Dad makes steaks. He gets butter on his fingers and slicks his eyebrows back as if he was Elvis in a jumpsuit about to shake his heinie on stage. All artificially boisterous and cartoonishly suave. He’s a Claymation person. Seemingly handmade, with features exaggerated as such. Doughy under the eyes. Pliable, plush cheeks. A face that’s delighted to be aging. Because it can only get better from here. Mom just remarried. His spousal support payments to her have ended. A triumph. He can finally retire. To top it off his son—me—is visiting from college. 

The kitchen in Dad’s apartment is surprisingly big for a one bedroom. I blink in quick succession like a camera shutter and watch him cook. He twirls to the refrigerator in sticky stop-motion to grab a beer. All his moves seem wonderfully choreographed, loose but precise. It reminds me of the little animations my older sister, Elena, used to draw with a pen and stack of Post-It Notes. She could make a stick figure throw a baseball, race it across a few frames to home plate, then have the little guy pull out a bat and smack the very same ball he threw well over the fence. Just by gently grazing her thumb over the paper, as if she were shuffling a deck of cards. She made one of herself once. And that’s how she disappeared. 

Her stick figure came across a small rock on the ground. She wanted to pick it up, but somehow, it was stuck. She tugged and tugged with all her might as if the earth was made of rubber until the rock finally snapped off. The earth rebounded, revealing a hole where the rock had been. She stretched it out wide enough for her to fit, then jumped in. I found the animation under her bed after she went missing. A high school freshman, I had just gotten my driver’s permit. Elena, two years older than me, was a junior at the same school.

Dad eats with rhapsodic urgency, something that likely developed from living alone over time. Efficiency starts to outweigh enjoyment, I’d assume, at least with meals. I remind him that we have nowhere to be, nothing to do but loaf around. He holds up his beer bottle. 

“Here here,” he says, a toast of acknowledgement, then he takes a slug. 

I start on the steamed broccoli that Dad forgot to season while he slices a bite of steak that is far too big for his fork. The meat looks like a fat moth flapping its wings as Dad dunks it into a pool of BBQ sauce repeatedly. He gives it a full coat before eating. 

I set my utensils down in front of my plate. 

“I know what really happened to Elena,” I say. 

“I think the Bucks play tonight,” Dad says with a full mouth. His chewing is laborious. 

“That’s fine,” I say, clasping my hands over my food. Dad was always a master of selective listening. I think he hears everything and only chooses what he wants to respond to, secretly hoping the other person takes the hint or gets distracted and just moves on either way. 

“It’ll be tough to get out of the East this year but if we make the finals, we repeat for sure. I have every faith in Giannis,” he says, finally swallowing. 

But this time, I don’t give in. I know what I know. Elena’s not dead. She’s just stuck in some in-between place. Something like a transparent slide projector over our daily lives, there are invisible layers to this world that we will never fully understand. 

Elena and I used to hear creepy classical music playing from inside the wall that separated our bedrooms. I thought she was pulling a prank on me, so I unplugged her stereo. She thought I was pulling a prank on her, so she took the batteries out of my wireless speaker. The look on our faces when the sound persisted. We didn’t even know how to react. There was no reasonable explanation. 

“I’m going to start looking for her again,” I say. 

Dad quickly glances up from his plate. His skin jiggles then reconfigures around his skull, a millisecond behind. 

“Are you fucking crazy or something?” he says. 

“There was never a body.” 

Dad throws his beer bottle against the wall. I blink in quick succession. There’s the percussive blast of a cheaply made drum cymbal lined with plastic explosives. Fractals splinter outward in uniform like a violent kaleidoscope.

“You wanna know why there was never a body?” he screams. 

I feel Dad’s downstairs neighbor banging something on their ceiling right below my feet, likely pissed off about all the noise. 

“Because when you get hit by a train, you become nothing. Just mist.” 

Little spit bubbles collect in the corners of Dad’s mouth like a cluster of insect eggs. 

The banging moves to the front door. In a single motion, Dad wipes his mouth with his shirt sleeve and makes his way there.

The same night my parents reported Elena missing to the police, there was blood spatter and bits of tissue on the train tracks near our house. At a press conference the following day, the police chief said someone from the railroad got to it before any real conclusions could be made. Of course, there was a chance the remains belonged to Elena. But cattle were known to clear the fence and wander over from our neighbor’s farm. For weeks I had nightmares of Elena’s body, hundreds actually, swinging from butcher’s hooks on a complex system of conveyor belts like some machine-operated, macabre meat processing plant. 

It wasn’t long before the spectacle took on a life of its own. A phantom born from rumor, assumption. Before they divorced, I overheard Dad telling Mom that his coworkers were talking about Elena behind his back. Saying that she was too weak for this world. Thin-skinned. They had collectively decided Elena must’ve killed herself by purposefully jumping in front of a moving train. That’s when things really took a turn for the worse.

Dad opens the door a crack, apologizes to the angry neighbor, says he dropped something by accident, had a bad day and sorta exploded. You know how things can add up. 

He puts on the Bucks game but falls asleep at halftime. I turn off the TV and blink as fast as I can. For a split second, I see her. I see Elena’s reflection in the blacked-out screen, as if she were standing right behind the couch where I’m sitting. I can almost feel her hand on my shoulder.

+++

Paul Rousseau is a disabled writer with work in Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, Catapult, JMWW, CRAFT, Jellyfish Review, Waxwing, Hobart After Dark, Wigleaf, Cotton Xenomorph, and Pithead Chapel, among others. You can read his work online at Paul-Rousseau.com and follow him on Twitter @Paulwrites7.