A True Son of Gävle
- Jul 10, 2020
- 3 min read
by Sutton Strother
My father hasn’t stopped talking about death since his heart attack. “When I die,” he says tonight, “I’ll die deciding whether to call out to you for help. I won’t trust what I feel in my body or the shift of the light or the hum in my brain as two distant planets align or whatever harbinger I get.”
He says this in Swedish, which I think is the perfect language for death, and I tell him so.
“Like a Bergman film,” I say in English. My father is the only Swede who’s never seen a Bergman film.
“I’m not talking about death, Marie, I’m talking about you.” His face has turned as purple as the cabbage I’m chopping.
One of his cop shows—I don’t know which, they’re all the same—is paused on the TV. A handsome detective has his gun drawn. He’s frozen mid-shout, and a glob of spittle hangs suspended in the glow of a streetlamp.
I wave my knife at the television. “Think he’s single? That actor, I mean. I’d eat glass before I’d date a cop.”
“What’s some actor want with you? Some cop, come to think of it?”
The summer I was fourteen, he pinched the flab of my bare inner thigh. “Ugly,” he said, and when English alone wouldn’t banish it, “Fula.”
We eat dinner on the sofa: sausage (chicken instead of beef, because of his heart), braised cabbage, mashed potatoes for him alone since I’m avoiding carbs. He stabs one unmashed chunk of potato and holds it up to my eyes. “Why do a thing with half your ass?”
“On purpose,” I lie. “To make you suffer.”
“When I die, I’ll come back as a bird so that in my next life I can shit on you.”
“Turn your program back on.”
In motion, the handsome detective becomes less handsome. He handles every prop like a gator that needs wrangling. In the interrogation room, he lifts the suspect from his chair and slings him into a cinderblock wall. Eventually his partner, a tired-looking blonde lady, has to call him off.
“I could’ve been a cop,” says my father, who spent forty-two years behind bank-teller windows. Last week he said he could’ve been the biologist we saw in a documentary, exploring caves to uncover species thriving in the absence of sunlight. We are both afraid of the dark.
“You’d have been good at it, Papa. All that shouting and meanness.”
He’s had a tremor in his hands for the last decade. The fork shakes as he brings the sausage to his lips. I can’t imagine what messes he’d make with a pistol.
His episode ends as I’m clearing the dishes, and a trailer for the new Spider-Man movie blares to life.
“There he is!” cries my father. “Our Gävle boy!”
When I was a baby, Chernobyl fallout rained down on Gävle, the city of my birth. We left when I was three, but my father raised me on tales of berries as big as tennis balls and spiders that glowed in the dark. He used to tease that Spider-Man came from Gävle, another radioactive miracle. He talks about Peter Parker like he’s the son of a neighbor from back home, a good boy who will make a good husband for someone else’s daughter.
“Spider-Man’s just a cop with superpowers,” I say.
“I could’ve been Spider-Man.”
He moves past me down the hall, flinging imaginary webs from his trembling hands then scurries behind his bedroom door to climb the walls.
Sutton Strother is a writer and teacher who lives in New York. Her writing has been featured in various journals, including Pidgeonholes, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Pithead Chapel. You can read more of her work at suttonstrother.wordpress.com. She tweets @suttonstrother.
