Theatrically Sporadic

A parent witnesses Oscar's surreal acts of grief after their child's death.

The first time Oscar vanished, it was a violation of physics. We were hosting a dinner party, the air thick with the lie of normalcy. He was mid-pour, the neck of a Cabernet hovering over a woman’s glass when the light in the room waned, as if dimmed by a master electrician, and bent around the space where he’d been. The wine completed its arc, splashing crimson onto the white tablecloth. A gasp. A dropped fork. He was simply… un-created from the scene. I found his suit jacket folded on the piano bench, pristine, a single cufflink gleaming under the light like a tiny, cold eye. For a moment, the air tasted of oatmeal and the waxy scent of crayons. A small, warm shadow flickered just beyond the doorframe, gone before I could turn my head. The air hummed, a low, dissonant chord that vibrated in the roots of my teeth. The clock on the mantle ticked three times in the space of a single breath.

Our daughter, Laura, had been gone for eleven months. Oscar didn’t cope. He performed.

I find him at 3:17 AM. Or perhaps it was only a minute, or an hour. Time is soft here. A rectangle of cold, electric light cuts the kitchen darkness. He is inside it, a statue posed before the open refrigerator. He isn’t looking. He is a man listening to the hum of the motor, an audience to its singular, droning note. I watch from the doorway. In the periphery, a small shadow darts past the table leg—too quick, too low to the ground to be anything real. The hum swells. The bulb above him flickers, ever so slightly, its white light tingeing to a sickly yellow for one prolonged second. He closes the door, and the light vanishes with a final, mechanical sigh. A blackout. When my eyes adjust, he is gone. The highchair in the corner leans on two legs, defying gravity. From the living room, the faintest whisper of a sigh, too high-pitched to be an adult.

He leaves behind his props. A Tuesday. Or the Tuesday after. The sun seems stuck at a single, low angle. A single gardening glove in the black earth, fingers curled inwards, clutching a fistful of nothing. A trowel standing upright, a tiny, brutal monolith. He is building a garden for a ghost.

The most brutal was the sweater. Laura’s favourite, the colour of oatmeal. I found it at dawn, arranged on the lawn with a curator’s precision. The neckhole was positioned just so, the sleeves laid parallel, a perfect, child-shaped emptiness pressed into the dew-damp grass. I didn’t touch it. I let the morning wind try to shift it. A faint, sweet smell of apples and damp earth rose from it, a scent that belonged to a warm, living neck. The afternoon light seemed to avoid that spot on the lawn, leaving it in a perpetual, cool shade. It remained, a perfect, aching negative.

The ring is a gunshot in the silent house. It rings seven times, or maybe only once, stretched thin as wire. His voice is a crackle of static from another dimension. “Do you remember,” he begins, no greeting, “the way she would line her dolls up? Not by size. By the colour of their dresses. A pastel army.”

My own memory fractures. Is that right? I see the small hands, yes. I see the dolls. But the order… was it by colour? Outside the window, a single raindrop hangs frozen on the pane, a perfect, trembling lens. The hallway behind me seems to stretch, elongating into a tunnel of deepening shadow.

“I bought a doll today,” he whispers. “A stupid, tiny thing in a yellow dress. I left it on a park bench. I hope it’s loved by someone else.”

The line dies. The only sound left is the low thrum of the dial tone, a flat, endless note. From the playroom upstairs, the distinct, plastic click of a tiny shoe being set down. Once. Twice. Then silence. The clock on the wall resumes its ticking, now impossibly fast.

He doesn’t enter. He coalesces. One moment the armchair is a void, the next he is baked into its leather, a part of its structure. The light is the colour of dust and regret, and it pulses, faintly, like a slow, tired heart. He smells of ozone and cold pavement.

He addresses the empty fireplace, his voice the sound of stones grinding underwater. “I saw a moth. In the library. It was beating itself against a fluorescent light. A terrible, frantic, ticking sound. Like a tiny heartbeat trying to escape a glass jar.”

I hold my breath. The walls emit a faint, sub-audible hum. The lamplight dips and flares.

“I turned the light off.” A long pause, filled by the sound of the wind worrying a loose latch on the window upstairs. A faint, rhythmic tap-tap-tap against the frame. The pause stretches, a canyon of silence that seems to last for minutes. “And it stopped. Just… stopped. It settled on the shade. Just a little piece of folded dust.”

He turns his head. His eyes are empty proscenium arches. “I stood in the dark,” he whispers, the words fraying at the edges, “and I couldn’t remember if the sound of the moth was what woke me up last night, or if it was the sound of Laura, crying out for us.”

The line hangs in the air, an atom bomb dropped on the past.

He rises. His exit is not a disappearance but a slow, weighted procession. He stops before me. He does not touch me. Instead, he places an object on the coffee table between us. It is the other gardening glove, caked in cold, alien mud. Then he turns. The stairs do not creak under his weight. Each step is a silent, seismic event. The light in the room brightens a fraction with his departure.

I look at the glove. It is a relic from a play that never opened. A prop left for me.

The house holds its breath. The wind has stilled. The tap-tap-tap has ceased.

The performance is over.

I pick up the glove. It smells of earth from a garden that doesn't exist, and faintly, impossibly, of oatmeal.

And I sit in the perfect, ringing silence, waiting for the next act to begin.