Olympiad
“PLEASE COME DOWN AND WATCH THE GAMES.”
My father was squeezing neon index cards under my door. All six feet and seventy-two years were compressed beside the cat, waiting for my response.
I watched an orange paw jab the gap, getting only as far as his toes. I was angry that the cat was on the wrong side of the door. My father knew I didn’t know why I was angry.
“I CANNOT WATCH WITHOUT YOU.”
Fluorescent pink followed safety yellow in his meticulous all caps. We still had four days of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.
“WE WILL NOT SEE ANOTHER OLYMPIAD ON OUR SHORES FOR SOME TIME.” The card was chartreuse, and he was wrong. The millennium would ferry the Games to Sydney, but they would be in Salt Lake in 2002. I knew. The world would come back to us.
“PLEASE, LITTLE SPARROW.” My father used his final throw.
I conferred with my mirror to ensure I looked stern. I opened the door. “OK, Big Sparrow.”
He was on all fours, eyes filled with tears. I took his hand and buried my head in his flannel. The cat exploded into a room made exotic by banishment. We watched him interrogate the bookcase to ensure nothing had changed. Tolkien and Lewis’s oeuvres were intact, safe in the Secret Service of a dozen Care Bears and the lemurs and wombats my father could not resist at the drugstore.
My mother was watching the Games, legs curled beneath her. She was breathtaking in pajamas covered with leopards. I looked less like her at fifteen than I had at twelve, and this bothered me. I’d once had the longest hair in class, ridiculous enough to sit on. I had it cut to the same chin length as my mother’s. My father said we both looked like Mary Tyler Moore. I learned that name in 1990, when Type 1 diabetes recruited me. Mary Tyler Moore was the best role model the pediatrician could offer. No one in class knew Mary Tyler Moore until I convinced them to watch The Dick Van Dyke Show on Nick at Nite, like we did.
Dick and Laura were on every night, but the Games were shy, only ours every two years. We cheered for Team USA unless circumstances dictated otherwise. My father wore incompatible shades of blue with red heart antennae from Valentine’s Day.
My mother had been awarded Most Athletic Girl in school, and I never forgot. I could not follow. I incurred the expletives of strange fathers in left fields. Pop-up softballs flew easy over my head while I gaped at the sunset.
“This is our guy.” My mother spoke with urgency. Her lilac leather journal was open, so I knew this was important. She took notes for poems. I told my friends my mother was published in places like Pudding and Plainsongs.
“We are underdog people!” my father proclaimed. Tonight, a man from Côte d’Ivoire would meet a pole vault he had loved on faith. His name was Bakary. His father had constructed an apparatus with his hands. Bakary had never touched a proper pole vault. Bakary was made entirely of ribs and eyes. Bakary’s father had died. There was no reasonable chance that Bakary would be among the top twenty finishers. He was our guy. My mother took notes until the left side of her left hand blushed blue. I had her crooked handwriting, and a t-shirt that said, “Left-handed people are the only ones in their right minds.”
The Games jump without apology. We would not get to see Bakary pole vault before a detour to the aquatic center. We would not root for the United States here, either, because a man named Aapo was jangling his arms, long as my father’s.
“A Finn!” my father exclaimed. He reminded us that he loved the Finnish people for “incandescent valor” and “indispensable humility.”
I had seen a three-ring binder as tall as a cinderblock in our basement, straining with the white pages of Kemijarvi. My father never asked me to read his novel about Finland’s Winter War. He never sent it to a publisher.
I had only seen my father actively brave once, when a snapping turtle the size of a hatchback brandished fear in all directions at the bus stop. My father knelt and delivered a homily into the creature’s rage: “Well, now, my good man. This is a distressing morning for you, but your ship has come. Your ship has come.” Half the neighborhood watched my father lift the turtle by its shell and bear it through the front and back yards, all the way to the creek, chomping at oxygen all the way. The bus stop applauded. I reminded the kindergarteners that this was my father.
I watched Aapo, whose brass body was a reflector under many lights. I had never seen my father young. When I cut off my hair, I brought a picture of my mother at twenty-two to the salon. There were no pictures of my father from the war before my mother was born. I accepted the report that he had been to France and Germany. He spent up his words about those places before I was born. The only artifact was Kemijarvi, which my mother said was and was not about the war. My mother reminded my grandparents not to buy my father striped pajamas for Christmas.
“Hold your horses, Aapo.” My father went into the kitchen and returned with my 8:30 snack. The endocrinologist installed this architecture to prevent me from “going low” overnight. My father read books from the Joslin Clinic and found a health food store with no-sugar crunchy peanut butter. Aapo was still preening when my father returned with my half sandwich.
The cat returned and chose my mother, who sat isled like Australia on the loveseat. After Aapo came in sixth place, we retired to our nation-states, my mother and I in the guest bedroom for Gymnastics, my father to the maroon suite.
The commentator reminded my mother and I that Russians are “always the spoilers,” which somehow made us laugh until we could scarcely breathe. We decided to root for Svetlana, a geriatric tragedy at twenty-four. She stared threateningly into the camera and warned that she would rather have a gold medal than a baby from her own body. She fell off the uneven bars and kept walking until she vanished. I hoped she had a mother waiting outside. My mother’s journal was open.
When I woke up the next morning, there was a turquoise index card on my pillow. BAKARY TAKES THE BRONZE! I found my parents laughing in the kitchen. My mother was administering individual blueberries to each square of my low-carbohydrate waffles. My father was wearing antennae. We still had three days left of the Games.
ANGELA TOWNSEND is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and seven-time Best of the Net nominee, and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, The Disappointed Housewife, Epiphany, Pleiades, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College and writes for a cat sanctuary. Angela has lived with Type 1 diabetes for thirty-four years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately.