By Aimée Keeble
After Life
When I die, I'm reunited with my parents for thousands of years. I look exactly like I did at twelve and my mom looks thirty-five which makes her happy. My dad is kind of a blur between thirty-seven and eighty. The cocker spaniel is back and so is the cat that ate my hamster. But he's outside because he was always outside. We have a great time, all four of us. There are always half-fizzy two liters of 7Up in the fridge and I wonder if there is any significance to this. We play board games a lot, especially Splat which I think disappeared from retail sometime in the early 90s. It feels good to be in memory. Mary Poppins comes on the TV a lot during the Holidays, and we normally make time to sit down together and watch it. Outside the windows, the sky is gold and moving.
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, my dad says to me.
Can you spell it?
S, I start.
No, he says.
S, I say again.
Wrong! He cries out.
I say S a few more times and he's looking at me with his forever eyes, smiling like he's always known he's smarter than me. And I'm so glad about that.
Can you spell it? He asks again.
I look at my mother but she's holding the cocker spaniel like a baby and Dick Van Dyke is talking to penguins. Animals can be distracting.
Can you spell it?
I give up, I tell my dad. I want to fall asleep on the sofa before the movie ends.
I,T! He yells. He's delighted.
I get it, I say. That's so stupid.
The movie ends but I'm awake, trying to backtrack my mind into getting to the answer.
Move on, my dad says.
I can't, my brain won't let me, I answer.
It's dark now and I stand in the doorway calling the cat's name. He doesn't come and so I go further into the yard and say his name a few more times. I turn back and close the front door and stand in the hallway, enjoying the safe night feeling. In life, the cat was the first to go. My dad would have been proud of him.
Aimée Keeble has her Master of Letters in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow and is represented by Ayla Zuraw-Friedland at the Frances Goldin Agency. Aimée lives in North Carolina and is working on her second novel.