This is the house with the mispelled date fingered into the old cement stoop: Aprial 18, 1959. This is the house where your father fell and never climbed back up. This is a house with lightning bugs blinking summer fire through the backyard wisteria and roses of your mother’s name. “This house,” you told your high school friends when he still lived here, “this is the house of the zombie—Father Ghost.” This was from where he called a dozen times a day for his famous 30-second conversations: just wanted to say hey, just wanted to say it’s raining, just wanted to say it’s later than too late. This is where the chimney swifts portal in and out of the sky every spring and fall. This is the yellow kitchen where you played guitar for him, Bach and Barrios, just once, and he said he wouldn’t count the two mistakes you made. This is the black TV mirror that sucked up so much of his static life. This little yard is the birdsong of your youth. “This is going to be hard,” Mom told you, and you could still smell him in the cobwebs and cockroach droppings. This is your first memory of toeing winter mud, tasting pollen grit with your eyes, sweating endless summer light. This yard corner here is where his rose-pink lilies bloom every June, and even though your mother says they smell like a funeral home, you can’t avoid their pollen stinging your eyes. This is home.
Jeff Dingler is an Atlanta-based writer. A graduate of Skidmore College with an MFA in creative writing from Hollins University, Dingler has written for New York Magazine, Washington Post, Salmagundi, Newsweek, and The Hollins Critic. He's currently at work on his first novel, Mother of Exiles, named runner-up in The Writers College's 2021 Global Novel Writing Competition.