletonized frame, tires popped and flattened. Vines infest the car wheels up to the shattered windows, stringing around the frames like Christmas lights. The crushed bumpers slump on the ground. I check the license plate. It’s missing. Only the rust welcomes me. But I know it’s Daddy’s car. I know it’s his Civic. That indelible shade of yellow, I can always sense it, always.

The windshield is missing, shards littered near the feet of the vehicle, but I can still imagine Daddy and me and you, all three of us in the car, smiling and sucking on popsicles. I imagine us popping firecrackers to celebrate Daddy’s birthday and fighting over whose music taste was superior. (You won that game.) I can still see us sizzling with deep tans, bare-chested with red towels slumped over us, a deflated beach ball flaccid on your lap, as Daddy drove us home. I still see all of us secretly wanting it to never end, can still see myself secretly wanting you gone but smiling to avoid suspicion. I can still feel and smell the sunlight of those days.

Eight months before Daddy died, we moved into a flat together. I brought herbs and classic literature from my dorm room, but you only brought a single comic book and a pink bra. I prepared all of our meals. Chicken Caesar salads with no dressing. Fried potatoes, grilled in canola oil. Phad Thai from the local Thai diner. You never cleaned the dishes but always massaged my back when I asked.

On the night Daddy died, you didn’t come home. I texted you, but you’d blocked me. From what I know, you stayed in a remote hotel for five weeks and came back with a clearer face. No zits or dark circles but a health-flushed smile. Lily-trimmed skirt with a new crop top. Chin-length haircut, no split ends. Orbs instead of eyes. You came back refurbished like a new-morning sky.

I think that was your coping mechanism. To change. To become something that you never were to Daddy. To regret always being scrappy with him. But that’s what he liked about you. That’s what he liked about us. We were zealously natural with our messy tough hair and last-minute clothing styles, our bare faces and affiliative smiles, our bug-bitten skin, and sun-swiped cheeks; like wolf children, we presented ourselves without artificiality. We never tried to look good for Daddy because he never needed that, and we knew. We knew. But you changed, and so did I.

The wind is soft. I tuck a lock of my hair behind my right ear. I open the car door—the hinges creak like a tin seesaw—but the stale warmness is familiar. I sit in the front passenger seat and stare into the night. Dust gums my lips and cheeks. Fireflies shine like embers outside. Daddy had leather covering for the wheel, a brown like the crown of an oak tree, but now I stare at the exposed black wheel. Unfamiliar scents choke the interior: the rust, the wooden tuff, the stench of dead rodents. I become a part of the unfamiliarity, and it feels surreal. Daddy preserved this Civic for ten years, but it disintegrated within one, leeched and stripped by nature.

Our memories wallow in this car. I can sense them, heavy on the moldy car seats, heaving on the tarnished rearview mirror and the floor mat collecting leaves. Memories overlap like filmstock and repeat until they are forgotten. I close my eyes to not mutate those moments, alter them with what I thought happened.

Now, all three of us are here. You are home alone, probably playing Pictionary online or sketching on your notepad but still ruminating about this car. Daddy is somewhere better, still warm and bright. He’s missed his Civic too. We don’t have to change anymore. We’ve found him. And now we are all in the car.

I reach for the driver’s seat, and Daddy holds my hand, his skin papery and smooth. You are behind us chittering about the newest celebrity gossip while I try to capture every pixel of the sweeping forests around us. Sunlight pierces through the window and squares the empty backseat.

“Toss me a bag of potato chips,” you ask. “I’m hungry.”

“You’re always hungry, aren’t you?” Daddy chuckles. The radio sputters, then plays The Beatles, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’

“Yeah, what about it!” you scoff. I take out a bag of chips from the storage compartment and toss it back. “Thanks.”

“Can I have one?” I ask. You hand me a chip, and the salt is sandy on my fingertips. “Where are we exactly going, Daddy?”

“We’re going to the seashore to find some seashells and crabs and washed-up kelp. Maybe see some coastal seals if we can.”

“Boring!” You chirp. “Let’s just go get ice cream or something.”

I laugh. Sunlight flutters through the forest, marbling my thighs. “Yeah!” I agree, “I want ice cream too.”

Daddy chuckles and looks behind. His pupils are as clear as a starless sky. “Shore, first. Then, ice cream. Okay?”

“Fine,” you mutter and giggle. I look behind, and you are drawing Daddy and us on your notepad. “Let’s hope the sea is pretty.”

“I hope so too,” I whisper.

Cicadas chitter with no fear of predators; sunlight pulses against our skin; the air smells like apples and pinecones. The clearing peek-a-boos in the distance, and the clouds, light and high, bubble the cornflower sky.

“It will be pretty,” Daddy says. “Pretty like you.”

All three of us laugh and imagine the tides. Daddy, you, and I. We are all blissful and natural today, gleaming in sunshine.

There isn’t a fleck of night.

Anthony Imm is an 18-year-old writer of prose and poetry from NJ. He has previously been nationally recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, and his works are published or forthcoming in Hot Pot Magazine, Altered Reality Magazine, Avalon Literary Review, and Fleeting Daze Magazine. In his free time, he enjoys watching hour-long documentaries on YouTube and listening to music. You can find him @anthony.imm.