All That's Left

All That's Left

Manny opened the door to his bedroom. Lavender walls were crawling with carpenter ants. The soft, worn oak desk that held his self-built Lenovo desktop had a viscous, syrupy puddle of red-brown from the Coke can lying on its side. Papers that had been relevant semesters ago snagged to the carpet’s little fingers. The rustling of a wrapper or aluminum bag of sorts crinkling somewhere in the room. Some corner. But he couldn’t see where, and he didn't necessarily try to find it. Something small and scurrying had hurled itself headfirst into the white plastic mountains of recyclables bulging from the corner of his room, their knotted bags crowding half the entryway. But he didn’t care for that either. His only priority was the bowl in his bottom dresser’s sock drawer. Or was it a plate? Whatever it was, it was in that drawer, dorming with a few pairs of old underwear and a pair of navy Puma sweatpants that hadn’t fit him since he was thirteen. That is where his leftovers from a few nights ago were, and he needed it now, then wash it, and then stack it with the other dishes in the cabinet before his mother or Terry could catch him. Manny couldn’t remember whether the bowl or plate would hold parched grains of rice that would stick to the bowl with starch, or if some sort of oil or soup residue would stain the cream-colored soda-lime glass bowl. He stared down at his dresser like a fledgling hawk too scared to sink its little talons into a crippled mouse. “There can’t be a bowl in there. There just can’t be. I can’t live like this,” he thought. Manny took a step forward but froze. Maybe there is no bowl, though, he thought. And he thought to be correct.

Outside, his mother was not yet near their neighborhood. In all honesty, she wasn’t the problem. Manny smiled at his mother’s serenity and her ability to forgive, or even forget, his mishaps. It was Terry whose voice he dreaded. It was Terry who would make the back of his neck hot once he remembered he had a bowl to take out of his drawer. That old sock drawer.

Manny thought back on a Thursday last year when Terry had been in the kitchen and made a fuss about two plates being missing. The funny thing was that he nearly broke all the remaining bowls and plates as a penalty for the two missing ones. 

“No! No, he’s fuckin’ useless! He don’t clean! He likes to do what he wants!” His low voice trilled through the walls like a vacuum. Manny could hear him through his closed door, crystal clear. Soon, he heard his mother’s sweet croon trying to calm Terry, while also defending her son. He couldn’t hear her words from where he stood. They weren’t boisterous enough to break through the walls. Manny could only stand there, looking at his closed door and imagining Terry and his Mom looked like fighting. If he sat down, he would faint. If he lay down, he might start to throw up. That’s how he felt. He couldn’t remember when that feeling began or what it meant. His legs tingled like twigs in the breeze under his skin. He couldn’t move. Terry’s voice was breathing on his earlobe like a heavy whisper. The temperature in his room alone climbed toward the sun’s climate. 

That’s when the thumping began. Not just the thumping of a dribbling ball or a drizzle of raining rocks. These thumps were of a furious nature that followed a path. An attentive myriad of footsteps. Footsteps not of his Mom’s dainty figure.

It was just as Manny could comprehend what was going on that the door swung open. The crinkling of weeks-to years-old aluminum cans crunching against the door.

An army of carpenter ants strided through the bushes of grimy rocks of muck. In a single-file line, they marched through the tangled debris on the scaling incline wall. It was a battalion large enough to coat the entire wall. Their antennae receptors could smell the weeks-old rocks of a cracker’s meat, the candied flesh of candy that hadn’t been bothered to be finished or thrown away. In the distance, there was a little hint of fried chicken that clung to the air. Perhaps the battalion will split in half, with the second line trailing down the wall to find the fragments of fried chicken? 

Manny didn’t see these ants. The frame of his bookshelf was hiding the army of carpenter ants, and thankfully so. If Manny had seen this colony, then he would have thrown up all over himself. Undoubtedly. 

On top of that, the bookshelf wasn’t in Manny’s attention anyway. He was still staring at the dresser, trying his best to see through the old oak of his sock drawer to see if a bowl was kept inside. He had crept two steps closer, which was still six steps too short to touch the pithy skin of the dresser. 

“There is no bowl, anyway. I cleared them all out,” Manny said to himself. He shook his head at the fruitlessness of this whole thing. Thing. That was what Manny thought to call this. There was nothing for it to be an “incident” or “event” or a “pickle”. There was nothing in that drawer. There was no obstacle. No obstacle means no problem. No problem means that this is not worthy of being called an incident, event, or a pickle. And yet that was only what Manny thought to be true. 

The Thursday one year ago when Terry, for the first and only time, yelled at Manny had left this image of Terry in Manny’s mind. Terry and Manny’s mom had been dating for three years. He’s been living with them for two of those three. Manny and Terry spoke to each other five times a year, and it was assumed to decline over the next years of their lives. 

Before that Thursday last year, Manny found Terry to be alright on the best day. There was nothing significant about Terry that made Manny believe he was a worthy candidate to be with his mom. Terry wasn’t all that much funny. He was two feet shorter than his mom. On top of that, he was the General Manager of a bicycle shop which Manny found to be sad. It was sad to him because the AC only blew warm, loud air and on a good day, maybe nine people would come in. He didn’t own the shop, just managed it so it didn’t exactly hurt him the way it did Kevin Gospling, the proprietor of the shop. 

Terry was also a thickset man, which Manny would critique daily to his mom, trying to make it sound like a joke when he was disgusted by his figure. 

His mom never took his little jokes seriously because Manny himself was chubby. He only wore medium-sized shirts, relatively common for the average seventeen-year-old, but, as she told her best friend, Charlize, in confidence, “you would think it’s a children’s small.” 

She never did tell Charlize about that Thursday one year ago, when she stood behind her boyfriend of two years and choked as he tore her son apart with his vehemence.

“You pathetic piece of shit, brah! You like to live like this! This is how you wanna live?! Huh?! Storing all your empty dinner plates and bowls and shit away in the fucking drawers?! Huh?!” Terry’s face had reddened while Manny’s had gone bloodless. Still, Manny tried to stand his ground, furrowing his brow, mouth agape, and head shaking. It was a face and a shake that insinuated that Terry was the idiot here. That he was irrationally causing a scene. And yet, Manny couldn’t say anything. His mom tried to, but all she let out were broken utterances, like a mute child learning to speak for the first time. She and her son were quiet, shaking at Terry’s rage. 

That’s when he yanked open Manny’s top drawer. 

In the summers of the 80s and the early 90s, Manny’s mom would visit his grandfather in the San Fransico Bay Area of California. He and his grandmother broke up when he was only three years old, so he was raised moving from her small brick house in the Vermont countryside to two months of ninety-degree sun rays in the Bay. His mom stayed skinny because her dad was, in her words, “so fat it’s going to kill him”. From five to ten years old, it was just how he was built. There was nothing to comment on. To her, he wasn’t called “fat” but “dad”. Her dad had his own shape, just as her mother had hers, and she had her own, and everyone else in the world had theirs. She loved being with her dad more than her mother, actually. All they would do every day of every week for the two months of her summer staycation was watch movies, drink fruit-flavored sodas, eat popsicles and burgers, and go to the beach. That was what her life was for sixty days, and she had no reason to complain. She’d come back to her mother’s house, her home in the countryside of Vermont, and her mother would say, “Oh my lord! You get so fat?! Why you let yourself get so big?!” But Manny’s mom would just laugh. It was funny to her because she would say the same thing to her dad as she would bounce on his stomach or play the drums on him as he lay down. 

She doesn’t know why, but the summer that she was now eleven, things had changed. Her dad was no longer “dad”; he was “fat”. Not only that, but she noticed that he never did take the trash out. She never offered because why would a child want to take out the garbage? They had only gone to the beach once or twice every other week, and during their time there, her dad wouldn’t take off his shirt. She’d lie her head on his round stomach at night when he was sleeping, and she was watching TV, but there was a sorrow painted on her face that she wouldn’t wash off for the two months. 

From the ages of twelve to fourteen, she hardly ever spoke to him during those two months. He disgusted her. She cried every night at his state. Not only had he become morbidly obese from his gluttony, but hygiene and a decent cleaning of the house were nothing less than a chore. And when you’re as old as her dad was, you could decide whether you did your chores or not. She practically begged to take out the trash once it got full, but that was no match for the carnage sprawled across the floor. The ground was a landfill for her and her dad to walk through. It was hard for her to hug him, both physically and psychologically. 

When she arrived back home to her mother, she cried that she didn’t want to see him again. It was too much for her pubescent brain to handle.

Had he missed the love of his ex-lover, her mother, that much that he had to destroy himself like this? Was this his way of getting the family back together? Was this his slow suicide? She couldn’t tell, and she wanted no part in whatever scheme it was he was planning. 

It wasn’t until after she cut off physical contact with him that they had gotten closer. She’d call him frequently through the years. She told him that she was too busy with summer extracurriculars and summer work to visit him, and he understood. She wondered if he knew how she actually felt, and that made her want to end her life. Thinking about her dad sobbing in his state, on his bed all alone, she couldn’t bear it. 

But she waited until she had Manny to see her dad again, and he was the one to come to her. He had gotten bigger, but she didn’t let that tarnish the birth of her beautiful baby boy. It was at Manny’s first birthday that her dad told her he had type 1 diabetes. She could see it coming and, in fact, joked that she was surprised it took this long, which she genuinely did feel. But he laughed at it too. They both knew what there was to know. 

Things were good just talking over the phone. If only she hadn’t had to go to the San Francisco Bay Area for a meeting with the executives of a successful boutique three years ago. If only she didn’t plan to visit her dad for a few nights. She knocked on the front door, knowing that what she would see would hurt her, but she accepted it. It was easy to accept something that you don’t see.

When he opened the door, tears immediately shaped in her eyes and she began to choke. It wasn’t the sight of his left leg stump pointing at her. She had known that it had been a few years since they had to take his leg. It wasn’t the sight of him in a wheelchair either. He had sent her a collage of funny pictures of him sitting in it, and they all made her laugh. It wasn’t that his stomach had swelled up thrice the size it had been the last time he saw her at Manny’s birth. Something slapped her in the face. Something invisible. And it smelt of grease and some old fruit and semen and the flavor of orange and grape Fanta. She didn’t know how the taste of the beverages crafted a scent, but it did, and it choked her. She looked down at her dad. His skin was yellow, like his kidneys were failing him. But he smiled. It had been fourteen years since he saw his daughter. Why wouldn’t he smile?

It was that smile that she saw crafted by the carpenter ants after Terry yanked Manny’s top drawer right out of his dresser. Perfectly sketched, too, like they had seen his smile for themselves. The carpenter ants were clever ones in this house. Three cockroaches then scurried out of the dresser with crumbs of their stale meal on their chins. Whatever had been on Manny’s plate was now cleaned off by the insects, but there was still residue on the plate, the fork, and the spoon that came with whatever his dinner was. 

At first, it seemed as though the cockroaches, or even the baby rat that sprinted out of the closet at that second, had sworn at Manny, spitting vulgarities at his dirtiness. That’s what his mother initially thought because it couldn’t have been from Terry. He had never raised his voice in such a manner before. But it was Terry. His bald crown resembled the town’s map, with his bulging veins. She couldn’t say anything. She was choking again. 

Manny stood still as he looked at his dresser. His mother and Terry weren’t home yet. He still had time to open the drawers and see that nothing was there. It was the two of them who had misplaced their dishware, not him. And that’s what he had. Time. With time as his friend, he figured he would wait a bit. He was getting hungry. 

The end.