Scalding My Face in My Father’s Apartment

by Kristin Distel

Arnab Dey

A crumb of the communion wafer I shouldn’t have taken wedged itself in the crevices of my molar. Shunted between the uplifted hands of my father and grandmother, I tried to sing along—holy, holy, holy Lord, God Almighty, early in the morning our song shall rise to Thee—but the words vaporized in my mouth, my tongue a rushlight. Between verses, I slipped out of the beachside tabernacle and stepped into the murky lake water with my church shoes still on. Seaweed licked my soles. Waves broke on the wall of boulders, the gray spray of water looking, for a sliver of a second, like a plume of smoke, luminous. Thick water snakes, their black skins glinting in the late afternoon sun, flocked together at the shoreline. I heard my father’s distant tenor, my grandmother’s contralto—Though the darkness hide Thee, though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see, only Thou art holy—and wondered when my father, not yet forty and in perfect health, would die, would leave me with nothing but the sand and water under my feet, and remembered how I knew, I always knew, that he would die young. As a child, I tried to guess how much time I might still have with him, counted off years on my stubby fingers, and never knew when to stop counting. As a teenager, I watched his chest rise and fall and tried to match my breathing to his—and hoped that someday when his lungs stopped filling with air, mine might, too. Three years after I stepped out of the lake, the naked, steady flame of my faith was snuffed out when I buried him—grief clamped my mouth shut each time, after the funeral, I tried to pray. How I wished I had died with him on State Route 13. How, as a little girl, I blew out a candle at my father’s apartment, and the wax blew back like a wave and scalded my face, forming a perfect seal on my lips.

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Kristin Distel’s creative work has appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, JuxtaProse, Coldnoon, The Minetta Review, Rag Queen Periodical, Lehigh Valley Vanguard, Flyover Country Review, The Broken Plate, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and DIN Magazine. She is a Best of the Net nominee and the winner of 2017 Ohio University Literary Festival Poetry Competition. More information about her work is available at her website (https://kristindistel.weebly.com). She presented her critical work at The University of Oxford, The University of Manchester, the Sorbonne, and elsewhere, and recently published chapters on Toni Morrison, Larry Levis, Natasha Trethewey, Phillis Wheatley, and Mather Byles. Her co-edited volume, a reissue of Sherwood Anderson’s The Triumph of the Egg, was published by Hastings College Press in 2019.