September 8, 2014 | Occasus | Issue 4 | Poetry

On the Night Before Your Father's Funeral

It is the middle of the night, and you’ve left the hotel television on,
a movie marathon on SpaceTV and I wake up half-way through,
so I can’t be quite sure of all the details. But there’s a bald man
in a gray spandex space suit and he speaks in a low, slow voice.

There are an infinite number of universes, he says
        each vibrating at different frequencies,
like the hum of a hive of bees, thousands upon thousands of hives,
                                        billions upon billions of bees.

Oh, one of those then.

You grunt beside me.
There is a buzz in my ears that will not go away.

The scene shifts – earth now, it must be. Some kind of run-down
research facility, an exterior shot. The leaves outside are a faint orange that bleeds
through the broken windows of the decimated lab. Inside, a dying woman
with her head in a man’s lap. He cries her name and he shakes her. Sara!
Beside him is an older man, the mad scientist type, and he says
something about experimental variables that doesn’t help anybody at all
and the man cries some more and yells for a cure.

Another shift – airport tarmac, zoom to a private plane, the president on board.
This morning we missed our train, so we flew here instead.
At the airport, you said maybe we shouldn’t go and I said nothing,
but I maxed out my credit card for standby seats on opposite ends of the plane.
At take-off, I dug my nails into the hairy arm of the man next to me,
and never told you. Sorry about that. Sorry I did that. I’ve missed
something now, with the movie. The plane’s gone. We’re back in the lab.
Apparently The Machine is broken, apparently
the universes – all of them – are decaying at exponential rates.

The bald man returns. He’s on earth now,
standing beside The Machine, the mad scientist dead beneath it.
The other man is crying again – it’s an emotional role –
        and he says tell me what to do, tell me what to do you stupidpieceofshit.
The bald man says, the paths fork endlessly ahead,
        with each action there is reaction.

I’ve skipped a few frames now. I can’t quite follow along.
I keep thinking about that time you snuck out to buy me candy
and beer, because the dog died and I was having trouble
moving on. But you never said move on.
Your black suit is hanging on the back of the door and something explodes
on the television screen. You are moaning now, in your sleep,
and not the good kind where I know what to do with my hands.

KATHARINE O'REILLY is currently pursuing a specialization in Creative Writing and English. She has been previously published in Occasus (Issue 2).