Dreams of My Father

~Thom Satterlee 1. Most notable of all, his weight is back. A good, rounded beer gut stretches his sports shirt like a bull half-hidden under a cape. He is all and all energy, standing tall on the summer grass. I know: we are at my grandmother’s house, the home he grew up in. And I know: I am looking up at him. I am a boy and he is my father telling me some bullshit story to make both of us break out laughing. 2. On the sidewalk on Main Street in Batavia, NY, I walk several steps with him before realizing, my God, he’s walking, he’s walking as if he’d never had those operations! I turn to him and tell him how amazed I am. I ask him how. He says he just decided to walk. It’s easy once you make up your mind. I believe every word he says. I believe my own damned dream. 3. I must carry my father up this flight of stairs. They lead to a bedroom, but there’s no bed. I have to carry that up, too. The mattress buckles, gets stuck between walls, but I yank it free; I wrestle it into the room. Then the bed’s on the floor and my father’s on the bed. I sit in a chair, pull the lever to recline. That instant, I hear my father scream. Somehow his leg had gotten stuck in the chair. When I leaned back, I broke his leg. Now I’m kneeling in front of him. He looks at me with a look to calm me. But the cast on his leg has split open and through the plaster I see what he doesn’t: a gash in his leg clean to the shinbone. When I look up at him again his face is sweaty. Others have arrived. They will take him to the hospital, quickly. I want to help but am told, no, I can carry the bed. I follow after them, shoving the mattress down the stairs and through a doorway that opens onto a lawn with one tree. My father, changed into a boy, crouches on the grass. He holds out his hand. On his fingertips a green insect perches, its wings folded. My father, this boy, takes a few steps and as the insect begins to fly away he jumps, he throws back his head and laughs. When I wake I will tell myself this is a beautiful dream, but while I’m inside of it I feel only a sadness that passes understanding.