Free Poe by J. Lincoln Fenn

If it wasn’t rich, decadent, and with a calorific load that should have caused us all to die of heart failure from congested arteries, then it wasn’t fit to be served at our house.
    But while every dust-free and lemon-scented corner of the house was imbued with my mother’s passion, my father’s passion was—and remains—a mystery. In fact, the more I try to pin down his “thing,” the further I feel from knowing him, unless you count knowing something by its absence—like making a mold of a footprint to determine the curve of the heel that created it. Here’s what I can say for sure about my father. Every day he left in the morning at eight o’clock sharp, coming home a little before or after six thirty. Sometimes he’d go on trips for weeks at a time, returning weary, worn, and pale. He did not work, my mother explained once, because our income had been kindly provided by a deceased and wealthy aunt on my father’s side of the family in Russia. But when I asked where he was during the day or why, if we were loaded, he had to travel, my mother quickly changed the subject and asked if I wanted to taste the cake batter to make sure there wasn’t too much vanilla. Her tone let meknow that there was no point in asking again. Some things were just not to be spoken of—like the burn scars that twisted around the entire length of her right arm and up to the base of her long and lovely neck. I asked only once why she wore long-sleeved shirts on even the hottest days of summer and was offered an impromptu trip to Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor.
    My father was ethereally quiet and completely inscrutable. It was hard for me not to jump when I’d unexpectedly find him in the same room with me. One time I thought I was completely alone in the house only to discover him right behind me, reaching past my ear to open the kitchen cabinet. My dad could probably pick your pocket, lift your watch, and knot your shoelaces together in five seconds flat. When I was younger, I often wondered if we were in the witness protection program, because no one would make a better spy than my father—plus he had that soft Russian accent that gave him an international, mysterious edge.
    He was such a nonentity that I never gave his life much thought until he was dead, until I was looking through his drawers, feeling part thief, part pervert. I found nothing that could add to my understanding. There were no yearbooks or mementos in the attic, not even a file with a birth certificate or copy of his immigration papers. I’d felt a queasy churning in my stomach. Who the hell was this guy, my father? I dove into the metal trunk used to store our family photos. There were hundreds of me, of course, only child that I was. Me as a baby, toddling precariously down the steps holding my mother’s hand; me on my red tricycle, gap-toothed with a bad haircut; and there were a series of Polaroids I’d taken of my doomed goldfish (I was the angel of death to fish—none lasted more than a day or two). But none that I could find of my father.
    Finally, at the very bottom I discovered one: it was of the two of us, my father and me, taken by my mother. We stood in front of one of her grand Thanksgiving turkeys, an impressive spread on the linen-clad table. We did not look comfortable with each other; therewas an awkward distance between us. I was squinting and forcing an impossibly wide grin, and he was looking down at his shoes, brow furrowed, as if he were worried.
    None of this, of course, made its way into their obituary, a copy of which I keep in my Roget’s Thesaurus . I’m the only record of who they were, or weren’t. And what stops my heart at four in the morning is the idea that in time I’ll lose what little I remember, and then they will truly, and irrevocably, be gone.

    It’s a massive crack of thunder that wakes me up. I open my eyes, and lightning flashes across the night sky. A shattering rain pounds at the windows, blowing sideways. Or