Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance

by Alison Espach

“You’re so beautiful, Kathy,” Grandma said. “You could be an anchorwoman one day!” And then she turned to me. How desperate I must have looked, standing next to you, waiting for my compliment. “And you, little Sally,” she said. “You’re so smart and quiet and well-behaved. I bet you’d make a great nun someday.”

I was at the counter with Dad, who stirred Metamucil in his water with his finger. “This, Sally, is the key to life,” he said. “How is that the key to life?” I asked. “It’s just orange powder.” “One day, you’ll understand.” I never wanted to understand anything like that.

We were teenagers now, and we preferred, when given the opportunity, to suffer.

I like knowing that my problems exist within a large and respected tradition of problems. That ever since the beginning of civilization, humans have been very upset.

Dad still spoke with the confidence of a man who had been alive forever, as though he shook hands with Jesus on his way to the cross. When I read my history texts at school, it was still sometimes Dad I imagined signing the Declaration of Independence. It was Dad, fighting in the Civil War. Dad claimed he was born in the wrong century. I could have been a Spanish fisherman, he said once. Or a cowboy. I would have been a great cowboy.

Too many days go by where we just eat chicken and vegetables and forget about it. Too many days feel like nothing. One week without a bill or a phone call and I start to wonder if I’m even really a person. I don’t have coworkers anymore to

A joke is nothing to own; it is not a house or a family or a small white dog. It’s just a wave crashing over my toes, weakest just after it’s strongest, gone as soon as I feel it.