the last trip
by Kris Green
“There’s always one more thing to get,” My sister’s wisdom from when my mother died.
“One more thing?” I scoff, not meaning to, but in the way siblings do when they aren’t aware how deep rivalries go.
“How are the kids?”
“Fine. They don’t get it.”
“Well, they’re young.”
“Yes.”
“You good?”
I don’t remember my mother’s death. I remember things around it. The smell of her car, the night table with the hankies, and then random things that come back to me.
Children are born with their hands out to receive. “You must be like a child to inherit the kingdom of God,” Jesus said, and if I’ll be damned, when my father died, he wasn’t much more self-sufficient than a child.
I could smell the piss in his hospital bed even though the nurses said it was just the catheter filling up.
“Yes.’ I say, not looking at my sister, allowing my thoughts to drift.
“I took pictures of my kids and a few things. Nothing big. Let me know if there’s anything you can’t find that you want.”
I nod. She hands me the key.
Old aftershave is the only way I can describe the smell as my father’s apartment door creaks open.
I don’t know why I’m angry. I feel like a child wandering into his bedroom after my mother passed, and I start looking around, reverting to being eight and looking for old Playboys. I know there’s none. That wasn’t the man he is. ‘Was’ – my mind corrects.
I brought a box and garbage bags. I slowly fill the box with pictures. I take handwritten notes knowing I’ll never see a fresh one again. He has more photos of my kids than me.
The whole apartment smells of him, as if his ghost is lingering.
I grab books. Finding the ones I bought him. Ones that he stashed under his bed in a plastic bin when his bookshelves filled up. I grab his smoking jacket and toss it over the box.
The bags I bought are useless. I grab some cleaning containers that weren’t open and, like a refugee, toilet paper. I fill some grocery bags with unopened food that he never got a chance to eat.
I walk around the apartment one more time before I leave and see the small wooden toy chest filled with small toys hoarded for my kids. I grab it.
“Here,” I tell my sister as she leaves my house handing the key out to her. I can hear the kids running around somewhere upstairs.
“I don’t want it.”
She’s stern, and I wonder why she’s so resolute.
The next day, I walk to my car during my lunch. I don’t even realize it, but I’m suddenly in front of his apartment again. It’s paid for another week, and then people will come and empty it. I feel possessed as the lock clicks before I push his door open.
The storage unit, closets, and under his bed all get a closer scrutiny. It’s like I’m on a sinking ship, and I’m grabbing things out of panic.
Throw it away, or keep it, or sell, I don’t care. He wrote in his will.
I grab a bookshelf I’ve always liked. There’s a smear of dust across my shirt after I load it into my car. I wipe it in his house using one of his washcloths.
When I return to work, nobody mentions it. Nobody can see it, but I can feel it there.
“Do you want to speak with anybody? A minister, perhaps?” Over his deathbed, a nurse asks us.
“No.” I’m sharp with my words. Angry at even the suggestion, and angry for someone waiting in the wings to have this death conversation filled with false platitudes that don’t mean anything for conversations that won’t go anywhere.
People at work tell me they’re sorry for my loss. They try to use words. Their heads bob to the side unconsciously. They’re muted, and nothing comes out right. A few are bold enough to ask for the story. I tell it, but I feel like I’m relaying how a mission on a battlefield goes wrong.
I don’t want to talk about it anymore, but as the week progresses, I hate everyone for not mentioning it.
I answer my phone without thinking, knowing it’s my sister. After 8, she’s the only one whose calls will go through. I don’t have the heart to delete my father’s number, but I think about it.
“They’re going to cremate him this week.”
I don’t say anything at first. She says something else, forcing an ‘okay’ out of me.
“You good?”
“Yes.”
I can’t walk into my garage; I want to tell her. I have so much of my father’s stuff that I can’t stop visiting, and now my garage smells like him. I want to cry. I want to scream.
The crematorium sent a DocuSign form for you. Check your junk folder.
“Okay.”
“I’ve already signed it.”
“Okay.”
“How are the kids?”
The kids don’t know anything or don’t seem to. I can hear them even though it’s after 8 and they should be getting to bed. My wife is wonderful like that, but even then, it’s like conversations from looking down a tunnel.
I find myself lying in my bed at all hours of the night. I’m moving through life feeling more zombie than man.
My wife doesn’t mention the garage and how full it is getting, but she’s thinking about it. I can see it.
I don’t realize it’s the first of the month until I see the moving truck in front of his apartment.
My sister had arranged everything. I’m lost in space. Drifting through the atmospheres of planets undiscovered. I see them carrying things out, and I want to yell at them. How dare they not handle these as sacred relics, but it’s just an excuse to hold on to what I’ve lost.
Photo of Kris Green
BIO: Kris Green lives in Florida with his beautiful wife and two savage children. He’s been published over 80 times in the last few years by the wonderful people at Nifty Lit, The Haberdasher: Peddlers of Literary Art, In Parentheses Magazine, Route 7 Review, BarBar Magazine, and many more. He won the 2023 Barbe Best Short Story and Reader’s Choice Award for his short story, “Redemption”. Currently, he has regular nonfiction articles being published by Solid Food Press on fatherhood entitled: “On Raising Savages”.