excerpt from
White or the Muskox Play
from
The Best American Short Plays 2011–2012
BON Dad looked like a zombie. He’d lost a lot of weight. It wasn’t like the life drained out of him or anything, you know? It’s like he’d already sprung a leak and now we knew what it was. That it was life draining out of him. And we just had to watch. We sat in the car for an hour, and just . . . sat in the AC. I didn’t want to cry, you know? Didn’t want him to feel bad. Like he needed to protect me. But holy shit. Holy. Shit. I couldn’t think of anything else. The inside of my head was wallpapered with it. And I looked around . . . you know, in my head . . . trying to find other things to focus on. But there weren’t. The walls, the windows, they’d all been wallpapered over. Everything else was gone. It had drained out. And I started to get panicky. Almost claustrophobic. I couldn’t let it out my eyes, I couldn’t let it out my throat. I just had to sit there, with it in my body, pushing from the inside out. And I think Dad had to notice. ’Cause he started fidgeting. And of all things to say, he looked at me and said, “Let’s get some ice cream.”