The Atmospherians by Alex McElroy (digital ebook reader txt) 📕

was a small secret as secrets went, but it tightened the bond between him and Bridgett, and he prized feeling like his daughter loved him more than her mother. He cast himself as the gift giver and rule breaker, the one who let her do what she wanted—though making Susan the disciplinarian eroded his marriage.

“Little jolts of tension whenever we spoke. I didn’t expect to resolve it. For all I knew, that was how family worked. You’re always mad at each other, scared of each other. I figured our lives were on track.”

Then his daughter got sick. Peter lay on the floor clutching his stomach. Gerry and Dyson argued in the corner of the square. All over town children were getting the flu. For weeks, Susan insisted they ought to get their daughter a flu shot. Randy wouldn’t allow it. Everyone who got the shot became a little bit sick. Even a little bit sick was too sick for his girl.

His parents blamed doctors for his brother’s death—for failing to undo the inevitable—and he carried their paranoia and blame inside him. Her fever climbed to 101. He refused to bring his daughter to the ER. Instead, he put her to bed with cough syrup and an aspirin, hoping sleep would lower her fever, make her tummy less grumpy. In the morning, Bridgett lay stiffly in bed with her eyes fixed on the ceiling. They rushed her to the hospital. The virus resisted antibiotics. The doctors were sorry. So sorry. She was less than a month into her eleventh year.

“A smart friend of mine, this philosophy guy who quit on college to work construction, used to tell me God is a novelist. Nothing is too convenient for God. You think: I couldn’t possibly lose my daughter at the same age as my brother. But God—and I don’t mean God god, because fuck him, I mean whatever’s shaping this world—only has so many notions.”

Randy grieved. Susan grieved and resented. They spoke to each other in barbs, thirsty to hurt. She filed for divorce. “Divorce meant the end of everything: job, barbecues, the conversations in supermarkets, fishing trips, love from her parents. All of it gone. And why? Because I wanted to protect my daughter from quacks.”

Dyson shaped his hand into a pistol. He paced in front of Gerry-as-Susan waving his handgun-hand. He pointed it at Gerry-as-Susan—head, then stomach, then heart.

“I wanted her to love me again—that’s it. Like she’d loved me when we met, when I was a mountain of trouble and need. I thought she’d love me again if I was in trouble.”

Dyson-as-Randy pressed his fingertip-barrel to his left forearm. They fired. Dyson dived forward in pain.

The men on the benches applauded and hollered. Dyson jumped to a stand. He locked arms with Gerry and Peter. They bowed. Fled the stage. Randy carried his chair to the center but didn’t sit down.

His history didn’t surprise me—I assumed each man harbored some violent or disturbing act in his past—but knowing what led him to Dyson, then here, and knowing he didn’t know that I knew, made Randy malleable and small in my mind, like a cloud of pillow filling, or mud. The rain had calmed down by this point, and the performance seemed to have ended—but Peter and Gerry joined the other men on the benches. Randy circled the chair. He eyed the empty seat, cracking his knuckles, his face tight with nerves. The energy in the barn sharpened. He clapped his cheeks to psych himself up.

Dyson stepped into the center of the square wearing a loose cotton dress patterned with suns and Mary Jane shoes. A wig clung to his head—blond—the sides pulled into pigtails. His outfit was one giant lollipop short of a joke. But no one giggled or snickered. They leaned over their laps, as captivated and haunted as I was. Dyson sat on the chair. Randy got on his knees.

I turned away from the peephole. There was no reason to punish Randy with some deranged public sex act. How stupidly cruel. No wonder Peter couldn’t have sex with me. I wanted to drag open the door and end this before it happened. But I was curious, too, as curious as I was disgusted—and I returned my eye to the hole in the wall, prepared for the worst.

Randy clasped his hands. He pleaded, “Bridgett, my love, my baby girl, my only child: I can’t begin to tell you how much I love you and miss you and how sorry I am that I lost you.” He listed everything he loved about Bridgett—the buttery scent of her hair, how she said the word happy (like hippy), her terror of cats, her dream of one day riding a horse (“such a simple, obtainable dream and I kept putting it off, kept telling you we’d do it when you were older, assuming you’d be older”)—while interrupting the praise with sticky pleas for forgiveness.

“None of this was your fault,” he said. “I’m the reason you’re not here anymore. I’m the reason you and me and your mother are no longer together. I’ll never forgive myself for losing you so early in life. Every day I wish I could tell you how much I love you and miss you.”

His devastation hosed through the hole in the barn. Drenched in his remorse, I regretted the cruelty I’d shown him, then regretted that regret, because Randy should never have acted with such callous stupidity—over a flu shot! I regretted only that his daughter had died so young, that his wife had suffered such an indelible grief. I wished Randy did not have this story to tell. As he spoke, my mind drifted past his contrition, and I imagined his face slumbering off to expose new faces beneath: Blake’s face, Lucas Devry’s. When Randy said, “Please forgive me for all I have done,” I saw Blake speaking these words. I heard Lucas Devry saying, I’m sorry, so sorry; I never should’ve acted so reprehensibly.

Randy bowed forward. He