Gonna tell my kid this is a short story
Short-short #2
Every month I’m writing a new short-short.
I can’t stop thinking about that Twitter meme that’s like, Gonna tell my kids this was [blank]. Like, someone will post, Gonna tell my kids this was Michael Jackson, and there will be a photo of Lionel Richie or something. I never really understood what the joke was supposed to be, aside from Isn’t it funny to lie to kids, but I guess it was just one of those things, one of those snowclones that rolled downhill from what used to be called blue checks to the most far-flung reaches of the internet. Twitter has a way of doing that, of taking phrases that mean nothing and turning them into deafening echolalia.
I’m sitting in my living room, struggling to read a book on my Kindle Paperwhite by the light of my fireplace. It’s a gas fireplace, the kind with fake cast-iron logs in it; if you squint, it almost looks like something a caveman would recognize as a fire. (Gonna tell my kids this is a fire.) I’m holding the ebook at an awkward angle, trying to catch the orangish light coming out from between the gaps in the fake logs—the Kindle has a backlight, which I guess I could turn on if I wanted to, but I’ve got this romanticized idea in my head of reading by firelight, as if that’s somehow more authentic, even if both the book and the fire are fake.
(Gonna tell my kids this is a book.)
Above me, across from me on the mantle—barely visible behind the Kindle, but it keeps catching a glint from the fire and taking my mind off the book—is an urn, a brass one, containing the ashes of my father. It’s been sitting up there a couple of years now, just long enough that I don’t see it unless I’m thinking about it, just long enough that it doesn’t get dusted or polished as often as it used to. My kid went to bed an hour ago, and before he did, he turned to the urn and said, Goodnight, Grandpa—a weird habit he developed when he was a younger, a couple days after the funeral, when I was struggling to explain to him what was in the urn and why it was up there.
(Gonna tell my kid this is Grandpa.)
It’s not Grandpa, though. Partly because my sister and my brother each took a third of the ashes, but also because ashes are just ashes, just carbon, and one atom of carbon is the same as any other. The rest of him—the water, the nitrogen, the oxygen—escaped into the atmosphere, I guess along with the part of him that used to drink himself stupid and then take whatever book I was reading and tell me it was garbage and throw it in the fire. That part of him is in the air now, all around me, everywhere, nowhere. And my five-year-old kid won’t understand any of that, that of dust we were made but we spend our whole lives pretending that it isn’t true, that we’re something worth saving, worth keeping, and that iron is logs and a screen is paper and Lionel Richie is Michael Jackson, and I—
(well)
—I’m just sitting here trying to convince myself I can’t hear his slurred voice floating around me. 🕹🌙🧸
⬅️ In case you missed it: Social media and hell (but I repeat myself)
Books worth burning (or reading, or whatever)
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I'm gonna tell my kid this is a real good story. Sorry. I can't lie to a kid😉
Oof. That landed. Really well put, Luke. A reminder to be careful about what we tell the children. They will remember!