By Samantha Kolber
“Unknowability is a fundamental experience in the world.”
–M.T. Anderson
This is the story of my father, the young version of him, with the tight-curled perm, the believe it or not I’m walking on air style, the 1980s mustache, the brown suit with wide lapels and wide-striped ties. With the leather briefcase and shiny shoes. My father with his Coke-bottle glasses hiding bright hazel eyes, and smooth pink skin on cheeks and chin. My young father without the wrinkles or the hunched shoulders or the extended stiff neck stuck out like a turtle’s. When he went to work in the city each morning and returned to his family in the suburbs each night. There was this one night. It could have been spring or summer or fall. But not winter. It definitely was not winter. I say this with authority but I don’t really know. It’s a memory. I am not making this shit up.
This is the story of the rifle, the long, brown rifle my father kept on the top shelf of his bedroom closet. It was there, just in case. In this case: pounding footsteps up the stairs. Then the rifle, sleek yet bulky in his hands. He looked so tiny, my young father, with the rifle in his hands. Tinier still when he ran to the double window of his bedroom, yanked up the Venetian blinds, and held the rifle upright with its barrel at the top edge of the window, tapping the glass, although I don’t remember the tap-tap sound, but I can hear it now. Do you? I remember yelling. “Jeff, put the gun down! Jeff, put it away! Jeff, what are you doing? Jeff, you’re crazy! Stop being crazy, Jeff, there’s nothing there!” My mother in her hysterical voice. I knew back then it was called hysterical because that’s what my father called it. “Lynn, you’re hysterical, don’t get hysterical, stop being hysterical.”
This is the story of my childhood: I am five years old, standing behind the white rocking chair in my parents’ bedroom. Clasping onto the wooden back rails like a prisoner; making myself small behind them. I wanted to see “aliens.” My father said they followed him home from work. Said those lights in the sky, there, up there, where he pointed the gun, those blue flashing lights in too erratic a pattern to be a plane, or a helicopter, or stars, had been following him since he got off the train and into his car. They followed him as he drove out of the train station and toward our townhouse complex, Twin Rivers. Though the whole time we lived there I only ever saw one river and it was tiny like a creek.
This is the story of my father, again, his skinny body like a hanger for his roomy business suits. My genius father, the big city computer programmer. My working father before his midlife body-building hobby, when muscles bulged into cantaloupes, winning Mr. Bodybuilder competitions. My frenzied father pointing a gun at aliens in the sky thirty years before his schizoaffective diagnosis.
This is the story of invisibility. Police that didn’t see aliens. Only, my father with a gun; a woman with mascara down her face; and two young kids quiet as dead deer, whose eyes reflected the flashing lights of red and blue, coming from the ground, not the sky. The police took my father in handcuffs. Which is funny because it was he who called them. I remember him on the phone with its long, squiggly cord, telling them there were aliens outside his window. He was indignant, snorting Nos and I’m serious, I’m telling you, and FBI. He was always yelling something about the FBI.
This is the story of my baby brother. I say baby but he was a toddler. He was asleep, or close to it, on the bottom bunk, on his belly, diapered butt pushed up in the air. I climbed the wooden ladder to the top bunk. There was a window with Venetian blinds in our room, too, and I could see the moonlight spilling in through slabs, casting lines of light on the dark walls. None of those lights were blue. Or flashing. They didn’t follow us. Or take us away.
This is the story of my mother, soothing herself by chain smoking, sitting under a bright halo of light shining down from the hanging fixture over the table, the rest of the house dark, the whir of the smokeless ashtray fan the new loud noise in the house.
Samantha Kolber is an award-winning poet with poems in Rattle, Oddball Magazine, Mom Egg Review, Hunger Mountain, and other journals and anthologies. She received her MFA in creative writing from Goddard College, and completed post-grad studies in poetry at Pine Manor College’s Solstice MFA Program. Originally from Plainsboro, New Jersey, she lives in Montpelier, Vermont, where she runs a small, indie press, Rootstock Publishing. Her chapbook “Birth of a Daughter” was published by Kelsay Books in 2020 and was a 2023 Poetry Winner in the San Francisco Book Festival. Her debut novel, a literary coming-of-age about a troubled teen with a schizophrenic father and depressed mother, will be published in 2025.
losing our grip on purpose 