The Limbo

by Zach Murphy

The cicadas are extremely loud this summer, and so are my mother’s outfits. The leopard print high-heels, the oversized sunglasses, and the hat with the pink floral arrangement on its brim are some of the more understated pieces in her wardrobe.

“You don’t hear about the sun when it’s behind the clouds,” she once told me as she put her beet-red lipstick on in the mirror.  

My mother always looks so beautiful, even when she’s sad. Every time she comes back from the Friday night Limbo parties at the bar down the block, her frown has dipped a little lower than it was before. It’s amazing how spending time in the company of other people can make you feel more lonely. 

A ”Welcome Home” streamer for my father has been strung across our house’s front window for an entire year now. It collects more dirt with each wind gust, and its shiny colors have faded. I wonder why my mom has decided to leave it up for so long. She keeps saying it’s a pain to take down. But it’s also a pain to leave it up. Maybe a tiny part of her is holding onto hope. A thin, dangling shred of hope. 

When my father went overseas for his job as an underwater welder for cargo ships– whatever that means– my mother and I became a lot closer. She taught me how to cut my own hair and she taught me how to play softball. After my father didn’t come home when he said he was going to, she taught me that you can’t trust people even when they look you in the eyes, and she taught me that promises can be shattered and stomped over like broken glass. 

“If he was dead, we would have found out about it,” she once said. “If he’s alive, he’s making a choice to not come back.” Somehow that felt worse than a death. 

Sometimes I create imaginary scenarios in my head about why my father hasn’t come home. Maybe he got roped into a plot to save the world. Or maybe the work has just taken longer than anticipated. Or maybe he told us it would be three years instead of three months and we just didn’t remember. After a while, I run out of explanations.

My mother was never one to sugarcoat things. She didn’t even put frosting on my birthday cake this year. “Frosting isn’t good for you,” she says as she lights a cigarette from one of the candles. I blow out all thirteen of them, and we hear a car pull up on the street in front of our house. We get up to go look. An old man that neither of us recognizes gets out of the car and walks over to deliver a package to the neighbor across the street, gets back into the car, and takes off. My mother takes a drag from her cigarette and stares through the screen door. The sounds of the cicadas intensify. 

Zach Keali’i Murphy is a Hawaii-born writer with a background in cinema. His stories appear in The MacGuffin, Reed Magazine, The Coachella Review, Lunch Ticket, Raritan Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, Little Patuxent Review, Flash Frog, and more. He has published the chapbook Tiny Universes (Selcouth Station Press). He lives with his wonderful wife, Kelly, in St. Paul, Minnesota.