Father Knows Best

George arrived home earlier than usual and parked his car in the driveway, not the garage. He tried not to smile as he hobbled heavily up the brick steps to his house. When he pushed the front door open he found his wife and two grown children sitting side by side on the couch in the living room staring at him. Somehow, by pure will perhaps, he managed not to throw his head back and laugh out loud. Their eyes screamed in silent unity and told of a great sadness verging on pity and rapidly approaching unified hatred.

“What have you done, father?” his daughter asked in a small voice. She wore a yellow muumuu and her name was Vivian. She was thirty-six years old, and George was sure she had not brushed her hair once in the last five years of her living at home.

The other two on the couch were silent and watchful, waiting for an answer.

George knew what he was going to say when they asked this question. He knew it was coming. He had already practiced his answer several times in the rearview mirror coming home. He was not going to laugh when he said the rehearsed words, and he was not even going to smile, and he was definitely not going to dance around the living room waving his hands in glee… “I killed the cat,” he said slowly and clearly to the three stoic faces looking up at him.

“You killed Mister Ma…Mister Ma…” his forty-three year old son was having trouble getting the words out. His son’s name was Brad and Brad wore a ratty and tangled beard that lapped over an enormous gut that seemed to spring out of his lap as he sat in the middle of the couch with his legs spread wide. He had on his usual wife-beater tee-shirt that didn’t quite cover his stomach. George firmly believed no sane man who owned a gigantic beer-belly and a mirror both would ever purposely wear a shirt so tight, not ever, not even on laundry day, but his son didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned with how he looked these days.

“You killed Mr Magoo?” Janet said. Her voice was firm and accusative, as were her eyes. She was George’s wife of 43 years and had once been a dancer. The way she was sitting there made her look small because she was so firmly squished over as far to the right of Brad as the couch would allow. His wife was actually huge. She only looked small sitting next to her children. She too wore a muumuu, though her’s was orange. “You killed Mr. Magoo, really and truly, George?”

“Yes,” George said evenly.

Janet took in a lungful of air and held it with her cheeks puffed and her face growing red. When at last she spoke, her words came out broken and teary: “You finally did it, didn’t you, you bastard?”

“Yes—I—did,” George said. “I had to do it. It was for all of us. We are allergic to cats. Can’t you understand that? It’s why we are all so fat! It’s why our eyes are always watery! We’re allergic to Mr. Magoo!”

First Vivian tried to stand up and then Brad gave it a go, but neither one could muster the strength to actually rise out of the couch. George almost offered them his hand, but decided against it.

“Why?” they asked. “Why, why, why?”

“I just told you why!”

The cleaners arrived then. Three men with heavy equipment. George let them into the house as the family somehow removed themselves from the clutches of the couch and pounded in sobbing mass up the stairs. “We started sneezing the moment that cat entered this house,” George called after them. “Vivian gained forty pounds the first day and stopped combing her hair!!” Then bedroom doors began to slam—Bam, bam, bam!

The men went to work. They shampooed the rug and the couch and the curtains. They vacuumed and re-vacuumed. They scrubbed the ceilings and the walls and the floors of the entire house. The next morning the cleaning crew was gone, as was the cat box.

George had slept on the sweet smelling couch for three days. He went to work and came home and had a TV dinner each of those nights. He hadn’t seen his family in three days. He guessed they snuck down stairs for cookies and brownies in the night and while he was at work.

George looked at the pool in the backyard and decided to go for a swim. He stripped off his three-day-old clothes, all but his boxers, and began to swim the length of the pool. By the time he got to the other side his boxers had come off and he stood in the shallow end naked. He discovered his whole family were now standing at the other end of the pool looking at him with both horror and confusion.

“You got ripples in your stomach…” Vivian offered. She wiggled her finger toward George's stomach and they all looked at it.

“You’re ripped, dad!” Brad yelled.

He did have ripples. He had his old six-pack back! His man-boobs were gone. He felt his face and discovered he had lost three of his four chins.

Now his family were looking at each other. They poked at Brad’s stomach with their index fingers and confirmed with amazement, his previously huge gut was no longer there. Then, as one, they turned and ran into the house and up the stairs to check themselves out in the full length mirrors of their bedrooms. High-pitched chirps of ecstatic glee trickled down to George outside in the pool. He smiled as he returned to his laps. Fuck Mr. Magoo, he thought to himself.

--948 Words--