Environmentals
✧ 2023 Worlds Best Short-Short Story Contest Finalist ✧
Dementia made your dad so easy. He doesn’t hate me anymore, doesn’t yell at you, doesn’t remember the death of your mother well or sure enough to keep up the rent and taxes on earnest despair. He wakes up and plods around the house, moving as real as a piece of weather, and you talk to me about your poetry, the cost of an in-home nurse, and the moss cultivation that has taken over your life at “home.”
Your fiancé is getting a PhD in moss. Is what you’ve said to me. Too tired to drag out the full name of his program or specialty. He’s becoming a moss doctor, and that’s why he’s not here with you. It’s why I’m here with you and your dad and his new, foggy kindnesses.
“Moss is vital in the maintenance of permafrost in the Arctic. It traces a line of moving death, of global warming, of how much we are losing as we lose it.”
You say these kinds of things over coffee while I watch your dad make ice into water on the stove.
“He get that ice from outside?” I ask. You shrug. Your fiancé is texting you to text him pictures of the moss in your peaty, fragrant, moist, acidic backyard. “A goldmine environment,” he’s said from four states away.
“He’s gonna get fucking giardia if he drinks that without, like, boiling it,” I tell you. You look up.
“Dad, don’t.” Is all you give him. He looks at us softly. He looks at us like we are men, not his daughter and his daughter’s friend he’s never liked. He turns off the stove and walks away to another section of his life we can no longer know. You go outside to get pictures of the moss. I go to make sure he is staying safe from inside his rain. I touch his back in the living room. He sits. I start to talk about things, to test his waters. I tell him what I can’t tell you yet. That I’m thinking of thinking of going on testosterone, of trying for New Jersey again, of reaching back out to a woman I loved. He nods, and I watch as he doesn’t call me a dyke. He asks what testosterone is. He asks if it’s something he has. I tell him he does have it, yes. He asks if he can just “give his to me,” if it’s so hard to get at the hospital in this county.
I am crying when you come in crying. You come in crying with your phone above your head. You have done something he could not do in the lab from your own goddamn backyard.
Your moss is perfect. Your moss is better than his. Your moss has some kind of pollen-production miracle. Its gametophytes are gorgeous. He will have to love that he loves you now, once you’ve showed him how you’ve won. The world will end anyway.
CLAIRE OLESON is a queer writer and 2020 Fiction Fellow at the Center for Fiction. Her work has been published by the Kenyon Review, the LA Review of Books, Foglifter, Brink, and Guesthouse, among other journals. Her chapbook of short stories, "Things from the Creek Bed we Could Have Been" debuted May, 2020 from Newfound Press. She is represented by Eloy Bleifuss at Neon Literary. She thinks you look nice today.
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