On Christmas day, 1948, my father got two things: a fear of progress and a hatred of Christmas. It was their first winter with electricity. The breaker sparked when his parents were at the Janisch house for drinks. When they returned, they found walls floating in smoke, and my father unconscious under the tree, surrounded by presents. My father blamed himself for the fire because his father told him to. Years later, he said he knew what started the fire. It was the sight of the long rectangular box under the tree. It was exactly what he’d asked for. As soon as he ran toward the box, the breaker sparked, and everything came down, and he never got to see what was inside. He said God tricked him into greediness and punished him for it. He wouldn’t let it happen again. # Dad was a Christian, but to others, he was a heretic. He had a logic all his own. His decisions made no sense. He built a chicken coop even though we had no chickens. We used it for storage. He built a loft in the hayshed so high nobody could reach it. Pigeons nested there. “I let nature speak through me,” he said. “I haven’t made a decision of my own since Christmas 1948.” We scraped together a living despite him. # On Christmas Eve, 2008, Mom told us she was worried about him. I said he was always like this before Christmas. She said it wasn’t the same. It had started that summer. He spent so much time in the dusty abandoned hayshed, creating his ecosystem of nonsense with the pigeons and rabbits and rats, that he could barely breathe anymore. He had a pacemaker. He could hardly take in clean air, let alone the grit that hung in that rotten old place. I shrugged. “He’s a creature of habit.” We hadn’t dried hay for thirty years. Like the chicken coop, the shed had become a repository for Dad’s useless things. Tractors missing engines. Rabbits that fed on the carrot patch he’d planted in the concrete. Family photos tacked above the workbench decades ago, now coated with bird shit and cobwebs, impaled by weeds that grew through the wall. Like Dad, the space cultivated its own logic. On Christmas day, I saw him disappear. His footprints led to the hayshed. He was inside, staring at the photos above the workbench. He didn’t turn when I called him. Instead, his body faded, then vanished entirely. His pacemaker hit the stone. I picked it up. It purred like a kitten. Dad’s photograph watched me from above the workbench. He was twelve years old. A stem of thistle grew through his chest. # Since taking over the farm, I sense Dad everywhere. He coos with the pigeons. He sways with the cobwebs. He smiles in the rusty scales of engineless tractors. The signals he sends are a corrective. They remind me there’s more to the world than progress and Christmas presents.
Owen Schalk is a writer from rural Manitoba. His fiction has been published by Quagmire Literary Magazine, Sobotka Literary Magazine, Vast Chasm Magazine, and more. Most recently, his short story “Speaking in Regrets” was selected as the winner of the Humber Literary Review’s 2024 Emerging Writers Fiction Contest.