Crystal Odelle
Phantom Pleasure
Someone I love is dying, I’m certain when DAD lights my bedroom.
I slip sweat damp bedsheets and abandon my partner in dreamland. Hollow eyes at the doorstep question my judgement, but on leash my dog yawns, shambles at my side up the wet, leafy sidewalk, risking a night chill to speak freely.
“Hey, hon,” a warm southern slant greets on the first ring.
“It’s—” I stumble, still can’t name me.
Twice we’ve talked since Dad broke our years-long silence in tears, the only bio family wanting me more than a son.
“Dumb bitch says to me, she says—” a man crashes the pause, one of several rowdy voices in his background. Awake near midnight, I can’t place Dad in his garage, blaring daytime TV to keep me, his secret, caught between Mom and the reality of a daughter.
“You OK?” I ask. The hospital bed he groaned from last month has me worried he’s–
“Fine,” Dad assures, “other than missing you.” On his feet after the big scare, he tore up the Blue Ridge Mountains to enjoy his remaining time on Earth, with or without Mom it seems. I picture my dad making friends, a flirt, a storyteller like me. After “kicking around” small town Tennessee, soon as he’s home, he wants to plan a reunion, to meet halfway in Kentucky. “We can get a hotel,” he proposes, “go out to dinner, swim.”
Not the family, he means, us two, alone. I leap healing into the barstool beside him, our cold cans dripping while his watery blue eyes adore me. I wait for his mouth to move, quilled promises, the black stubble he nuzzled into a squealing kid’s neck until she came to pieces, silver.
“Yes,” I burst, my blood tingles, can’t stop—yet too bleary to cross the street safely with my own daughter. She looks up at me, a good girl, asking with a low wag, “Mom, are you OK?”
I miss why my Mom showed him photos from social media—my 3-year HRT anniversary, my first gender-affirming surgery. “Beautiful, soft,” Dad compliments my voice and asks if the story is true: I legally lopped the family name, his. “Crystal Odelle—” he lilts “—that’s a pretty name.”
He says more, loose words, bold. Dad can’t drink at home, and I suspect his desire might sober, be gone by morning. Missing him wouldn’t be worse, only normal. My partner has cited “daddy issues” for my bad habit of giving boys chances through our decade of polyamory for greater care, family, to be deeply known—but she didn’t watch him labor residential and industrial construction jobs 80 hours a week to support me and survive to an age of tenderness, earn a hug in a touch-starved home, my first, “I love you.”
“Goodbye,” we say. Ears ringing, I’m lost in a church parking lot, hoping someone will guide Dad to his hotel. “Shhhh,” whisper the trees. I shiver, carry back the question, What is a father? reaching for fullness, the October moon in a bruised sky, even a slice, for the clouds to change.
My partner big spoons in bed, her heat generous. M thaws my feet, doesn’t ask. “You look like Mom when she was younger,” Dad’s line flashes through me, his laughter a rumble, long and slow. Was he hitting on me? Crooked echoes chase—Dad at 41 marrying Mom at 18—poolside in a bikini, disappointing a man who’s fantasized cosmetic procedures I can’t afford—how, if he, I—bright cedar and hot tub salt, our hotel for Kentucky family visits, towel tight until my glasses came off, in the deep end, a blur of somersaults, up underwater or down, no way of telling.
“You held my hand,” M shares—the tornado, a highway. In the nightmare, we live.
I touch her temples, buzzed on one side—my California girl, new to the Midwest, to death by wind. In the daylight, aging handsomely, she resembles her father. Dad’s fingers thumb her thin lips. My partner kisses me. I kiss back. We come close, closer. We turn inside each other to find
out.
I slip sweat damp bedsheets and abandon my partner in dreamland. Hollow eyes at the doorstep question my judgement, but on leash my dog yawns, shambles at my side up the wet, leafy sidewalk, risking a night chill to speak freely.
“Hey, hon,” a warm southern slant greets on the first ring.
“It’s—” I stumble, still can’t name me.
Twice we’ve talked since Dad broke our years-long silence in tears, the only bio family wanting me more than a son.
“Dumb bitch says to me, she says—” a man crashes the pause, one of several rowdy voices in his background. Awake near midnight, I can’t place Dad in his garage, blaring daytime TV to keep me, his secret, caught between Mom and the reality of a daughter.
“You OK?” I ask. The hospital bed he groaned from last month has me worried he’s–
“Fine,” Dad assures, “other than missing you.” On his feet after the big scare, he tore up the Blue Ridge Mountains to enjoy his remaining time on Earth, with or without Mom it seems. I picture my dad making friends, a flirt, a storyteller like me. After “kicking around” small town Tennessee, soon as he’s home, he wants to plan a reunion, to meet halfway in Kentucky. “We can get a hotel,” he proposes, “go out to dinner, swim.”
Not the family, he means, us two, alone. I leap healing into the barstool beside him, our cold cans dripping while his watery blue eyes adore me. I wait for his mouth to move, quilled promises, the black stubble he nuzzled into a squealing kid’s neck until she came to pieces, silver.
“Yes,” I burst, my blood tingles, can’t stop—yet too bleary to cross the street safely with my own daughter. She looks up at me, a good girl, asking with a low wag, “Mom, are you OK?”
I miss why my Mom showed him photos from social media—my 3-year HRT anniversary, my first gender-affirming surgery. “Beautiful, soft,” Dad compliments my voice and asks if the story is true: I legally lopped the family name, his. “Crystal Odelle—” he lilts “—that’s a pretty name.”
He says more, loose words, bold. Dad can’t drink at home, and I suspect his desire might sober, be gone by morning. Missing him wouldn’t be worse, only normal. My partner has cited “daddy issues” for my bad habit of giving boys chances through our decade of polyamory for greater care, family, to be deeply known—but she didn’t watch him labor residential and industrial construction jobs 80 hours a week to support me and survive to an age of tenderness, earn a hug in a touch-starved home, my first, “I love you.”
“Goodbye,” we say. Ears ringing, I’m lost in a church parking lot, hoping someone will guide Dad to his hotel. “Shhhh,” whisper the trees. I shiver, carry back the question, What is a father? reaching for fullness, the October moon in a bruised sky, even a slice, for the clouds to change.
My partner big spoons in bed, her heat generous. M thaws my feet, doesn’t ask. “You look like Mom when she was younger,” Dad’s line flashes through me, his laughter a rumble, long and slow. Was he hitting on me? Crooked echoes chase—Dad at 41 marrying Mom at 18—poolside in a bikini, disappointing a man who’s fantasized cosmetic procedures I can’t afford—how, if he, I—bright cedar and hot tub salt, our hotel for Kentucky family visits, towel tight until my glasses came off, in the deep end, a blur of somersaults, up underwater or down, no way of telling.
“You held my hand,” M shares—the tornado, a highway. In the nightmare, we live.
I touch her temples, buzzed on one side—my California girl, new to the Midwest, to death by wind. In the daylight, aging handsomely, she resembles her father. Dad’s fingers thumb her thin lips. My partner kisses me. I kiss back. We come close, closer. We turn inside each other to find
out.
Author of Trans Studies, Crystal Odelle (they / she) is a storyteller of trans / polyamorous / whore practice, writing and revising into the desire for something like a life. Their stories have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Foglifter, Split Lip Magazine, smoke and mold, Apogee, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Crystal was a Lambda Literary fellow and Tin House Scholar, nominated for Best of the Net, and anthologized in We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction. She also serves as a hybrid reader for Abode Press. Her writing and performances trouble the divide between fiction and reality toward liberation.