Fiction

It’s embarrassing, admitting that your father thinks your dead mother has come back as a parrot. There isn’t a natural way to bring it up in conversation.

When we meet again for lunch at Swingers in Hollywood he has already been dead for three years. Still, I’d recognize him anywhere. The way he stands. His California slow smile. That stupid T-shirt I always hated, the one that says “Musicians Play Around.”

I murmur in the father tongue, I don’t know where to go. I shout in the mother tongue, estás ahi? The bedsheets bunch up beneath me as I tremble, they dampen with my tears as I beg to be held a final time.

My father was patient as I got used to the slick sphere, the frightening oddness of it there in my mouth. His encouragement was gentle, routine, no different than when he’d taught me to tie my shoes and ride my bike.

I checked my notes, wondering where to go from here since it seemed we were at an impasse. This was Day 94, and Dendro, as I had nicknamed it, had gone silent. At least, as far as I could tell from a tree.

“I’m not trying to get rid of you at all,” I lie. That’s exactly what I want to do. Despite his presence as a permanent fixture in my emotional life, I know he can’t give me a commitment.

If you’re going to order a dozen tropical drinks and dump their contents onto the table, then start sculpting those contents into the shape of your would-be daughter, the late-afternoon rush at Señor Frog’s is the time and place to do it.

‘Is that common?’ I ask Lee during a lull in the conversation. ‘Hurling cabbages over with catapults?’

‘What, you don’t have catapults in Myanmar?’ Lee quips. ‘Or cabbages?’

‘Well, we use coconuts,’ I say, and the audience laughs. 

‘What, for catapults?’ 

Rod jumps in. ‘Ignore him, Thandar. You haven’t been in the U.K. for very long, have you?’

‘I arrived about four years ago,’ I tell him. ‘Bit of a culture shock.’