The Inventor

Each night before we fell asleep, my father came to our beds and recited a story in a low voice. He would tell us about all of the ways the world was broken—a fractured skull grafted together by green tectonic bone, cocked 23.4 curious degrees on the axis of its neck like some big “huh?” to human suffering. Mindless wars, the Irish Potato Famine, mismatched socks. Manic depression, the impossibility of socialism, 10 hotdogs per every 8 buns. He would tell us about all of the ways he would fix it. Life could be simple, he told us, if only we stopped thinking so hard. One night, not long after my mother left him for another man, he solved the clean water crisis. Imagine, he said, his voice vibrating with an energy that we couldn’t understand, a special drain installed beneath every pillow on earth. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, their tears would trickle down double-helix drains and into pipes that filled giant reservoirs, a borborygmic bubbling rumbling in the stomachs of our cities, secrets clinging to the sides of the tank like a fungus. The water we took showers in, brushed our teeth with, stirred into lemonade mix, all spilling from the private impulses of anthropomorphic sadness. There, he told us, simple as that. We pondered for a moment, turning the proposal over in our heads, wanting to believe in everything he said. Finally, my youngest sister spoke.

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But what about the salt? she said.

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My father went on to become an accountant.