"Poem" of the Week: 2.1.24

Novella sneak peek

Due to popular demand—seriously: thanks to all of you who commented and wrote me messages last week, love you—I present to you all

SOME NOVELLA SCRAPS.

by Ricky Novaes de Oliveira

(Note: this is a ROUGH draft; don’t mind the little errors; subject to change)

	Looking into the rearview mirror, Roxas saw a stranger’s eyes. Roxas was parked in front of a Wendy’s fast food restaurant, orange in the LED light of a Frosty advertisement, and sitting in his 2006 Volkswagen Rabbit that was now missing the right hand passenger seat door. A cold draft blew in from the gaping hole, jagged and exposed. A steady ticking alerted Roxas to his emergency lights still being on. With surprising calmness, he slowly pushed to turn the flashing button off, his hand steady and not trembling, his breath sharp but not panicked. Roxas returned to the eyes in his rearview mirror as if to ask, and knew only one thing: he was fucked. 

	I’m fucked, Roxas thought to himself. 

	The eyes in the rearview mirror were his, but for the first time Roxas questioned why they were. He knew his eyelashes were long and dark like his dads'; he knew his green irises had the same flecks of amber like his mom's; he knew the bags under the eyes and the pimples on his nose and the dry, bitten lip were all the same reactions to stress he was told many of his dads had when they were his age. Though Roxas knew where all of these features came from, could trace his likeness to his parents, Roxas still could not put them all together and understand the whole face he saw. He knew the blood, a small trickle draining from a light gash on the right side of his hairline, was his, but the rest of the face he had always seen in a mirror was suddenly foreign. 

***

	His dad, Rigoberto, was sitting in the loveseat by the front door when Roxas entered the house. His dad was holding a mirror with one hand and plucking dark curls from his nose with the other hand, a look of intense focus on his face. 

	“Look who made it home!” 

	His dad didn’t look away from the mirror, not wanting to break his focus, but waved with his tweezer-holding hand. Rigoberto was immaculate about his looks, always combing and pinching and smoothing and glancing. If you don’t look good, I don’t look good he would tell Roxas as a kid, getting him ready for school in the morning. His dad only wore monogrammed shirts, always freshly ironed, and smelled like he slept in cologne. The hand that waved to Roxas had clean, filed nails and gold, polished rings, but if you looked long enough at it you’d notice the liver spots and little scars that blemished his skin. 

	“Hi, dad,” Roxas said quickly, already turning toward the stairs, but his dad, Renan, appeared from the hallway and stopped him. 

	“Where have you been? You smell like smoke.” 

	His dad, Renan, gripped his shoulder, not hard enough to hurt but firm enough to feel his strength. Renan was always coming or going yet often accused Roxas of treating the house like a hotel. His dad always wore leather jackets and carried sunglasses that never had smudges. He smoked cigarettes in the car and chewed gum to hide the smell, yet told Roxas he would beat his ass if he ever caught him smoking. Renan was the third best pool player in Southern California for fifteen straight years, and on the nights of big tournaments he would pace around the house, mumbling and measuring distances between his fingers, a white paste at the corners of his mouth, teeth bared like a hungry coyote. 

	Roxas honestly didn’t know much about the life his dad, Renan, lived before they became a family. He felt a mysterious distance between his dad and the rest of the family that was bridged by white lies and uncertain trust. Roxas said nothing and shirks away the shoulder, putting his back to his dad’s mutters.

* * *

	Since Roxas was a kid, it was hard to have friends over—there was a lot to explain. If there weren’t questions about his dads, then there was all the organized junk in the corner of each room, the rooms behind the closed doors, the relative silence in a house of eleven. 

	There was always too much going on at home—snoring and beeping and stomping and laughter and music and whistles and creaking—even though Roxas’s family tried to keep quiet. His dad, Ruben, needed sleep with the medication he took, so noise was at a minimum most of the time. His dad was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder the year after Roxas was born; this is how life was. Though there was apparently a time when all of his parents worked, Roxas knew his dads as stay-at-home parents in various stages of retirement, unemployment, job-seeking, and working-on-it.  

	Home, to Roxas, was a circus without a ringleader when his mother was not around: the animals had complete control. Roxas had nine dads; that’s how life had always been: all of them sitting in the living room at Christmas, needing to call ahead and make party reservations at every restaurant, all the hugs and kisses he would get on his birthdays, never knowing if his favorite snack in the pantry would make it one full day without being brazenly eaten by one of the hungry men. 

	That’s how Roxas knew his life to be, but he had no way to make sense of it. What to say to others outside of his family, what to tell himself. Taunting bullies at school sometimes got under his skin, making Roxas wonder how it worked, if he really did only have one dad—a true, singular, biological father—if he already knew which one dad it had to be instead of the other eight. He did love all of his dads, but Roxas couldn’t help but wonder.

---

---

Yep: a story about a teenager with nine dads.

And one mom and one sister and one secret, but I think the nine dads part is going to stick out the most. I could tell you it’s all a metaphor, or how the story will end, but I think I’ll save that for now. Here are some random tidbits about this novella in progress:

• I’m writing this for an MFA class. We have 10 weeks to write a 50-120 page novella. I’m at 23 pages right now!

• No surprise here, but it is loosely based on my life. LOOSELY! Don’t read too far into it—it is fiction, I am intentionally making things up, and this is not an autobiography.

• Roxas is a character from the video game Kingdom Hearts. It was kind of a placeholder name at first but now I’m rolling with it.

• Why nine dads? Nine was kinda arbitrary at first, but my classmate told me cats have nine lives, and my professor reminded me of Dante’s Inferno and the nine circles of Hell, so I’m rolling with that, too.

• If you’re wondering if the biological / physical nature of nine fathers and one mother is going to be addressed—it won’t :) You pervert! Jk. It’s going to be an ongoing joke that is never fully answered, which drives the main character crazy.

• My professor’s advice on writing a long form project: pick a topic that will sustain your writing. I’m having fun with this, and not taking it too seriously, and somehow that’s actually been generative.

What do you think?

Scrappily, Ricky

AI generative photo prompt: nine dads in the living room. Looks like AI needs to learn some mf math. But good enough for me.