Relentless

Rochelle Hurt
· in ,

My father is a mime. Always waving his arms at us. Always drawing lines. Even in sleep, his nervous hands press and pull the air like dough. Sometimes my mother wakes to an O, his mouth like a hurricane’s eye, eerily quiet inside.

At the dinner table, he usually just spoons silence into his mouth, leaving the butter to melt down to a lake in the crater at the center of the mountain of my mother’s mashed potatoes on his plate. Relentless, his invisible knife. The dog drools, hypnotized.

Evenings in the family room, he builds himself into a man-sized box and spends the night jiggling an invisible key in its lock. Once he gets in, he fondles its corners and gazes at the forbidden space outside its walls, where the rest of us play checkers and watch TV. One morning we came downstairs to find him sitting on the ground, back straight, head slumped down, leaning on air. His fingers were vaguely blue, and he was shivering, as if it was cold in the house. We knew he’d finally locked himself out.

Rochelle Hurt is the author of a collection of prose poetry, The Rusted City, forthcoming in the Marie Alexander Series from White Pine Press (2014). Her work can be found in recent issues of the Kenyon Review Online, Passages North, The Southeast Review, RHINO, and Versal.