The Bright Sky | Natalie Marino

Art Smith was born an outcast. He told everyone he was Irish, but it was just one of his stories. Art’s father was given his surname at the orphanage in Dublin where he was dropped off as a child. Art was sold by his own parents to a family who wanted a son and a servant. Art Smith was my Pop, and I only met him two times. I only really knew him from what my mother said. Like how he taught himself how to fly a plane in World War Two, and got himself off heroin by locking himself in a room for several days. Pop wasn’t afraid of anything, not even shame. 

When my mother was a kid, most weekend days Pop sat alone in his chair and drank whiskey while my mother watched black and white cartoons and waited for the few days in the summers when he would wake up happy, when he would take her to the small airport in Van Nuys, and then up and down and up again in the bright sky. 

On one of those happy days my mother begged Pop to get her a dog. She was surprised when he took her to the pound and got her one. The dog was small and wagged his tail a lot. The lady at the pound told them the dog was mixed. My mother didn’t care because she was mixed too. Her mother was Mexican, and she knew how disappointed her mother was because none of the children were born with blue eyes. 

The first night my mother had the dog she slept next to his cardboard box. His fur looked silver in the flickering street light coming through her bedroom window. She was surprised when he let her kiss him even when he was asleep. Later she found he loved going on walks, especially on the weekday afternoons when no one was home except the two of them. Some nights she tried to clean up after him before she put herself to bed, but most of the time she forgot.

Pop didn’t have a problem getting jobs. But it was just as easy for him to lose them. On a  December day with a gray sky Pop came home early. He saw the newest stain on his chair right away. He poured and drank two whiskeys without saying a word.  He picked up the dog and walked out the door before slamming it shut. 

My mother heard the car drive down the street. She remembered how when Pop was drunk he would threaten her about driving the dog to the field on top of the mountain behind the house. She wondered if the dog was curled up in the back seat. She wondered if it was cold. She waited for what seemed like hours for Pop to return, and when he did it was in an empty car.

Natalie Marino is a poet and writer. Her work appears in Leon Literary Review, Midway Journal, Reservoir Road Literary Review, Rust and Moth, The Shore, Variant Literature, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Memories of Stars, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She lives in California. You can find her on Twitter @nataliegmarino.