Petals Down the Drain

My father enjoys listening to soft rock while I give him his bath. He wears one of his old bathing suits while I do it, and handles the parts the suit covers only after I leave him be for a few minutes. When you’re caring for a relative, there can’t be any shame or pride, but my father has plenty of both. I give him the minutes that he wants, and then I come in to towel him off and turn down the radio. I won’t turn it off completely until he falls asleep. I bring it into his bedroom and place it by the window. A caller is asking the DJ to play Chicago. In the tub, the broken up rose petals I drop into the water to make my father feel special make their way down the drain.

Once he’s asleep, I leave the house the same way I used to when I was a teenager. I ease out of the sliding glass door, and cross from our backyard into the neighbor’s yard, and then out to the car waiting for me by the Penn house. It’s an idling Chevy Sonoma that I hop into, and the guy driving it is a former football player named Harris, who keeps talking about divorce. I don’t know if he’s going to get divorced or wants to get divorced or if he’s been divorced for years. When he talks, I stick my head out the window and smoke as many cigarettes as I can. He buys me the smokes and some beers and when he parks by the beach, I tell him that we’re not going in the backseat tonight. He’s fine with it. He’s a decent guy. In the front seat, we can still kiss and I can still shimmy out of my underwear. There’s a car a few hundred feet from us, and I suspect they’re doing something wrong. It never occurs to me that maybe I’m doing something wrong. I don’t do drugs and I’ve never stolen a single thing in my life, but my father could die in his sleep, and I’m here listening to the seagulls crash while a gently married man tells me he loves me and that I should quit smoking.

Back at home, it’s nearly dawn. My job these days is caretaker and nothing else. My father can afford to support us both, but once he’s gone, I’ll be screwed like a hinge. All rust, no oil. I run a bath for myself, but I’m out of rose petals. I drop some vanilla extract in instead knowing I’ll get out smelling like an ice cream cone. My legs need to be shaved. I can’t believe I let a man see them like that. Lucky for me, the lighting at the beach parking lot is non-existent. Not that the guy would care if he saw a little hair on a woman who doesn’t love him. I soak in the bath and see myself putting out cigarettes in the eyes of every man I know starting with my father. The bathwater turns the color of a red rose, and I swear out loud at my clumsiness. I must have cut myself again and not realized it. There are times when I disassociate, but when I do, it usually only leads to online shopping or digital slots. This time I must have made the cut. A rose looks like a rose and like blood and very little else.

When I get out of the tub, I don’t see a single wound anywhere on my body, but I do see a couple of new additions to my form--

Thorns.

They’re running down my legs and up my arms. They’re circled around my neck like a piece of avant garde jewelry. They seem too modest to explore my crevices, but they’re everywhere else. I touch one, and my finger pulls back a spot. Now, there’s a perforation, but there wasn’t one until now. I’m not protected against my own weaponry. I can still hurt myself, but I feel no need to. Not now that I’m floral. Not now that I finally feel unexpectedly organic.

My father tends to wake up around six or six fifteen. I check on him and notice leaves covering his mouth. I don’t know if they’ll smother him, but I won’t stop the course of nature. I’m not sure what we are now--him and me. Are we part of a garden? Should we be buried somewhere? I feel a rush behind my cheeks, and I know I’m turning colors. I can’t remember what a white rose means, but I know red means love or passion. Or is passion a different color? And why do I need to know what a white rose means? Is it because white roses are my favorite? A red rose seems like such a cliche. Why do I have to transform in such a predictable way? Why can’t I be a geranium? My father smells. It took me a second, but now it’s pungent.

He’s gone rotten.

How did I let that happen?

I go over to him and pull back the blanket he sleeps under that he won’t let me wash. His legs have already fused. He always did want roots. When my mother died, he moved us up and down the Cape into all sorts of trailers and subsidized housing units. He used to let me sleep with the light on, but one night, I couldn’t sleep, and I saw all these dots pouring out from the glass lighting fixture on my ceiling. They covered the ceiling, and I didn’t scream until the first one landed on my face. My father ran into my room, scooped me up, and ran me right out of the house we were renting from the brother of one of his girlfriends. A spider had laid eggs in the fixture. When they hatched, they covered my entire room. We never even called anybody about it. My father ran in, grabbed a few things, and we drove to wherever our next residence was going to be. The whole time I was in the backseat, teeth chattering, and my father telling me that what happened was so unbelievable I shouldn’t bother telling anyone about it. We kept a lot of secrets between us. I suppose we still do.

He’ll die with most of those secrets, but I’m not sure I will.

The radio will be on when he wakes up. The morning DJ will play some Adele and I’ll wait to see if my father can breathe through the foliage. If he wakes up, I’ll show him my thorns. He’ll want to touch them, but I’ll say “No.”

I’ll say he might get hurt.