I sat at the breakfast bar in my parents’ house, staring blankly at my homework, when the heavy front door opened thirty feet away, and my father appeared, his skin ashen grey, his eyes slits, his mouth half-open. Dad’s agony was informed by an inarticulate groan dragging his furry chin until it rested upon his chest and the carelessly buttoned dress shirt he wore. My father usually dressed impeccably. But now, his necktie was missing, wadded like a sock in my stepmother’s right fist. With her left hand, she steered Dad upstairs to their bedroom—her steps measured and deliberate, buoying him like a wounded soldier; his steps delicate and punctuated by muted gasps. I felt these sounds as much as I heard them. Thirty-seven years old then, my father aged seventy-three more by the time he crested the staircase summit, and their mattress squeaked as he collapsed, a muffled mournful hum heard through the ceiling above me.
Moments later, my stepmother passed me on her way into the kitchen, retrieving a bag of ice from the freezer, and returning upstairs with it in her left fist; Dad’s necktie forgotten in her other hand. I’d just returned from school. My father had just returned from his vasectomy.
I was fourteen. Even then, I knew I didn’t want children. I also knew, in those granular moments—the congealed syrup of time—that despite the misery graffitied across my father’s crinkled forehead, I would one day join him.
And I didn’t sleep well the night before my own scheduled procedure many years later; Dad’s tortured face revisited me. I turned in bed and lay on my side, eventually thinking of my younger brother, who’d gotten neutered a few years ago. To him, it was nothing. He even claimed to have tested himself a few hours later. Everything still worked, he said, laughing. Weighing these contradictory perspectives, along with the inexplicable overturning of Roe and the cacophonous ascendance of Trump, I contacted a local doctor who could see me before someone pulled the plug on my wife’s access to birth control.
My vasectomy lasted fifteen minutes. Waiting was the hardest part. The doctor made small talk while he worked on me. He said his business boomed immediately after the historic reversal. You wouldn’t believe it, he said. I believed it. My wife and I talked about my vasectomy for years. Her insurance company changed her birth control prescription continuously without telling her, resulting in frightening days of doubt, and she adjusted to her newest medications, only to have them arbitrarily switched back to the previous prescription, throwing her body out of sync.
The evening after my vasectomy, I slept eleven hours, rising and staggering toward the Tylenol. I returned to work, hobbling like a tortoise, whispering to my male colleagues, clocking their nods.
Writing this forty-eight hours later, I’m still sore, though I doubt I’m quite as sore as my father was. At least I can finally appreciate the look on his face.
SHORT BIO: Jason M. Thornberry is a disabled writer whose work appears in World Literature Today, Los Angeles Review of Books, Grub Street, Maryland Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and elsewhere. His chapbook, The Finish Line, is available through Sand and Gravel Press. Jason lives in Seattle with his wife and dog.