Cheap Blue Biro
Despite his worsening illness, the ritual my father indulges upon on us each year, the strangest of anniversaries, has not changed for many years. The day his wife, my mother, had left him he had taken a bottle, one that had been bought without ever a precise purpose in mind, and he sat at the kitchen table. He had drank it close to its entirety with undue elaboration or fanfare, a very methodical and modest ceremony, lasting only as long as it took for the first bile to rise in his throat and then, he was done
Watching him now, repeating this act, I think again of something he had said when he had tried to explain why it was that he had loved her – how there’s a very pure perfection about someone that’s so hopelessly damaged. And how in that damage and all that mess of most likely their own making, a perfection can lie for perhaps only a single person to see… one person who sees the single and brightest star in the evening sky. The one hidden to everyone but he, because he and only he has stood himself, entirely by accident at the spot where the break in the clouds give the perfect and only possible view.
On that occasion it had been a strange and uncharacteristic slip. He had for the most part, since the day she had left behaved in a manner that seemed to suggest she had never existed in the first place. Or that at best he thought of her only as some lost and forgotten chapter of his life. This night he had wandered the apartment drunk, and it was as if he looked to find parts of her – torn up pages to stick together again enough so that he could read them. “Love is seeing a star as a sun,” he said as he tripped to bed leaving me with a notepad on which he had drawn an almost perfect resemblance of my mother in cheap blue biro.
Peter McCloskey lives in Belfast. He studied English Literature at the University of Ulster and works in the Arts in Belfast.