Get Yourself a Tsunami Cat
Short story by Rebecca Wood, published by Waxing & Waning, Issue 10
Excerpt…
It was raining in the basement. Dark puffs of clouds circled against the drop ceiling, mixing patterns with the speckled tiles. At first it was only rain. Fat drops fell against my head while I looked for a light bulb to replace the burnt-out kitchen light. The ground was cold against my bare feet, the rain mixing with the cool basement air. My feet were still wet when I climbed onto the kitchen tabletop to reach the fixture causing me to slip on the smooth wooden surface as I stretched on my tiptoes. My hair dripped water down my back as I ate breakfast that morning alone.
“Dillon, Dillon, Jesus Dill take off your headphones for once,” my dad said loudly walking into my room, spooking my cat, Yuki, so that he hid under my bed. We had two policies in the house: no phones during dinner and my bedroom door stayed open. It wasn’t because they didn’t trust me, but my dad wanted the house to feel like all three of us were welcome in every corner.
“Yeah, sorry, what?” I asked, pulling the headphones from my ears. The beat of the music could still be heard from where I rested them on my laptop.
“I’m taking Dezi to the hospital, she might be having contractions or something,” he said. His phone dinged.
“Is everything ok?”
“What? Yeah, I was just texting with her doctor,” he responded. “We might not be back tonight. Take care of things around here, water the plants, and be good. Make sure you eat. And feed the cat.”
He walked away before I could respond, answering a message on his phone, shouting over his shoulder to lock the door behind him. I quickly ran downstairs after him, catching the front door before it swung closed, watching as he got into the driver’s side of the truck. Dezi caught my stare as I stood in the doorway, the door swinging shut against my back. I wanted to wave but ended up just staying still. She smiled at me.
Our house was an hour out of the nearest town, settled on a rise amongst the brush and desert willows. The hill kept the house from flooding during run off after summer storms. An adobe style wall surrounded the whole house making a sort of courtyard in the front. There were two gates in the wall, one for cars and one I used to go to and from school. I would ride my bike to the bus stop in the mornings, where me and the other kids who lived out of town would just leave them in the grass on the side of the road until we got dropped off again later. We never really talked, just waved when each of us turned off for our separate houses. I thought ours was my castle, passed on to my dad from his parents. I sat on the wall and would just listen to the desert. It was the only house my dad and I had ever lived in. I used to skip school to learn the creeks in the floorboards and splits in the drywall instead of reading and writing. As a child, my friends lived inside the walls until I became too old to believe anymore.
My dad and Dezi hadn’t come back that night. I had gone to bed after he texted me saying she was in labor, there had been some complications. I texted back—love you.
There was still no response as I went downstairs for breakfast. The lightbulb in the kitchen hadn’t just burnt out; it had shattered, and glass was scattered across the table when I flipped the switch. I brushed it away into the trash bin not thinking about the tiny cuts the shards created on my fingertips. When I came back up from the basement after finding a spare bulb, I left the door open at the top of the stairs so I could hear the rain from the table. The house was too quiet otherwise, the scrape of my spoon against the bowl echoing across the room.
I washed my dishes when I was done with breakfast, leaving them to dry next to the window in the kitchen and went to watch the rain. I sat down on the top of the basement steps, shielded from the drops falling throughout the room. They soaked into the concrete creating freckles across the floor, sunspots without ever seeing the sun. Yuki walked past me, switching his tail against my arms and back, close for just a moment before scurrying away from me and the threat of water. I wondered when the ground would stop being able to absorb it all.
It had been fourteen years since my dad had brought me back to his parents’ house. He was only seventeen himself, my real mom unwilling to hold me in the hospital when the nurses offered me to her. My grandparents raised me while my dad finished high school and college. They passed away and we stayed in the house. He never brought over girlfriends, until Dezi. Maybe I knew before he did that, she was the one he was going to marry. She moved in a year before their wedding when I was twelve. We got along fine but were shy around the fact that she wanted a kid and I was only my dad’s.
The new baby was going to be named Cara, they told me after dinner one night. Dezi was already twelve weeks along then. I had thought about what me and Cara would talk about as she grew up, check the boxes off as her experiences followed my timeline. First crush, first kiss, first period, first school dance, first detention after climbing to the roof of the school portables to lie in the sun. The metal ridges burning into her skin.
“Hello, Baby Cara,” I would say. Extending my hand for her little fingers to grasp onto mine. That would have been our daily ritual until her hand would fill mine and she could respond.
“Hello, Big Sister.” And we would smile. Our green-yellow eyes from our dad mirroring perfectly.
The story continues with Waxing & Waning