The Laws of Tragedy by Ryan Griffith

At first it was Father’s pocket watch we found in our garden, crusted with mud and rust, his initials E. E. G. clearly etched into the metal. “It’s impossible,” Mother said. “We buried that with him.”

It should have been hundreds of miles away, deep underground, sleeping in his coat pocket. Only weeks before we had planted Father into the earth, a place we thought he finally couldn’t run from.

Mother’s eyes swelled with the salt of possibility. “He’s come so far to find us,” she said.

So we began to dig with spades, deeper and deeper into the soil, into different strata, uncovering ancient silverware, pottery fragments, and further down we found an axe, a cage, a busted compass, as if our backyard had once been the dumping ground for another civilization. A pile of junk began to rise, all things broken and buried. Deeper down I found what appeared to be a strange, spiny root reaching through the earth, searching for daylight. I wiped the muck from it.

“Oh my God,” Mother said, “it’s your father’s hand.”

We began to find more of him, dusting each bone with a toothbrush—clavicle, humerus, femur—to reveal all the shattered pieces of my father, the body that had failed us all those years, now something different, carbon and calcium, and he began to emerge, the long bones of the forearm like a cello’s bow, the skull vacant as a cave.

“He tunneled halfway through the state to get here,” Mother said.

I sunk my blade into the clay. “Now he decides to show up.”

The deeper we dug the wetter the soil, the earth letting go of each bone with a sputtering suck. But parts were missing: eyes, lips, hair, teeth, his elements a broken jigsaw, so I substituted. For fingers I found keys, syringes, doll parts. One foot a crucifix, one leg the slide of a trombone, his penis a wild mushroom. For blood we pumped him with buckets of paint—Rose Madder, Cadmium, Permanent Red—until his body throbbed with all the shades of rage. For his brain Mother found a world globe, its map scarred and fraying. She placed it above his skull like a cartoon thought bubble, and for the heart I found a fallen nest, a baby starling curled inside like a shrunken old man gasping for air, and set it in the center of his chest. 

Once we were done we stood looking at him, this father we had assembled. “I don’t know how to wake him,” I said.

Mother sighed. “He’s just empty wreckage.”  

She was right. Father was nothing but bone and metal and chemicals, everything dead except the orphaned hatchling in its nest. The withered head lifted and opened its beak to the sky.  

“It needs feeding,” I said.

With tweezers I dropped bits of mashed potato, hardboiled eggs into the gaping mouth, pink as the inside of a seashell. It swallowed and screamed for more, then quickly fell asleep. I waited patiently beside the tiny pulse.  Every twenty minutes it woke, the thread of its neck stretching toward me, hungering for more.

That evening it opened its eyes like two wet berries, the featherless wings beating.

“He’s alive,” Mother said.

I moved my face close to Father’s mouth and listened. “He’s breathing,” I said, “he’s breathing.” The air streamed warm against my cheek. His light bulb eyes ignited, the planet of his brain began to spin, and the small bird of his heart thrummed its whole being into song. There we were, breaking all the laws of tragedy, resurrecting Father, whose body filled with the breath of wind, now revived in this broken and beautiful contraption, maybe someone I could forgive this time. I bent my head low, my mouth close to the tin funnel of his ear, and whispered, “I’m here now, Father. Speak. If you have something to tell me, speak.”

---

RYAN GRIFFITH — Ryan’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Peatsmoke, The Cincinnati Review, X-R-A-Y, Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions, Best Microfiction, and elsewhere. He runs a multimedia narrative installation in San Diego called Relics of the Hypnotist War. 

Art by NINA SEMCZUK — Nina’s illustrations and comics can be found on The Rumpus, Short Story, Long, Weekly Humorist, and other websites. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Post Road, the Los Angeles Review, The Offing, Sinking City Literary Journal, Coal Hill Review, and elsewhere. Nina is a Ukrainian American who grew up in the rural foothills of the Adirondack Mountains.