The Backwards Anthem By Meghan Finke Winner, Honorable Mention, 10th Grade Writing Contest: Fiction My father’s silence is like the symphony—just as loud, just as blaring, and in a language I can’t understand. His stage is our bland, insipid house with too-white walls. I am his lone audience. This is his opus, his anthem. It takes everything from him in a backwards way, as he composes it by doing nothing at all. My silence is lighter, unstable; a tentative harmony to his solo. I am intruding on his grief. “…April?” Dad poses my name as a question now, if he ever calls it at all. An innumerable change that whisks into everyday life after every tragedy, blending in subtly, pretending it has been there all along. The words melt into the silence, a change of key. “Yeah, Daddy?” I reply warily. For a moment the tempo changes. Accelerando, gradually picking up speed. Intensity. I am afraid to talk to my father, terrified of seeing how grief can change a man. I am watching a bizarre caricature of a stricken father who happens to look like my own. He has been rooted to his recliner all day, watching mindless sitcoms. He is engrossed so intently, listening to the canned laughter so earnestly, that I know he isn’t listening at all. He is lost in a happier time. “D—Do you want to watch Jeopardy with me?” My father asks, spitting it all out at once. Accelerando. “It’s on after the commercial break.” “Sure,” I reply eagerly. Too eagerly for an invitation to watch a game show. My reply is a false note, the tone a fraction too high. I curl up on our overstuffed couch, resting my head on the cushion. It is a curious kind of silence that follows—not comfortable, but expected. An invisible weight, stretching the silence out, slowing every moment. Rallentando. Nothing seems quite as bad if you know it’s coming. There isn’t anything to say, so neither of us try. We always were practical. I twitch my head towards Dad, away from the Daily Double. This is our first fatherdaughter moment since the Accident, yet he forgets I’m here. He is studying the screen as he used to my mother’s shopping lists, as if they were written in some outlandish script he had to decipher. Mom. I try to distract myself now, a gut reaction. I scramble hastily for something— anything really. I settle for Jeopardy. Some elephantine woman in an unflattering yellow is beaming, ecstatic. She knows what nation won the most medals in the 1992 Summer Olympics. Dad and I watch this woman do a kind of dance, some ridiculous ballet with the other contestants. Her hand rockets back and forth from the buzzer, rejoicing in her knowledge of completely irrelevant trivia. Yet she’s laughing, now a foreign concept to us. I slowly realize I am jealous of this woman. I wish so much it almost hurts that all I cared about was winning a game show. The show ends. Dad and I exchange more words that neither mean anything nor matter. We return to silence. His silence is his symphony, and as he lives he composes.
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