Frederick Charles Melancon
While I might be dead, this doesn’t change the fact that my daughter still needs me. There’s no other explanation why I’m still floating around here. Not that anyone accurately explained what happens after death, at least not from what I gathered while sitting in a pew. The whole experience is just a bunch of floating around, banging into things, and figuring it out. Of course, the incorporeal thing does stop most of the banging, but it’d be nice if someone gave some solid instructions before now. Personally, I’d just like to know why sometimes my hand passes through the coldness of a beer yet other times knocks it over with all the contents gurgling out. Or the fact that this failure has never stopped me from trying again.
Anyway, failing’s why I think she needs me, and this isn’t the father always knows best line. All right, it probably is, but it’s built on the need to give the child some guidance that she never had while growing up because heart attacks happen.
She was eleven. Old enough to remember me, but young enough to not understand the intricacies of living a life. To prove the point, she wants to be a teacher, and yes, I was one too. But it wasn’t by choice.
When most people die, they have some regret. Mine wasn’t giving more to my art. My passion was throwing mud. But the money from the couple of pieces of pottery I sold wasn’t enough to pay the bills, so I taught other people’s kids to scribble on paper. But even that small chance between lesson plans and meetings to do what I loved was worth it. Even in this state, the sound reminiscent to the humming of a spinning wheel or the slap of wet mud sends shivers… well, my spine isn’t there, but you get the point.
I thought my daughter knew the importance of passion. After all, a year later she went through my work and picked out my best designs, a coiled vase with perfect symmetries and a coffee mug. This was before my wife either threw the rest out and sold my potter’s wheel and kiln for far too little. Obviously, if I could’ve been drawn to the light or God or even the breath over the water, it would’ve happened while every ceramic piece of me cracked against the side of a trashcan. But I’ve only ever been drawn to my daughter, not the wife. Okay, I hear the slight edge to those words. My ex-wife’s that only because of my death, not by divorce or anything like that, so she’s allowed to move on with her life. After all, she put up with me and even raised my daughter. She even stayed with our girl until college, and when our daughter moved out, the ex-wife harassed her daughter with a phone call every day. The gossip from her latest call has her moving with her boyfriend to Hilo. I guess she got tired of the cold, and after living in the stillness of this void, I can’t blame her because whatever I’m doing here isn’t real living anyway.
But the living my daughter needs to make deals with her music. The soprano of her voice or the melting notes from an instrument far outweigh the other moments I’ve had to endure watching her awkward first kisses or shaking fogged up cars.
The way her body sways with the rhythm of her music reminds me of how the clay used to feel between my fingers. Now, don’t take this as fatherly pride. But she’s a musical genius, and there’s joy from being able to witness it. Of course, this isn’t a new revelation. She played the piano well when I was alive, and now she plays the cello, which she picked up in high school, and oboe, an undergrad experiment. But the best is the beauty that flows out like silk from her mouth. She even had scholarship offers after her undergrad years to go to anywhere she wanted. But she stayed close to home.
She did get a master’s degree. The problem was it’s in math education. And I’ll be blunt. At first, I had no idea where that came from until she brought the vase to the classroom. She used it as a glorified pencil box, which wasn’t its purpose. But every now and then she’d measure the symmetries with her students, and I realized that this was all my fault.
At that young age, she’d seen me teach art and really that must’ve been it. Also, I might’ve boasted about the natural math in my designs. It’s unfortunate I never told her how miserable I was at teaching others to crawl in the subject I could spin in.
Of course, I knew when she brought my vase into her classroom, even told her students about it, what would happen. I taught long enough to know that such a thing might be revered by some but others would see it as a challenge. Yet, if the vase broke, it might break her hold on me and my influence on her life choices.
But none of them ever even tried. They wouldn’t dare. Even in her first year of teaching, when most people do everything wrong, the students listened to her. Followed her down the hall in a long snaking line that never broke into a massive disobedient blob.
This is when I perfected a trick that would’ve been helpful sooner. I can’t pick the beer cans up, but I can change the flow of air just enough to knock over whatever I want. So, one of her math textbooks accidently crashed into another, which ended with the shards of ceramics scattering over the floor, and while I was sad about losing the vase, it was finally nice to have an impact that would help my daughter’s life.
Every child in that room rushed to their desk while my daughter knelt in the shards. One of the kids even cried silent at his desk. Of course, it’s the one that’s always out in the hallway and would’ve given me all sorts of trouble if he’d been in my art class.
At that point, I was drawn close to my daughter, almost too close. One of the worst students who she even wrote up the week before knelt down next to my daughter and hugged her. She sank into the child’s arms. The students—even my favorites—never touched me, and that’s when I realized why it was her and not the wife. She held on to me and taught because in her way she wasn’t missing out but fulfilling her passion, like she’d seen her father do with the pottery. Teaching, for her, made the world shape from clay into a vessel with perfect symmetries. She let out a sob and then stopped and started the next lesson to take her mind off all my mess. Every student sat silent. All the vase had ever been to her was a symbol of pursuing what I chased with my art.
At the end of class, every last student got up to pick up the shards of her father’s work, and in the future, they’d make horrible facsimiles giving them to her even when they weren’t in the class anymore. She never threw one away. That day, I floated next to her trying to explain. No one ever told me. Because yes, my daughter does need me—just not in the way I thought.
Frederick Charles Melancon lives with his wife and daughter in Mississippi, where he tries not to haunt them too much. More of his works can be found in Short Beasts, Eye to the Telescope, and 365tomorrows.
Featured photo by Pavel Danilyuk (Pexels)
