Interaction between you and your father consists entirely of text. No dialogue, just text.
You slide your nail under the purple Post-it and stick it in the trash—the words love you glare at you, so you tie up the bag too. Thursday. Trash day. And the day Dad will discover all of his Post-it notes stuffed into three large trash bags. Purple, green, blue, yellow, scratched with pencil or marker or anything he could find. Some notes are typed on your mother’s vintage typewriter. All of them are lousy.
You’d think he’d get the message, you think, unfastening the window with icy fingers. No heater this winter, what with Dad’s accident and all. The harsh, gray-white wind finds all the crevices in you and fills them with cold.
It’s going to be a hard winter.
Despite yourself, you peer into Dad’s room before you leave for school—he’s dead asleep over his blankets, fully clothed. Blueprints and Sharpies roll underfoot as if lurching about on a doomed ship, and his taped glasses sit inside his shoes.
You close your eyes, count backwards to ten, and leave the house.
It’s a mantra Mom taught you to memorize, for when the winter winds are choking you and Dad’s slept through his alarm for work and you have to fight the urge to take the back road instead of the path to school.
(Because it’d be better, wouldn’t it; to hide in the forest, to be quiet. Surely Dad couldn’t tape Post-its for his silent daughter there.)
The sorry thing is, you can’t even bring yourself to toss all of the notes. Idiot, you think, idiot (also what Mom used to call Dad). So you discarded most of them in the bag but had left a couple, twenty, maybe, the best ones. You hid them in your dresser, tucked under your birthday cards from Mom where they’d never be found.
Lights come alive in the houses down the street as you pass by. Somehow, it’s much better to be alone in an empty street. With the slightest stretch of the imagination, it’s easy to pretend that everybody in the whole world is dead but you, plodding down the street to school. You, the idiot who kept a couple of her Dad’s flimsy attempts to communicate.
As your steps lead you out to the main roads, you wonder what would happen if a bus hit you.
And who would wake Dad up.
(And what he would do, then.)
