Our Parents
by Corey Farrenkopf
Our parents wait until It scrapes the windows, groping limbs circumnavigating the house, smudging the glass with whatever oil bleeds from their pores. First, the limbs streak across bedroom windows, then kitchen, then larder, then the next bedroom, then the next, then the dining room where we cower, unmoving, waiting for Its probe to pass.
Upon passing, there are five hours until It returns. The timeframe to find food is short. It likes to know we’re inside, secluded in our rooms, curtains wide so if It chooses to peer in, head dropped from the clouds, It could count us, one and two and three and four and…
So our parents are out the door, packs slung, boots rotting at the heel. They don’t carry weapons. If It decides to take fault with their absence from the rooms, there is nothing our parents can do.
Many of our parents have been lost in this way, caught looting canned chili from crumbling markets, picking apples from abandoned orchards. The food grows farther away, nearby spots picked clean, once seeded gardens fallow. The other parents wish for burials, but there are no bodies to inter, just absence, the clock unwinding, the grasping limbs slicking the windows once again, checking, counting, tallying births and deaths as if It has some plan for us other than to sit and wait for Its tide-like return.
Maybe it’s for the best there are no bodies.
Five hours isn’t enough for a proper burial.
Our parents leave for food once the limb has drifted away, door unlatched, feet echoing off chipped sidewalk. We watch the clock, wait with our remaining parents, second hand navigating the dust-etched facing. Sometimes our remaining parents sing to us, songs from a time we don’t remember, a time we weren’t crowded into a singular sprawling house.
We’re not even sure if our parents remember those times, but we choose to believe them.
It’s best not to think in more than five hour increments.
The limbs return before our parents return. Our youngest sibling moves to the window, peering through the grime, searching for bodies moving down the street, but there are no figures in the fog, no faces parting the mist. Our sibling is more attached to the parents who left than the parents who remained. We understand.
There is no food tonight.
The same happens the following day. And the next. And the next, until there are no more parents left to search for food or to sing or to hold us in the corners while the limbs wander about, reminding us of our time remaining.
There are many of us, dozens and dozens, a sea of dirty faces, but no one wants to become the parents. We’ve seen what happens to the parents. Inferred. Guessed. As we said, there are no bodies, no graves. But someone has to become the parents.
We have no food, no songs, and children need to be fed.
Corey Farrenkopf lives on Cape Cod with his wife, Gabrielle, and works as a librarian. His short stories have been published in Tiny Nightmares, The Southwest Review, Wigleaf, Catapult, Flash Fiction Online, and elsewhere. He is the Fiction Editor for The Cape Cod Poetry Review. To learn more, follow him on twitter @CoreyFarrenkopf or on the web at CoreyFarrenkopf.com.
