Still in the Static

A son wrestles father's war-ghost, grief, and memory in a home turned museum of absence.

The Army’s letter called him remains—
a word too clean for the mud, the moths,
the way his dog tags clink in my fist
like loose teeth. His uniform hangs
in the attic, sleeves still stiff with desert,
pockets full of sand he’ll never shake out.

I find him some nights in the TV’s blue hum,
pixelated, mid-laugh, a ghost in the snow
of dead channels. He tries to speak,
but the war ate his vowels. I know,
I whisper, I know. The screen burns my palm.

Mom still sets his plate. The gravy thickens
to tar. We chew the silence he left,
swallow the grit of his last deployment.
She polishes his boots til they gleam
like caskets. I hate how she hums his name
to the dishes, how the soap bubbles weep.

The VA sent a box: his watch, a photo curled
at the edges (me, age six, on his shoulders),
a pocket Quran with a bullet’s kiss.
I wind the watch—it ticks Iraq, Iraq, Iraq—
press its hands to my pulse. Too late, it rasps.
Too late.

In dreams, he’s always digging.
A hole where our backyard pool was.
A hole where the Christmas tree bled sap.
What’re you looking for? I shout.
His face, when he turns it, is the roadside bomb’s
white flash. I wake with his voice in my molars.

At his grave, I bring a cassette of his laugh
caught at a ’99 BBQ—play it, the priest said,
so he’ll know he’s missed. The tape unravels
in the rain, becomes a river of black cursive.
I drink it. Let his joy rot me from within.

The grief’s not a fist. It’s the dud grenade
he joked about in letters—still sweating it out
in the sand, kid. I cradle its rust,
pray for the shrapnel to finally bloom.
But some wounds don’t need a body.
Some wars just… linger.