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We rarely speak, Dad and I, but I get his emails. Often the emails are bad, disjointed, weird. Often he tells me he's going to leave various possessions to me, like the fuel tank in our stamp-sized backyard that leaks kerosene through its corroded belly. Sometimes he says he'll leave me his pets: the parakeet, a dozen fish, an iguana, and his latest addition, a tortoise impulse-purchased from a street vendor. The tortoise's age he puts at 14, based on some scutal-ring counting method he read about online.
 My father is a big collector of animals that don't love you back. Of the scaly and prickly and strange.
I don't take his emails seriously. They've been going on for years. I figure he has several people he contacts like this, old coworkers or even my mother, who's since remarried and retired to Arizona, one of those enclosed communities where people ride golf carts to the grocery store. I live in Colorado now, which looks close to Arizona on the map, but distances are deceptive this far West and neither of us like making the 12-hour drive to see each other.
Turns out there's some basis for these emails, though—as in, he really is sick. I find this out when he sends me a PDF of his recent health records, which I go through with a medical abbreviation dictionary borrowed from the library.
So I decide to go home to Philadelphia. My girlfriend Maribel wants to come but I tell her not to bother. We've been together for four months by this point. I don't want her to see my home city, to tarnish it with her fresh Boulder air, to frown at the litter, the fentanyl snoozers on the curbs outside corner stores, the grayness from which I come. She's a sunny person who tends to sanitize sadness with platitudes and cliches before letting it enter her system.
I take a cab from the airport to our old rowhouse. I'm supposed to work remotely but mostly I share cigarettes on the porch with the Guyanese home aide, Dexter, a muscular dude in his 40s because Dad scared off the older lady I hired remotely a few weeks ago. Feed the tortoise, which has developed shell rot from neglect, scraps of romaine. Scrape algae off the aquariums with razors and douse them in vinegar before Craigslisting them because the fish all died; Dad ran out of tropical formula flakes and poor Dexter didn't know you can't feed them bread.
Dad wakes from long opioid naps into delirium, thinking I'm his long-dead brother, calling me a life-ruining thief. He's shrunken, prone to bouts of aggression and flatulence. I sit up nights by his bed, waiting, I'm not sure for what. After Mom left we lived like roommates, dishes never done, laundry never washed, empties on the floor. He'd leave his pet enclosures too long, letting them build up ammoniac reeks before cleaning them all in one disinfectant binge while listening to punk records. Sometimes he let me order Little Caesars and invite a few friends over for video games—that was how the parakeet learned to say Scooter brother! from GTA.
Dad was the one I called after my DUI in college. I knew he'd bail me out like an old drinking buddy he still felt responsible for. On the drive home I cried and he did too, loudly, snot and tears flowing freely onto his flannel shirt, which scared me so bad I stopped. I quit partying, transferred to a new school, got a suspended sentence and a degree in business administration, found a job and moved out west.
A gray afternoon five days after I arrive, that's it. Dexter puts his big hand over my father's face and closes his eyes, then spritzes cologne into the air. I can't touch the body. I call the authorities and then I call Maribel and she says, Oh, babe. Should I fly out for the funeral?
No funeral. I have him cremated and write an obituary with ChatGPT and send it around via blast email.
I want nothing from that house. I have a yard "sale" where I push items for free onto any passing person. I rent a truck and pay Dexter off his agency's books to help me transport the rest to Goodwill, until all that remains is the stained mattress on which my father died. I sleep there the remainder of my stay.
I find a buyer for the parakeet online, and a pet shop in Melrose takes the iguana, but nobody wants the tortoise. I like animals fine but he's too ugly, beady-eyed. He snaps at my fingers when I reach into his tank and whenever he misses I mock him, saying, Too slow, bitch. I call six animal rescues, all full up. I could bring him to Colorado but the thought of him in my house, watching from his habitat while I try to fuck Maribel on the couch, creeps me out. Those monsters live forever.
I put him into a laundry basket lined with a towel. At the end of the purple line is a park with a pond. It's after dark, half the bulbs in the street lamps blown. The tortoise doesn't go easy, constantly trying to climb out of the basket all slow and unbalanced. When I arrive three turtles are already sitting on a floating log alongside many crushed beer cans. Frankly I don't know the difference between tortoises and turtles. The water has an evil smell.
Go, I tell the tortoise, go to your friends. I tip him out right where the dirt meets the water but he just sits there. When I prod him he collapses inward, under threat. Eventually I leave, thinking, He's meant to be in nature, if he doesn't thrive it's no one's fault. I toss the laundry basket into the overflowing dumpster of a CVS on the walk back to the station, then call Maribel to tell her I'll be home on the first flight I can find.
It's only when I get back to Dad's house and look down at the tank, dry and empty except for a layer of orchid bark, that I remember tortoises don't swim.
That poor animal. All alone out there in the big empty night, hermetic and deaf, with only such protection as his own body can offer.
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