Dad booked us a first class sleeper on the Amtrak Lakeshore Limited line. Nineteen hours from Chicago to New York. That meant a bunk for me, still spry enough at twenty-three to climb up monkey style, using assorted footholds; chair cushion, armrest, folded up metal table. “That’s for anemic blue hairs,” I tell him when he offers the ladder, and he nods before resigning to his still upright bunk/couch.

      I lay up there and pretend to sleep when I hear him scuffling below, kicking at the lever beneath his seat and cursing. Idly, I lean over the edge and watch him. It’s comical, his frame in that small space. Gotta be topping 400 pounds now, I think. That’s twice my size. He’s six feet tall and round. He limps all the time. He’s limped as long as I can remember, but he’s fifty-two now. His back has been giving him trouble this week. That’s a new one. Though, come to think of it, I’ve never seen him touch his toes. He’s a broken man. If he could just bend over, I know he could reach under, pull the lever, and drag the lower end of his bunk/couch out into its bed-ish form.

      “Hey, Pops, I think your ass is in the way.” My kind of advice. He waves this comment away and keeps trying, telling me to “shut the hell up and sleep.” I’m still awake when he gives up. I can hear and feel him slough down in his chair, huffing and puffing. At no point do I offer to help.

      That night, with the train rocking me and humming smoothly through the Midwest, I slept better than I ever have. Dad was awake all night. I heard him a few times muddling about, heard him struggle to get inside our little podlet of a bathroom, grunting with the personal embarrassment of it, grateful that I wasn’t awake to see it, the folding door pressing his arms into his sides so tight he can’t reach to unzip his fly. Twice his feet scuffled along the blue, ribbed carpet to leave our cabinet and use the larger bathrooms near the dining car.

      In the morning while he thinks I’m still sleeping, I watch him in the full-length mirror next to the podlet toilet. How do fat eyelids weigh more when they’re tired? Fat seems to pool at the bottom of the upper lid so that when it collides with the lower lid, like two tectonic plates, they rip fault lines at the edges of his eyes.

      In my mind, he’s always been so big. A monolith of a man in stature, mentality, morality. Bigger than life, bigger than me, always. A god to me. It would seem that the four pressing walls of our cabinet would make him appear ever larger. But through that mirror, leaning at an angle so his knees don’t slam the bathroom door at every bump, his head drooped with fatigue, his hand weakly squeezing a styrofoam cup of stale coffee, his lungs wheezing, his back aching, his stomach rolling, his eyes unfocused and far away, his lips slightly parted and dry, he’s never looked so small to me.

      As I watch him, he shrinks, and shrinks, and shrinks, until he’s a pinprick of a man. My dad is a nearly invisible dot of blue jean still leaning at the same awkward angle, half awake, half dead, wishing his bunk were a bed. One hand on the safety rail, I swing with the grace of an acrobat, weightless and free, around the edge of the bed and down. I gather my momentum, suck in all the forces I master, release the handle and plummet to the cushion below like a cannon shot. The blue jean dot of my father is at the focus of my impact. The cushions bend inward, the metal frame groans and releases, the bottom of the rail car explodes underneath, and I fall through to the rails and gravel, embedding my pinprick father in a decaying rail tie before the force of the blow obliterates it into millions of splinters.

About the author:

Ryan Duke will earn is BA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago in May of ’08. His flash fiction work has been published in The Story Week Reader, and StickBall Magazine. He was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” and “Most Talented” by his graduating preschool class of ’89. Ryan is currently looking for writing/editing jobs or internships in Chicago. He can be contacted at ryan.duke@loop.colum.edu.