Fragmentary
Scarcely a month after her ninth birthday, her father is murdered, struck from behind by a truck at an unlighted rail crossing a short distance from their village. The driver, a gin-soaked farmer blinded by too many early New Year’s toasts, narrowly avoids being dragged under a rumbling north-bounder; he doesn’t feel or hear a thing of her father—astride a motorcycle pieced together from parts he’d salvaged over years—being thrust by the impact beneath the wheels of the last freight car.
Hours later, she and her mother are awakened by a shuffling constable, offered scraps of her father’s wallet and a humanely vague rendition that nevertheless sets her and her mother instantly adrift. For days after, she cannot comprehend how her father could have been so irreversibly stopped, like the old pocket watch it took him years to discard though there was no hope for its repair. Finding his absence too jarringly abrupt, too abstract, she has become consumed with seeing for herself the exact spot where he ceased to be.
And so, days later, rising at dawn, she creeps from the house and sets out for the place where he, like his old pocket watch, fell beyond repair. On the road leading to the crossing, straddling a bicycle grown too small for her, she feels a prick of shame for not wanting his incandescent green eyes to be her only bequeathment, driven instead to find a more tangible keepsake, one steeped in his lingering presence, one more reliable than her own reflection.
After a short while, she arrives at the crossing to immediately find shards of his motorcycle’s fender lining the tracks; flattened like plated leaves, they glint with morning light. Strewn between the rail ties, she discovers crescents of rubber shaved from the tyres and, scattered along the ballast like scrapped hairpins, bent spokes. Sifting through all this debris of his patiently assembled machine, she still can’t imagine how he could have been so completely unmade, leaving no trace of himself among the wreckage. She doesn’t know of what was scraped from the tracks, hove into black bags, the rails then scrubbed to thwart scavengers, but if parts of his motorcycle remain, then surely something of him must also—a ring, his buckle, the leather-banded Serbo that replaced his pocket watch, anything that might give her mourning a focal point, as would funeral beads or a prayer wheel. And soon enough, she finds it, something that diverts that mourning down another flume altogether.
High on the post of a signal box, fastened to its weather-beaten surface, a small clump brings her insides to a crawl: thrown from the train’s wheels, affixed with the force of its own steaming velocity, there hangs what she knows can only be a piece of him. Somehow going unnoticed by the crows, and despite the brumal exposure, it remains semi-moist, semi-him—just a tiny fragment, still pink as her cheeks on this bright and brittle winter morning.
It’s in this moment that her own unwinding is set in motion: inner belts slacken, gears list out of mesh, a membrane of wordless fury slips between the cogs as she feels a primal ligature wrenched up from some deep hollow, like the cracked glyphs of an abandoned alphabet or cached seeds. Staring up at the zero-sum of him, she feels one of those seeds plant itself in the humus of her grief, unaware of how quickly that seed will sprout a fixation on the fugues of what it is to be made, unmade, and then made all over again, though never quite the same.
She can’t yet know that with every savage dismantling, every painstaking reassembly, there will come a reckoning—a tythe taken from the fierce creature her father has left her to become, having abandoned her to the mercies of a world she will soon discover has none to give her.
Cor de Wulf divides their life between the Pacific Northwest, Normandy, and the Zuid-Limburg region of the Netherlands—that idiosyncratic Dutch province being De Wulf’s home port for decades. De Wulf’s short fiction has appeared in Every Day Fiction and Ink in Thirds.