Three Days After

Fiction & Poetry
Written By Amanda Barusch

  • Title – Three Days After

  • Author – Amanda Barusch

  • Genre – Poetry

  • Type – Poem

  • Publication Date – 2015

  • Publisher – The Legendary, Issue 66

  • Medium – Magazine

  • Available at – The Legendary (USA, defunct)

  • Source Text:

    Three Days After

    I saw a chameleon fish mimic the colors and patterns of its surroundings so perfectly that only his twitching nose gave him away. No. Wait. It must have been a puppy, his twitching black nose the only clue he wasn’t a fish. Please forgive me, I am not myself. I keep thinking of water. My father was a sailor. With his hair tied back he could shoot the sun and take us to paradise. He threw a hook off the stern and fed us rainbow fish for dinner. He never did like dogs.

    “Bastante!” he yelled, “Enough!” when he’d had it. And when we fretted he said, “At ease, at ease,” and asked our mother, “Should we give them postre now?” It didn’t take us long to learn it meant dessert, or how to spell i-c-e-c-r-e-a-m. Please, I’d like more postre now. In that place they never gave him ice cream. I used to sneak it in. Chocolate, and he ate it with his fingers. Once I asked how he was, and Dad said, “Fit and ready for duty, sir!” Then he pointed at my step mother and said, “You know, I was once married to a woman with the same name as that one. Only the other one was much nicer.”

    I fell from a great height and was caught in a sling. A meadowlark sang, and the air rushed cool against my face. No. Wait. It must have been a raptor’s cry. Yes, a red tailed hawk dove past the naked tree where sparrows perched, waiting to tease her. My mother flew to Hawaii on one of the first Pan Am airplanes. It took a long time and she met a handsome man who was not my father.

    When I told my brother, he reminded me how after her shower, our mother puffed talcum powder all over herself. What a strange thing to remember when someone tells you your father is dead. She taught me to call chickens, a skill reserved for the women in our family.

  • Audio

Amanda Barusch

Amanda Barusch has worked as a janitor, exotic dancer, editor, and college professor. She lives in the American West, where she spends as much time as possible on dirt paths. She has an abiding disdain for boundaries and adores ambiguity. Amanda has published eight books of non-fiction, a few poems, and a growing number of short stories. Aging Angry is her first work of creative non-fiction. She uses magical realism to explore deep truths of the human experience in this rapidly changing world.

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