katherine o’hara

The Spaces Within

After Matthew Vollmer

Here lies a man whose daughter chewed the inside of her mouth raw because she knows that her father, the deceased, doesn’t like sunflowers, doesn’t like sunflowers because of the way their insides make up tiny little holes, that the deceased said is a perfectly common phobia, the fear of irregular clusters, why he didn’t buy pomegranates at the market and told his daughter to eat them over the sink, halves kept in the palm of her hand, away, and the daughter, eldest of the family, sees that someone brought a bouquet with sunflowers, sat to the left of his casket, and the daughter can’t look at the deceased, or her mother, or her brother who isn’t there—her brother who didn’t want to attend because he said he couldn’t stand to see his father like that, pallor skin under the only light in the room, who argued with the deceased more times than not, and now didn’t know how to sit in silence, and the eldest is almost glad that all she can focus on is the spaces within those sunflowers because her mother told her a story months ago—how the daughter’s uncle took a photo of her grandmother in the minutes after she died, and her mother shoved him aside saying, “for God’s[1] sake why would you want to remember someone like that?”

[1] The mother, only, still commands god’s name in capitals.