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

“I’m gonna make chicken nuggets,” Dyson said to me.

“Carrots, honey. Your humors are off.” Your humors are off meant he was thicker than his father liked.

“The carrots are droopy,” he said.

“Because you never eat them.”

“Sasha wants chicken nuggets.”

“Sasha is welcome to as many as she likes.” She loaded the nuggets into the microwave. Dyson bit into a carrot as limp as a deflated balloon, eyeing the nuggets as they heated and spun, spun and heated.

“Dyson’s never had a neighbor his age,” said his mother. “Do you have siblings?”

I shook my head.

“Your parents made a wise decision. Two children, three. They’ll only fight. Worse. They’ll gang up on their parents. That’s how I was with my sister. A smear campaign against our parents. When Dyson’s daddy and I were deciding, I thought: It’s hard enough raising one child. Try raising two kids who conspire against you. I commend your parents.”

“They’re divorced,” I said. It seemed like it needed saying.

“Ohhhh. No. No. No,” she said. “That shatters my heart. There’s already too little love in the world. People say it’s so difficult, preserving a marriage. But what’s the alternative? Abandoning love? Accepting that love doesn’t deserve your effort? Dyson: Daddy and I could’ve gotten a divorce, couldn’t we have, sweetie? After the thing. But what would that have solved? Nothing. There were hard times, but we got through them because we—”

Dyson lunged an arm toward the microwave, trying to open the door before the timer went off. He was too late: a first chime, a second, a third, then an elongated chime louder than the others. He and his mother went silent; they angled their ears to the ceiling. Footsteps pummeled through the upstairs floor. Dyson’s head drooped in defeat.

“I’ll talk to him,” said his mother. But her voice tremored.

Footsteps descended the stairs and crossed the dining room. None of us let out a breath. I knew enough to fear whatever they feared.

Dyson’s father lurched into the kitchen. He was a short, dense man, built like a tombstone. He wore a loose Bugs Bunny T-shirt with holes under the arms and blue basketball shorts. His clean-shaven face was reflectively smooth. He peered through the microwave window. “You’re not eating this crap, are you?” he asked Dyson.

Dyson shook his head.

“We’ve talked about this. They’re softeners. What do softeners do?”

“They’re for my friend,” he said.

“This is Sasha,” said Dyson’s mother. “Our new neighbor.”

His father’s eyes grasped the cords in my throat. He was the type of man who felt most powerful when feared. So I feared him, out of courtesy—then actual fear.

“What do softeners do?” he asked Dyson again.

“Softeners make you stupid and fat.”

He slapped the back of Dyson’s head, then tossed the nuggets into the trash.

Dyson skated glances around the edges of his father, unable to look at him directly but unable to look anywhere else. I couldn’t look away, either. He was gravity incarnate in this house. His wife pawed his shoulder, asked if he wanted something to drink.

“What I want is two more hours of sleep. But looks like I’m working out early.” He stepped into the basement and slammed the door so hard a magnet fell off the fridge.

Dyson’s mother’s smile came out as a grimace. “You’ll need to make it up to him later.”

I said, “Can we watch that movie?”

“Not while Daddy’s exercising,” said his mother.

“The TV is downstairs,” said Dyson. “With the gym.”

“I might need to go home,” I said.

Dyson’s mother peered out the window. “Is your mother picking you up? Because you can’t possibly walk in this rain. Never. My god. It would be irresponsible of me as a parent—no, a community member—to let you out in this weather. You can’t underestimate rain. Even showers like this. Showers like this, you think it’s nothing and boom you’re facedown in the dirt. Is that what you want? That’s not what you want. I’ve seen people—men far stronger and older than you, athletes in their prime—taken down by rain much lighter than this.”

I asked her a question with my eyes: Could you drive me?

She shifted the compress to the other side of her forehead. “Oh, dear. I am not a driver. Not in my condition. In my condition, Dyson will tell you, I shouldn’t have access to a TV remote. But there’s plenty to do while you wait.”

We joined her in the living room to listen to some of her favorite chants. She stretched across the entire couch. Dyson and I made room on the floor amid an army of plastic Eastern God statues. His mother practiced a range of new-age healing methods, she told me, subscribing to a kind of de gustibus Eastern philosophy that combined but never committed to yoga, meditation, acupuncture, Reiki, chanting, and tea. In time, I would know people like her well, scattered, good-faith people desperate for fixes, the people most often hurt by the people they loved.

Dyson’s father was a small-time crook—shoplifting, passing bad checks, selling bootleg CDs and movies. He had broken a man’s jaw in a bar fight when Dyson was five. He spent seventeen months in prison. The charges funneled him into a life of part-time employment and night work. He’d never been a warm person; time away made him remote. In the aftermath of his sentence, Dyson’s mother treated her husband with caution verging on terror. She did all she could to ensure his family never disturbed him. This made it impossible to feel at home in their house—especially for Dyson, who ached for his father’s love but could never ask for it, out of concern it might shatter the fragile stability of the home.

Dyson’s father rumbled out of the basement. His gray shirt was oceanic with sweat, drip-drip-dripping on the linoleum floor. He filled an enormous stein with tap water and, gripping the glass instead of the handle, emptied it all in one terrible gulp before returning upstairs.

Dyson waited for me at the door to the basement. I was nervous to go in after