He had nothing to leave his daughter. Had no estate. This troubled him deeply. He looked around his room—his last but one resting place. Nothing here to leave her. No assets. A jagged bird flew by the window. A tortoise, I could leave her a tortoise, he thought. A tortoise would make for something of a legacy, a monument at her feet. Something that would outlive me, he thought. Plastic tubes drooped from his abdomen and wept bilious drops on his sheets. He hadn’t left the bed for a month.
Yes, a tortoise. Definitely. Or perhaps a parrot—an African Gray. If one of those things could survive being stuffed into pantyhose and smuggled dangling down someone’s pantleg, then it could outlive him and spend another fifty years with his daughter. He’d teach it to say stuff.
–Let’s go to Dad’s grave!
–Your father forgives you!
–He’s sorry he embarrassed you in front of your students. He simply wanted to dispel some of the awful things he thought you were saying about him. He realizes now that he’s wrong. Really sorry. Really sorry.
But. Well. Probably too much for a bird to say.
He had heard there were fish at the bottom of the Marianas Trench that lived for a hundred years. It would be hard to capture one live, of course. And difficult to construct a pressurized tank filled with frigid water and cascading detritus. And the fish—a terror with its barbed underbite and gray eyes—would have to be kept in a dark room. His daughter would only be able to watch it with infrared goggles. Maybe a tortoise, after all.
Scorpions, though… Scorpions could live for fifteen years, and he certainly wouldn’t. But his daughter might tire of feeding them pink baby mice because, like them, her skin was thin. He remembered her presiding over somber backyard services for a deceased cat or ferret. She even dug soap-sized plots for tetra fish. She had invited him to these ceremonies at first, but since he never attended, she stopped asking. She stopped slipping construction paper requests under his bedroom door. Now, from bed, he looked to the door.
He felt a prickle on his arm. A beetle. It marched a course through his purple and orange bruises.
He remembered, back when he could still climb stairs, finding his daughter’s college classroom. She wasn’t there yet, but most of her students were. He took a boy’s hand and said, “Do you recognize me?” He found a girl who was browsing through something. He took her papers, flapped them in the air, and asked, “What’s she been saying about me?”
And then she was there. In the door.
A beetle. It was what he had, so he plucked it off his arm and closed his hand around it.
About the author:
Rhoads Stevens grew up in Hawaii and spent his summers in New Jersey. He has a story on elimae and one forthcoming in NOON.
