Buying Mr. Bubbles Bath Soap Makes Me Cry
My father rents a hotel room once a month to take a bubble bath. He lives alone in a tiny house with a stand-up shower. I imagine him at the local Holiday Inn, his body stretched out in the porcelain tub, his eyeglasses perched on the edge. It is hard for me to imagine him without them, even in sleep he wears them, nodding off on his recliner.
I imagine how he sighs as his bones and muscles relax in the hot water, his skin turning red. His body hair grows in bright blonde, just like mine, and has turned white with age.
My mother says I have his wide feet, that his genes are the reason I have a hard time finding delicate women’s shoes. I imagine his feet, that look like my feet, propped up by the faucet.
When I was little, too young to remember, I got sick with a cold that settled in my chest. Dad says he took me into the shower with him and let the water turn hot, so the bathroom steamed up. He rocked me up and down and patted my chest until I coughed and coughed and cleared the gunk from my lungs. I don’t remember this, but I can pretend to.
To conjure up the memory of the last time someone touched me, I must think very hard. An ex of mine joked that I liked the water scalding hot in the shower. He’d touch my skin and laugh at how red it would get after I bathed.
When my father takes a bubble bath, he texts me how I am doing, and I tell him I okay. I’m a little tired, I’m ready for summer to be over. It isn’t a lie.
When I was thirteen and my parents were newly divorced, I had to share a bed with him as he moved between places. I remember how the hallway light shown in through the crack in the door and my dad snored slightly and how my mother told me it was inappropriate to sleep in the same bed with my dad at that age. At his new place he bought me bunk beds and I had my own room. We’d order takeout food and fall asleep on the recliners with the A/C unit blowing in the summer and the sound of crickets outside.
To conjure a happy memory, I imagine myself little and my lungs full of mucus. I imagine my father holding me in his arms and laughing as I cough and cough and clear my airways and take a deep breath of steam and finally, finally breathe.
Michelle Bellman received her MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Bowling Green State University in 2021. She works as an adjunct instructor and has been published in Running Wild Press, Passengers Press, New South Journal, Ripples in Space, and Flash Fiction Online. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.