Winona has mixed feelings about her father, as she participates in a ceremony to mark his death.
Image generated with OpenAI“Okay,” Jack says. He keeps saying it over and over, like he’s preparing himself more than anyone else. It’s starting to piss her off. She’s not proud of it. “Okay. Ready?”
Winona stares into the heaping pile of picture frames in the center of their circle. They’ve all been tossed into the fire pit, soaking in lighter fluid and waiting for her signal. The pit is usually reserved for bonfires at the end of the season, after they’ve cut the spare branches from their trees and trimmed their greenery for the winter. It’s their definitive marking of fall on the calendar, a chance to chat around rumbling flames that flicker in the dark and keep the bugs away.
Tonight, midsummer, it is a resting place for her dad.
Jack’s waiting with the grill lighter. The handful of other people around her, family and other friends, have given her the unofficial burden of starting the burning ceremony. It just feels right that she’d get the power to burn his memories to ash.
“Yeah,” Winona says, and her voice is a bit hoarse, probably from lack of use. She hasn’t spoken more than a few words for hours, jaw clenched as they painstakingly removed the glass from each picture frame, leaving the polaroids inside. Staring into the smiling face of her father at different stages of his life felt sharp in her hands, even though her careful fingers avoided any actual cuts.
She clears her throat and repeats herself, more confident this time. “Yeah, start it.”
Jack clicks the lighter a few times before getting a solid spark. Winona thinks she hears her sister sniffling, but it’s hard to say if it’s because of the unusual chill in the wind or tears. She won’t look at her to find out; Lily was close to Dad in a way Winona will never understand.
This is what they do in their family. When someone dies, they burn the pictures. It’s from an old folk tale that every Higgins takes a little too seriously – a belief that if the pictures remain, so does the soul, and the dead will never find their way to the afterlife. Winona had never questioned it until this moment, when Jack finally sustains a flame at the end of the lighter and lowers it into the bits of kindling at the bottom of the pile. They ignite almost instantly, and soon, the first frames begin to crackle too.
Grief for a person who hurt you is hard. It’s frustrating and increasingly painful, the longer he’s dead. She can still hear his voice yelling sometimes, but she can hear him laugh too. She loved him and hated him in the same breath, and now that he’s gone, it’s like those feelings have been mashed up into one angry, violent cloud that hangs over her head and occasionally scratches the inside of her ears. She resents him for having died alone, leaving her in charge of the funeral per his will. She misses him. It’s all a fucked up mess in her head.
For a while, no one speaks. It takes Winona a while to realize they’re all waiting for her to speak first. She lets out a frustrated huff, then rubs her hands together to warm them by the fire that erases her father’s image forever. “Dad was an unfair person,” she says. She waits for someone to argue with her, but they don’t. “He picked favorites in almost everything. He had a favorite wife, even, and he never let Sue forget it. Bastard.” (Sue lets out a chuckle between embarrassed coughs to her right.) Winona reaches into her coat pocket for her flask, half-forgotten in the act of preparing the fire. She takes a hearty sip of straight whiskey before wiping her wet upper lip with her sleeve. She stole it from her father’s alcohol cabinet before they started, pouring the last of the bottle into the flask with a cheap plastic funnel that was permanently dented on one side.
She used to make Kool Aid with it, too. The blue kind. Sugar and blue powder sifted down that funnel like a rain stick all year round, but for some reason, she thinks of winter now. Her dad in his armchair watching a movie he rented from Blockbuster, The Truman Show, his back to the kitchen while she struggled not to spill any sugar on the counter. The step stool helped, but her arms still barely made it over the top of the old water jug they kept recycling, let alone the funnel. Water jugs were always littering the kitchen countertop from the machine her dad used for his sleep apnea. They usually still had the label on them, “distilled water” written on the outside but instead full of various powdered drink mixtures. First it was Kool Aid, then it was Crystal Light, and eventually it was the gross unbranded powder his doctor ordered to keep his levels steady. “Bring me a glass, Winnie,” he said to her, keeping his eyes on the boxy television set. No matter what drink she was making, he’d ask for a glass as soon as she finished it – it didn’t matter that the water was a little warm.
Winona swallows thickly. This is what keeps happening to her – memories keep building on top of memories until it becomes an unstoppable movie of feelings she doesn’t want to feel anymore. It’s driving her insane. “Well, he’s gone now. I guess we’ll see him in Hell.” She takes a drink again, but now she just keeps thinking about how this is his favorite brand and remembering when he’d send her out to buy it with his biweekly check as soon as she turned 21. She can’t even enjoy the spoils of war without feeling too goddamn sad.
“Anyone else want to share a few words?” Jack says, inviting the rest of the family to pay their respects. It’s probably for the best, considering her churlish remarks. It’s probably bad luck to send Higgins family members to the afterlife with swear words, or something.
Lily clears her throat and says some generic words about missing him. Winona tries not to roll her eyes. Jack drops a hand on Lily’s shoulder while she cries, and Winona stares into the flames. The corner of the picture from his fiftieth birthday catches, melting to nothing before her eyes. Once Lily finishes speaking, Jack breaks up the ceremony, inviting them to chat amongst each other while the remains of the frames work down to ash. Most of the pictures are probably gone by now.
Jack’s hand rouses her from her thoughts, squeezing her arm gently in support. She looks up at him, and the pity on his face flickers with the orange of the flames in the fading daylight. “You handling everything alright? I haven’t heard much from you since.”
“I feel like I’m a few inches to the right of my body,” she says with a snort, reaching for her flask again. Then she thinks better of it, pausing halfway to her lips, and tucking it back into her coat pocket.
“That’ll get better. You won’t forget how this feels though, not completely.”
“Spoken like the wise old man you claim to be,” Winona says.
“Winnie,” Jack murmurs, and she shakes off his hand with a little more force than necessary.
“I’m fine,” she insists, looking into the sky behind him to avoid his sad eyes. The clouds are white streaks against a dying blue, dark enough to turn the treetops to black silhouettes. The power lines web across the roofs of her father’s neighborhood, and she wonders if any of them have noticed he’s gone. The power lines were probably the only thing that connected them, after all. He didn’t go out much and wasn’t very neighborly. Unfortunately, Winona took after him in that way.
“If you need anything…” Jack says, and anger lashes out like lava in the pit of her stomach. She’s tired of people asking if she ‘needed anything.’ Just before she gets the chance to let him have it, a gasp from behind them grabs their attention. Winona and Jack turn around, and the breath sucks out of her lungs in one stuttering choke.
Right there, above the fire pit, a cloud of smoke plumes. It curls in on itself in the shape of two broad shoulders, its head bent toward the ashes. The smoke swirls within the shape of a man, and Winona knows it’s her father more than she knows her own name. “Daddy?” Lily whimpers, flinching backwards. The head turns to Winona, though, ignoring Lily’s sniveling. For five full seconds, the smoke stares straight through her without eyes, and smiles without lips. It points a finger at her coat pocket. “Bring me a glass, Winnie,” Winona hears in her head, clear as day.
She can’t breathe. Her chest is so tight she wonders if this was how he felt when the heart attack took him. Then, with a quiet whistling sound, the wind takes the smoke into the air, and her father is gone. Tears pour from her eyes unbidden, but she doesn’t sob.
“Hm,” Sue says, startling everyone from their individual crises, “that lasted longer than Earl’s did.”
“Earl? Uncle Earl?” Lily asks, her voice shaking slightly.
“Yeah, he came to his burning ceremony too,” she says, so flippant it’s maddening. “You were too young to come then, of course.”
Winona nods because it’s the only thing she can think to do. She figures something significant had to happen at these ceremonies to keep the Higgins family engaged in the practice all these generations. Her hand twitches toward her flask. Somehow, the idea of her father’s ghost staring into her soul fills her with a kind of acceptance she couldn’t bear to feel until this moment. Her hands are shaking as she unscrews the cap. She holds the flask under her nose, smelling the spice of her father’s favorite whiskey, and finally, she smiles.
“Alright, you son of a bitch,” she says, laughing to herself. She steps slowly up to the fire pit and pours a shot for him at its base. “Sorry it’s a little warm,” she says, just like when she handed him Kool Aid that winter night fifteen years ago.
She hears him again, one more time: “Thanks, baby.”
The summer night’s wind is cooler as the sun gives up, and the lanterns hanging from the back porch are joined by fireflies in the bushes. The fire breathes its last breath, fading to smoldering charcoal, and Winona sighs as she finishes her father’s whiskey.
She stops at Walmart on her way home and buys blue raspberry lemonade Kool Aid and a jug of distilled water. She pours the distilled water down the sink just to refill the jug with tap water, and she gets a free trial on a random streaming service to watch The Truman Show. And as she sips her lukewarm Kool Aid, she sets an extra glass on her coffee table, for Dad.
