Justin Noga

No not good agreed

We had our reunion beneath a lakeside arbor. Father lined up we bundle of 30 daughters and arranged us in an order he thought sound.

Here was my sister Crab.

                                                                             And here was me, me being Frog.

“You two girls are our rocks,” Father said to us. “Keep your backs the straightest of all backs.” And though I hated this man, and to a lesser extent Crab, standing there unbittered and mannequin calm, it thrilled me knowing I held some value to Father. Which, true, I should of course hate about myself. But have you felt that feeling? Suddenly valued by one so foul? It is not so awful. I was high on it same as Crab always was. We lived together, me and Crab, our only contact that 3 a.m. fantasy I had of firm throttling hands, a shallow grave, but for a moment we were just two kindly sisters shoeless in the soft grass with our mutually beloved Father.

The job of our confirmed lesser sisters—thrillingly lesser!—was to pop from their spots one at a time and side-step with Father. Crab-head to Frog-end. The walk was not an inspection, Father assured us, but a discovery, a private time with Father to see what Father sees alone. “Do not divert your eyes, popsicle,” he said to each, gripping their necks as if there was no one more special, no view more important. There is only you, Clip, my popsicle with the red sweater neurosis, and only you, Lu, a two-pack popsicle with your support chicken Nabby, and only you, Polligan, my dearest iciest ichthyologist, and even dearer dearest Tí, cold-calling harbinger of child support payments coming due. Hard to deny his schtick wasn’t effective. By the time my sisters reached me, me the last sister Father glued their eyes to, a dumb smile shredded across my face—that smile? That just broke them. Sister after sister buckled over, sobbed, snotted. I was at a loss for what was going on. Between each rotation Father pointed at me and Crab said, “Keep it up, my anchors,” guiding a broken daughter back to her old spot and exchanging her for another to break. Which only made me smile more.

The hour passed in this way.

Only Crab and I were left.

On Crab’s turn, she simply laughed when she reached me. “You’ve gone off the deep end today, Daddy.”

“You’re old enough to know reality,” Father said to her.

“What’s this about,” I whispered to Crab.

“Daddy’s being jokey.”

“We’re a joke to you?” our sister Hetta hollered, Pippa nearby saying a daughter isn’t a joke, hardly a joke, and Lippy and Shed refusing they were jokes, just appropriately emotional given the circumstances, Hopskip especially, Hopskip blowing her nose into Clip’s thick sweater, Clip catatonically staring at the swoosh of a speedboat.

Father sighed. “Quit dawdling, Frog. You were doing so well.”

Strutting with Father from Crab to my empty spot, my eyes pinned sisterward, Father’s hot hand clasped on the back of my neck, I soon saw the deformations play out: a fine nose starting in Crab but quickly lifting in another sister, hooking in yet another, warting, flaring, cheeks pillowing and sagging, eyes bouncing around asymmetrically, the perfect combination of Father and Mother found at the start of Crab but gone horribly awry in his squat Frog. Like a flip-book of a souring gene pool.

Father sat before us in a wooden chair. “Of course this is entirely aesthetic, and does not reflect who you are as a person. Only what you look like as a person. When compared to those around you. The hierarchy genetically inside you, I mean, and how whatever child you produce—or try to produce, I know you have been trying, Hopskip—will ultimately be part of that particular stratum. Erma’s children will be nothing like Irma’s, as is visible by the bite of Irma’s jaw. Not even twins are equal. It is not so often a father can so clearly arrange his daughters in a correct amalgam, to see the way our own genes have surprised us.”

I said, “That’s not how genes work, idiot.”

Wept romper-clad Eupha, last in line with me, “It’s a harsh truth but a truth.”

“Absolutely right,” Lu said, squeezing her support chicken hard enough it stopped thrashing.

I yelled to crumbled Oya in the middle, “Back me up here—didn’t you study genetics?”

Said Father, “Oya dropped out before she could retain anything but bills for me.”

“I was talking to Oya.”

“My hands are tied to the facts, my dear. Isn’t that right Oya?”

“Who even asked you to talk, Frog,” Oya said.

“Agreed,” Eupha said.

“Also agreed,” Lu said.

I said, “I don’t understand why you’re all being jerks to me.”

Second only to Crab was corn-blonde Kern, and Kern yelled over, “Read the room.”

“I can read a fucking room, alright?”

Father clapped and said, “Well worth the English degree, congratulations,” and those proud front-enders Kern and Funt and Twob all clucked their pleasure. “Point being, girls, is we all live so far away from one another these days we should cherish these new discoveries. I only wish your mother was here to see how her goodness lives on. However diluted.”

Crab said, “I’m going to go on the record and say Frog is lovely. I love Frog. Look at her.” She ran over and clamped me from behind. “Whatever squish there is, I love that squish. Squishy squish. None of you got that squish. That’s Mom’s squish.”

Father tilted his head. “Not so sure.”

“You might be onto something,” Kern said.

“Poor Mom,” Funt said.

Twob shook her head. “Baby after baby after baby.”

“I barely remember Mom,” said Funt.

“Only remember her in stirrups, myself,” said Twob.

“Barely even remember the stirrups I was so young,” said Kern.

Twob looked at her sideways. “You’re older than me, Kern. Brain on the fritz already?”

“Biologically older but genetically in better shape, as Father proved. Isn’t that right, Funt?”

“Don’t drag me into this.”

Hopskip blew a deep sigh. “Can’t even have one baby.”

Kern stared at her. “Why would you want a kid to have your bunk genes?”

“She can pop out her body whatever she wants,” I said. “Any of us can.”

“Gun to my head, fine, her maybe, but Frog? Hm.”

“Hm is right,” Twob said.

Crab kneaded her fingers into my sides, dodged the elbows I threw at her. “Remember when your head got stuck in the bars of your crib, Frog? Such a cute baby. Such a large head.”

“There’s no coming back from a large head,” Father told her.

“Definitely not a top ten head,” Kern agreed.

Father gestured to Kern and Funt. “A good hat could provide you all a little mercy, too.”

Father fired up the grill, leaving us sisters to feel like shit like a family. We had all hated one another before but now we knew why.

Dinner was ribs, rolls, waffle fries. Oddly enough Father had forgotten knives.  “Probably because he’d be a murdered Father,” I said aloud. And maybe my mistake was thinking nobody would care what I said? But to truly be a shit to a sister, you must be a connoisseur. Understand her inner workings. Know her thoughts. Know her actions. Burrow into her mind deep enough that when you’ve left the room, the house, the country, she’s still expecting to find you over her shoulder. Only then can you tear her apart at will.

Box heard me, Box the forever clerk, who I thought of maybe twice in my life when buying slips of ham hock, who now flicked fries from my plate each time I reached, proof of her elevation over this lowest stratum of Frog. But she heard me. She heard, flicked, paused, slid the words around her thin mouth—murdered father? murdered father?—and poor diabetic Linty heard and put away the orange and texted her favorite Süe across from her, and soon everyone bunched toward my end of the table to taste the sweet words together.

I cleared my throat. “So is this what we’re doing?”

“Long as you don’t muck it up,” Kern said.

“You want to do the grunt work, be my guest.”

“Would Crab join?” Funt asked, long an admirer.

“Go bug her.”

“I’m busy.”

“I knew it! You’re all afraid of Crab.”

Twob and Funt scoffed at that, Kern explaining that Crab was a simple puckered asshole.

“She’s just an idiot,” Melba said, and her two-rungs-lower twin Miette shook her head and said the only idiot here was Melba, who Miette said outed herself as a poison to the sanctity of twindom by not refusing a position higher than her sister.

“She can be anything as long as she’s also dead,” said Vlatka, sculpting her meal into a meat-and-potato mash of hung Father and hung Crab.

“See? Crab’s gonna get hung if she’s not privy,” Eupha said.

I said, “She’ll manage.”

“God knows how you two have rapport,” Kern said.

“Beauty and Beast,” Irma said, tossing a fry to Erma.

“Jekyll and Hyde,” Erma said, whapping the fry back at Irma’s cheek.

I said, “Not the right references at all.”

Said Max, who once smoked aspirin in Father’s closet on a dare, “What’s the one where a beautiful angel-thing befriends a puddle of rotting horse piss?”

Said Janice who smoked it with her, “Or a princess befriends a tapeworm?”

Behind me Crab appeared and asked what about tapeworms. “I thought your pills worked them out, Frog?”

Gagging from Tí and Kern and Lu and Funt and Eupha as they all scooted from me.

“Murder,” I said. “Murdering Father. You in?”

“Oh, he means well. Don’t overreact.”

“We’ve decided on group strangulation, princess.”

Tí said, “He’ll think it’s affection.”

Hok said, “Team effort.”

I explained we’d pretend to love him, all of us piling on top until he flattens clean. “Voilà! Problem solved.”

“Some of us don’t have your heft, Frog,” said Verl, that bitch.

Crab said, “I’ve never seen him die before, so why would he now?”

I said, “Awful point.”

“It’s a very good point,” Funt said.

“Suck up.”

“Piss queen.”

I said to Crab, “You go about your day then, dear sister. We’ll take it from here.”

“Don’t get hung!” Vlatka sang.

Crab crossed her arms. “This is not healthy. You all need to go on your own journeys of self-acceptance. For real. Who cares what Daddy says. He loves you all for who you are. So be that you you are and be it proudly. No reason your own problems should beget harm to an old man trying to love his daughters in the way he knows best.”

We all sat there thinking about it.

Nearby, a bell rang off the tip of a fishing pole Father had set into the shoreline. From the water an eighty-pound bass shot into the air and slopped onto our long picnic table. A seam in its white belly split open to a velvet sleeve of thirty knives.

Father glanced over from the grill. “Would you look at that. Still got the touch.”

It then did not take long for us to murder Father. With our new knives we cut him into a pile of thirty pieces. Who’s to say it wasn’t a team effort after all? Other than Crab, Crab who knifelessly shook her head at her sisters hacking away at an undying Father.

“What did I say?” Crab huffed. “Empty effort.”

A piece slugged onto my foot. “Still kicking.”

“Hats off to the ass who don’t know how to die,” Lu said.

Crab said, “How about we try again?”

“We could burn him?”

“No, opposite of what I mean. You all got some serious issues to work out and this is not the way to do it.”

“I feel better,” Clip said, discovering how his bloodstains matched her sweater.

“Same,” Polligan said.

“I mean regrow Father,” Crab said. “Look, he’s already trying to come back together.”

“Like a tapeworm?” Kern said.

“Tapeworms regenerate, not reassemble, isn’t that right, Frog?” Tí said, certain she wasn’t an idiot.

“Father does both,” Crab said. “If you ever talked to him for like two seconds he’d tell you.”

“First I heard of it,” I said.

“Did you even give him a chance?”

“I guess he had a bad start,” Hetta said.

“Hardly,” I said. “Silver spoon all his life.”

“Every time he walked a path it was the wrong one,” Pippa said.

Crab lifted a shred of ear, the ear jostling in her hand. “Well, whatever your belief, now we can start him anew. A little sun, a little soil, a dab of milk or two.”

“Then, what, he’d be the same he always was, but more of him?” I asked.

“No, a fresh start of a Father. Right as rain in under a year.”

“I still say we should burn him.”

“Raise him how you want to raise him, Frog. Give him a year, all I ask. Let’s see if you can honestly do any better.”

We each went home with our piece of Father. Rinsed off, my piece could only be deciphered as something internal. He fit well in a troweled-out plot of dirt beneath Crab’s derelict birdhouse. Mornings in the backyard I squatted over the plot and dashed out a few long sprays of urine. When Father started to sprout, to hunger, I locked him in the lawnmower shed with oil rags for bedding, a garden hose tucked into the window like a hamster bottle. Hose off, his tongue lapped loudly at the dry brass tip. On, he screamed from the pressure. It took some weeks for a true Fatherly mouth to grow, for him to ambulate on his own. By then the alfalfa I’d bought him had thoroughly moldered, housed black biting bugs, but the alfalfa’s coloring remained verdant, and he tongued up whatever I put under his nose, so it was no bother at all.

Each morning I forked a chunk into his dog bowl. “Bacteria is good for you, Father,” I said.

“Flawk?” he said, the dawn light too harsh for the pink-lidded squeeze of his babybird eyes. “Flawk, that is you?”

“Yum yum,” I said. “Very good for you.”

Crab, she grew her Father in her own room. After a month her bedroom lights nightly blared a ritual dance party, Crab shimmying around with this, like, toddler version of Father who, over the months, stretched out and unfolded into a wiry sort of Father with a fluffy face who tucked her in and never yelled at her and never shamed her and never wondered what’d happen if he’d slapped her around in her younger years, just a thought experiment, just theorizing daughterly evolution, because how else could he have avoided this predictably failed child? None of that talk at all. Instead he got a job as a hair stylist. He paid Crab rent for the house which our original Father had bought for her, which Crab shared with me, a share she said I could tell no one. In Crab’s high window Father sat by her side and fashioned her hair into perfect ringlets, Crab waving down at me at the shed as I shoveled shit out, alfalfa in. This went on for a year.

We thirty sisters met at the same lake with the Fathers we’d all spent the year raising. We arranged them in an order we thought sound.

The Fathers were burly and shorn and rashed and erect and studious and toothless and breasty and reeking and musky and weathered and warm and lecherous and meek and humble and dowdy, and also not any of those, and also all of those. All my sisters bickered over placement in the line, voting and revoting and denying and whining and acquiescing the spot of one Father to spite the Father of another. Other than mine. Mine I anchored in my old spot.

Here was mine.

And here was Crab’s.

Crab said, “This seems off.”

“Looks right to me,” I said.

“Fair’s fair,” Kern said, current first spot, now adorned with an ill-fitting sunhat.

“I love you, Kern,” her golden-toothed Father said.

Crab passed out coupons. “Mine’s such a sweetie, see? He made free pedicure coupons.”

“I want you to look good and feel good,” Crab’s Father said.

“Gross,” Kern said.

“A suck-up is good but we need cash ASAP,” said Millarilla the chronic gambler, whose own Father had surreptitiously lost his hands in a pool drain, whose lawsuit was tangled in the courts.

“Mine’s an astronomer,” newly fedoraed Funt said. “He’ll be rolling in academic cash in no time.”

“Astrologer, my dear,” Funt’s Father corrected.

“Fuck.”

Clip chimed in about a re-vote. “Kern’s Father has no personality, and Crab’s Father’s a creeper who should be way closer to Frog’s snaily thing.”

Hopskip pinched my Father’s cheek. “Don’t be so down on him, he’s a cutie.”

“I’m proud of my own baby, okay?” Crab said. She blew her Father a kiss and he gobbled it out of the air.

I said, “Let’s throw them at each other. Winner take all. Don’t we want a show?”

“You want a show, Frog?” Kern walked across the grass to her Father. She patted him on the head and said I love you, Father, and her Father said I love you dearest Kern, and she said I know, you have to, and proceeded to plier out gold tooth after gold tooth, throwing them into the air like wedding rice. They regenerated with a kind of wet chalk squelch. Into the air these regrown teeth went, too, all sisters scrabbling for fresh gold on the ground. “So who wanted a re-vote again?”

None voted for the re-vote.

“Say we re-voted anyway,” Crab said, pockets full like the rest of us. “What would we want out of it? What would be our aim here? The best Father? The most generous? The kindest? Money isn’t everything. We all got jobs. Other than Frog. Frog doesn’t have a job. Frog never has jobs.”

“I have a job.”

“Do you?” Kern said.

“Just not now. Why work when you got a pocket of teeth?”

“Now tell me, Frog, whose Father provided that nest egg?”

Crab rolled her eyes. “Point is, what do we want out of this? What do we all want—equally—as representative of the best Father? Wasn’t being bought off that old shitty deal?”

Sisters muttered, sisters paced, sisters counted out their new gold on the picnic tables.

I said, “I just want you all to see my aim.” I threw a rock at Crab’s Father. Hard. His forehead cratered in, and his boutique nail file rocketed into Kern’s Father’s eye—and that? That set them all off, the Fathers. They were at one another in no time at all. All us sisters rushed up into the trees, on top of cars, all my sisters going Idiot bitch and I knew Frog would fuck this up, and all those other songs I could bury inside this joy. Millarilla deemed herself the betting pool, for all the brave to toss in a tooth or three to sweeten the pot, winner take all. I sat with Crab on the roof slats of the cedar gazebo, where she worried her hands as her Father whimpered into the bushes.

“Had you given him a single chance he would’ve done your hair right.” She flatly lifted my ponytail. “He’s a real miracle worker.”

“Was.”

“Is.”

“Is is in doubt for all of them, my sweet Crablet.”

Below us, Father fought Father. Father broke a bottle in Father’s face, and Father bled so much Father slipped and fell onto a tridented fence post. Father and Father joined hands and clotheslined Father hard enough to snap Father’s neck, but Father had whittled his gold teeth sharp enough they clung dead to Father’s wrist. Father could not remove himself from Father’s wrist. Father found Father clutching a lost support chicken and beat Father against a bench until Father arrived with a hacksaw and hacked off Father’s arm. Father ran into the lake one-armed and drowned, as Father could not swim, but Father could swim. Father dragged Father ashore and CPRed him weepily until Father coughed up a gallon of lake water and Father said I got you, I always got you. Father had a pistol and shot Father. Cattle prods were passed between Father and Father and Father and they stood behind Father with a trashcan lid and buzzed at Father barreling at him, sniping out prods to keep Father at bay. Father was behind them and had his own pistol. The trashcan lid was not sufficient. Father would not fight Father. Father groaned for well-cut nails. Father’s eyes were gone. Father’s tongue was gone. Father would not submit. Footless Father sifted through a pile of severed Father feet but could only find the left ones. Father had roided up. Father found Father hiding. Father tore small fragile Father clean in half like a telephone book. Where was the hacksaw? The hacksaw was in Father’s head. A chicken tugged out a brain stem. There was only one Father left. Father was a beefcake. Father massaged his shining pecs and lit a victory cigarette over a ruptured gas line. Bits of Father were everywhere. All us daughters were in the splash zone.

Through the smoke we heard two Fathers, not yet dead, or partially dead, for Fathers do not die. Two functional Fathers were left. One woke broken-limbed in the bushes, forehead cratered in. Another was babybird blind, two ungolden teeth, a snail crawler. Babybird Father crawled to Cratered Father and began dragging him into the center of the ashen field.

“They’re ours,” Crab said. “They’re helping each other. They love each other. Like us.”

Babybird Father set Cratered Father in the middle. Babybird Father put his nose to the dirt, followed trails of blood and organ meat winding across the grass, scraping each shivering piece adhered to table legs, car grills, grill grills—wherever a piece of Father lay, he sniffed it out and buried it over Cratered Father.

Crab asked, “What’s he doing?”

“He’s a cleaner,” I said. “He cleans.”

“Would Father reassemble into an equanimous Father, then? Being in a pile like that?” Eupha asked.

“They’re re-assembling. Genetically.” Oya said proudly.

“Our true best Father,” Lu said.

“I already grew the best Father and Frog fucked it up,” Kern said.

“This is the Father we deserve,” Eupha said.

“Equal love,” Lu said.

“Equally,” Eupha agreed.

Instead Babybird Father came upon a bottle of butane and sprayed it on Cratered Father and the wriggling pieces of the other Fathers.

Cratered Father choked out, “Father? My friend?”

“Oh no.” Crab hid her face in my shoulder. “No no no.”

Hopskip yelled, “Ew, what the fuck did you raise, Frog?”

“Cheater!” said one sister.

“Re-do!” said another.

I shrugged. “He cleans.”

Father set Fathers alight. Dark smoke, the black plasticky kind, thick and choking. No other Fathers were left for a redo. None wriggled alive. None demonstrated feats of strength or wealth. Nabby the chicken pecked at hot ash. Father, though, my Father, he snailed around the bloodslick grass, his nose high in the air. “Flawk? Flawk, where are you?”

God, I could barely look at him. I ducked behind Crab. “Tell him I’m not here.”

“You made this bed,” Crab said.

“Flawk, I hear you.”

“She’s right here, Daddy.”

“Don’t do me like that.”

“Follow my voice to the coward.”

But Father couldn’t find me, me who raised him, me who fed him mulch and piss, me who fed him stories of what I used to do to his pillow as a kid, what I did now, what I would do to him if he ever mocked me, disagreed with me, gave up on me, and this Father locked his uncut nails into the wood beam and slothed himself up. I tried to sneak away, to get to the other side of the roof, but my foot slid, kicking Millarilla to the ground who’d been slinking away with a betting sack of gold teeth. Her ankle snapped, the sack burst. Millarilla crawled to the stolen winnings, swallowing what she could find in huge mouthfuls, hoping her sisters wouldn’t notice, which they noticed immediately. But Father did not. Father found my foot dangling from the roof, the sandals open-toed, a familiar shape that kicked him joyfully awake, and he sniffed it and said, “Flawk, it is you,” and he clasped his mouth around it. “You taste so sweet,” he said. “You taste like the sunshine I have always known. You are it. You are my sunshine.”

Justin Noga is a writer from Akron, Ohio. His work can also be found in Conjunctions, Witness, Reed Magazine, and Northwest Review. He holds an MFA from Arizona State University and was awarded a fellowship at Vermont Studio Center. Also, Artist Relief saved his ass, and he thanks them mightily. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he teaches writing. Find him periodically on Instagram @jus.tin.no.ga.