Four Stories
Fiction by Evan J
This story will be called “Tragedy Hits Locomotive Ballpark.” For a time, I might even call it “Parent Problems.” Or, better yet, “The Faulty Scaffolds.” And while honesty will saturate all versions of the story, I hesitate to say we’ll find a truth. And while I’ll rip away a layer every time I tell it, this excavation will barely crack the surface.
1.
This story will be titled “Tragedy Hits Locomotive Ballpark,” and it will only be an introduction, a way to get acquainted.
I was at a baseball game with my family. We attended a game every summer. We sat behind home plate. It being a cloudless and warm Saturday afternoon, spectators filled the little V-shaped stadium. The stadium was named Locomotive Ballpark because a busy rail line resided beside it.
During the game, a painfully loud noise rang from every train passing on the nearby tracks. The fifth train sounded like a lumberjack cracking timbers.
The home team was losing.
Near the end of the game, the sixth train derailed. The front half of the train tumbled forward into the nearby river. The rear half accordioned into a bomb and exploded through the back of the stadium. The left fielder and shortstop were killed. So was everyone in the cheap seats.
2.
This story, titled “Parent Problems,” will be about the ungrounded strength of a man’s beliefs, his principles propped up like a statue, somehow rigid without a foundation.
I was at a baseball game with my parents. But I was really there to speak to my father. He was a retired millwright with a municipal pension. His politics consisted of sports news, of blue-collar small talk, of humour often hingeing on a typecast ethnic group.
In previous years, my father had always paid for the tickets. But today, I paid. It was my performance of maturity. If my father would recognize me for the adult I was, I would smile. When I rushed my credit card to the teller before my father’s handful of bills, my father’s wrinkles sharpened. He said, You don’t have money to spare, kid, not with the type of work you do.
I worked as a therapist. My practice focused on gender-affirming care. I told children and seniors and friends about all the ways they are important, even if the outside world cuts them down, makes them feel less than human. I suffered from waves of burnout. I changed employers often.
At the baseball game, I told my parents about all the issues I tackled in a workday. I told them about gender dysphoria, about genitals, about nomenclature, about government paper- work so convoluted I doubt even the form’s creator could fill it out correctly. I was opening the door, as I did every time we gathered, and as I had since a decade ago when I first came out, so they could see into my world. If my parents would recognize my employment as important, I would smile.
I spoke about my clients like I was not just their therapist, but part of the queer community too. My speech was a petition for equality. A lobbying for love.
But my father didn’t hear it that way. He told me, Don’t steer those complaints in my direction. He told me, Retirement means no longer giving a fuck.
The home team was losing.
When I told my father I had just been hired by a new community health organization, he perked up, as he always did when I spoke about changing employers. It was like he felt a chink in my armour open just enough for a dagger to slip inside.
He reminded me that it was never too late to change careers, never too late to join the City. He told me that the City was not a workplace that cared who you slept with, just that you worked hard. But of course, the City did care. I knew this from the struggles told to me by my blue-collar clients. I knew this from the language offered by my father.
I let the conversation dissolve because there was no place for it to go that wasn’t violent. I was angry beneath the skin, as I always was when I spoke to my father, but I never let my anger leak, never let my blood rise to the surface of my skin, never let my emotions burst. Instead, I poured all my anger and embarrassment and nausea into simple comments, asides picked from the rubble of arguments I had built then destroyed a hundred times while ruminating in the previous weeks about what to tell my parents at the baseball game. I handed them little rocks of thought I had rolled around in my mind for so long they had become perfect little pebbles, little gems about gender for my parents to pocket and fidget with when they needed to remember what I had said.
But when I got up to go to the washroom, my father, his eyes never straying from the game, piped up, informing me, as if I had never been to this stadium before, that the men’s is just past the lotto — my asides, my little rocks, my gems, littered beneath the seats like stray popcorn, my teachings demoted to garbage.
When I returned, I gazed out over the crowd of spectators. We were sitting in the expensive seats. The spectators in the cheap seats, the teenagers and families on a budget, became drunk and unruly. There was no shade in those sections. A delirious mother fell down the stairs. A baby began to cry.
An old rail line, still in use, ran through the city and past the downtown stadium. I don’t remember the trains ever producing a noise this ferocious. Four trains had already passed, and each one was so painfully loud that every nearby hand instinctually raced to cover an ear. A baby became deaf.
The fifth train sounded like a lumberjack cracking timbers. I then explained my gender to my parents. It was my coming out. A revealing I repeated for them every summer. Our necessary, uncomfortable ritual. Every year, I redefined non- binary, but then six months later I’d be halfway back to being, to them, a man. By Easter, I was again their son. Like the conversation had never happened. Like what I had said had just been a quarrel, but now all was forgiven. All was forgotten.
Water under the bridge.
If my parents could speak to me without gendered language this time, I would smile. But as usual, they were slow to respond to what I told them. In a neutral tone that made obvious her disapproval, my mother asked me, in a whisper, How long have you known? My father, silent, looked off into the outfield.
When the batter hitting cleanup flied out into left, the fielder tossed the dead ball into the cheap seats, but nobody had the dexterity to catch it. The ball knocked a baby on the head, and the baby finally stopped crying.
Near the end of the game, as my mother began her complaint about plural pronouns, the sixth train derailed. The front half of the train tumbled forward into the nearby river. The rear half accordioned into a bomb and exploded through the back of the stadium.
The left fielder and the shortstop, playing deep in the shift, were killed. So were the families, the elderly on a budget, the young drunks like I had once been, and everyone else in the cheap seats.
My parents and I, sitting behind home plate, were not injured.
After the evacuation, I walked my parents to their vehicle. I held their hands so we wouldn’t separate in the mayhem. My mother’s grip was tense, my father’s light like he was willing to let me go.
While we walked, my father got a call from my sister. And when he spoke, I heard, He’s fine. He’s right here. He’s fine. We’re all fine.
3.
This story will inspect the structures underpinning all that happens on the surface. Of a face, of a discussion, of a family, of a baseball field. It will, of course, be titled “The Faulty Scaffolds.”
I was at a baseball game. I had invited my parents not because I enjoyed their company, but because our summer outing was an annual event. My parents would be angry if it didn’t happen. They had expectations. And an expectation — I have learned in my employment as a therapist — is just premeditated resentment, a bullet my parents would later shoot at my feet if I broke from our tradition.
An old rail line, still in use, ran through the city and past the downtown stadium. The trains were disruptive. They shook your seat. They jostled your nerves. But here, in this space, at this game, strength was measured by one’s ability to show indifference to discomfort. Even as my blood stewed with anxiety — today I would remind my parents that I was not a man or a son — I never let my emotions leak. I blamed my red face on the summer heat.
I was not a brave person. I offered my parents no soliloquy, no treaties on how to live life or on how to accept me. That was not how our hierarchy worked. As a child, I had been forced to sit upright at the dinner table. A straight spine. Speak only when spoken to. As a child, I was allowed art as an evening activity, but colouring outside the lines was punishable.
We were at a baseball game, and there, in the ballpark, existed nothing beyond the gender binary. No scaffolds to support my queer identity. No touchstones to indicate my existence. In this space, gender roles were made to look essential: The roster was a metonym for hetero men. The cheerleaders was a metonym for femme women. And the purple mushroom mascot had a long-haired wife who kept him in line.
So instead of candour, I gave my parents concise asides — My friend Shawna, he used to play baseball professionally — little gems for them to pocket — Queer-friendly businesses are more profitable — small ideas that might not overwhelm — In my circles, people change pronouns often, and it’s never an issue — notes about language and symbols — Studies show the human brain can comfortably learn a dozen new words per day — and how it takes such little effort to affirm any identity.
But learning is never immediate, never quick, never done with soft messaging. That’s not the way the brain works. There must be turmoil or stress. The mind must crack, must fissure if the lava of a new idea is to invade, if a new rock is to be made. And nothing about me could crack a mind. I was not tectonic. Yet, for some reason, I still tried to educate my parents. I couldn’t help it.
We were sitting in the expensive seats. I had paid for the tickets. I had hoped this performance of maturity might remind my parents of my age, might remind them I was no longer a child. But also, ultimately, I wanted my parents to feel wealthy, if only for one night.
My mother never spoke about money. My father, the retired millwright, struggled to speak about much else. Every action, every job, every joke in his world was viewed through a monetary lens.
My father cared about money because, for an impoverished child, money was king. As an adult, he cared about money because he knew the backbreaking time it took to earn it. Once, he worked so hard he literally broke his back. Fractured his spine when lifting a furnace at the end of a sixteen-hour workday. Was back at work less than a month later.
My father never thanked me for buying the tickets. He’d told me he knew the price. He’d told me it was impolite to pay for him. It was proof I was a poor listener. I could see in my father’s eyes how he still considered me a forgetful child. Bound for failure. A disgrace to the family. When I’d paid for the tickets, I’d seen in my father’s eyes that, if I were younger and we had not been in public, he would have, with a fist, set me straight.
The home team was losing.
I wanted the game to end. I was uncomfortable. The tension I felt around my father turned my face red like the summer sky. Red like a rash. Like disciplined skin.
Trains were passing the stadium. Each one louder than the last. The fifth train sounded like a lumberjack cracking timbers. But I was not concerned. My ears hurt, but it was not my greatest pain at that moment. I was telling my parents about gender, about my identity, and like every other time I had told them, my parents did not respond the way parents should. I did not fit into their family portrait.
But near the end of the game, the sixth train derailed, and something within me finally calmed. In that instant, I recognized how every nearby infrastructure, including the rusted rail lines and rotten rail ties, was liable to collapse, to have gone uninspected, to have been maltreated for years and to be ready, at any moment, to crumble. And any structure — the stadium, the cruel noise of the trains, dysfunctional families — could collapse so quickly under the right conditions. And I recognized how laziness and carelessness and negligence are synonyms, but regardless of the word, stasis is harmful, and inaction is violence. Yet it was uplifting to know that all this oppression could instantly dissolve if the right wave broke through. Uplifting to recognize how nothing is enduring in this world.
It was, of course, also horrible. An atrocity.
The front half of the train tumbled forward into the river. The rear half accordioned into a bomb and exploded through the back of the stadium. My parents were not injured. And I too was not damaged, not pulled under, not drowned, not by my parents or the rubble.
My sister called my father to see if we were alive. When I was eventually handed the phone, I told her that our parents were unharmed. I told her I was tired. So tired. But yes, I was still alive. I was afloat. And I planned to stay that way.
4.
I’d love for the story to be called “Shapes of Disaster.” Or something more optimistic, like “What the Children Could Be if the Parents Would Listen.” Or even, ambitiously, “A Study of All Great Catastrophes.” But that won’t be possible because, when the story is eventually written, it’ll already be named. It’ll be a children’s tale titled “Inspector Lispector,” about an overworked and underpaid railroad safety assessor who calls in sick so she can spend the Saturday afternoon drinking beers with her husband and newborn. And it’ll begin like this: I was at a baseball game. »