Merry Go Round

You take the diploma with both hands. The dean shakes your hand and says congratulations. You look out past the stage lights into the rows of chairs.

He's not here.

You walk off the stage and check your phone. No messages nor missed calls. You call him. It rings five times and goes to voicemail.

You sit on a bench near the entrance of the auditorium and watch.

A fox in a pressed suit gets stopped by two people holding business cards. His mother stands behind him holding his cap and a plastic bag full of leis. A pair of rabbits pose in front of the university sign while their father kneels to get the angle right. A cat and her boyfriend walk past holding hands. He carries a bouquet of sunflowers that covers half his face.

You check your phone again. Nothing.

The crowd thins out. The auditorium staff start stacking chairs inside. The sky is grey and the air smells wet.

You call again. Voicemail.

The campus security guard, an older boar with a reflective vest, walks over and asks if someone is picking you up. You tell him someone is coming.

He nods and walks back to his post by the gate.

The first crack of thunder comes from behind the gymnasium. Then the rain, heavy and loud on the concrete. You grab your cap and hold it against your chest. Your regalia soaks through in seconds.

The security guard waves you over. You jog to his booth. He shifts to one side so there's room. Water drips from the edge of the roof in a steady line.

Twenty minutes.

The familiar car pulls up to the gate. A white sedan with a crack in the rear bumper that's been there for two years. The Uber sticker sits crooked on the windshield, peeling at one edge.

He presses the horn. One long blast. The security guard flinches.

A furred dragon, Biran, leans across the passenger seat and pushes the door open from inside.

"Get in, get in, get in- shit, you're soaked."

He's wearing the vest. The brown one, Under it, the blue button-up that pulls tight across his middle where the buttons strain. You'd asked him once why he didn't buy a bigger one. He said the store didn't carry his color in the right size. That was a year ago.

You get in. The seat is warm. The car smells of peppermint, the hard candies he keeps in a plastic bag wedged between the console and the parking brake.

He grabs you before you can buckle your seatbelt.

His arms go around your shoulders and he pulls you sideways across the console. The gearshift digs into your thigh. His fur is dry and coarse and you can feel the weight of him. His grip is tight but one arm, the left one, doesn't squeeze as hard as the right.

"Grats." His voice cracks on the second syllable. He clears his throat. "Shit. Congrats, kid."

He holds on for a while. The rain drums on the roof.

He lets go and leans back. His eyes are wet but he's grinning , wide, pulling further on the right side than the left. The fur along his jaw, white, fine-furred, greyed at the edges, bunch up when he smiles.

"Hold that up. Hold. Yeah. Hold the diploma thing up."

He pulls out his phone. The screen is cracked in one corner and the text size is set two notches too large. His left thumb doesn't move right, so he taps the shutter with his right while his left steadies the phone against his palm.

The flash goes off.

"One more. Don't make that face. There."

He brings the phone close to his face and squints. He taps around the screen. His claws, blunt, clipped short because he can't manage the long ones with one good hand, tap on the glass. He opens WhatsApp. He types slowly, one letter at a time, with his right index claw.

just graduated 🎉🎉🎉

He posts it to his story.

He drops the phone into the cupholder and shifts the car into drive. His left hand goes to the steering wheel and rests there. His right hand does the turning.

"Sorry I'm late. Fucking accident on the bridge, I sat there for forty minutes. I tried the back road by the church and some asshole in a truck was blocking the whole lane."

He talks with his right hand, lifting it off the wheel to gesture, then putting it back. The left one stays.

"But I'm here. You did it."

He glances at you. The grin, lopsided, wide.

"You actually fucking did it."

He reaches over and squeezes the back of your neck once. His palm is rough and warm. Then his hand goes back to the wheel.

The rain is getting heavier. He leans forward to see through the windshield. The wipers streak. He's been saying he'll replace them for three months.

The Uber app pings. A ride request. He glances down and taps decline without picking the phone up.

"Not tonight."

He drives. The heater rattles and pushes warm air against your wet regalia. The radio is on but turned so low it's buried under the rain.

On the dashboard, wedged between the windshield and the plastic trim, there's a small card from the hospital. An appointment reminder. Physical therapy, Thursday. The edges are soft. He's written something in the margin in messy handwriting. You can't read it from here.

"You hungry? My treat. Don't argue."

He fishes out a peppermint from the bag. He unwraps it one-handed, pinching the wrapper between his teeth and pulling, then pops the candy into his mouth. He drops the wrapper into the door pocket where a dozen other wrappers sit crumpled together.

You watch the road. He watches the road. The rain falls. The wipers drag.

He's here.

---

You pull the regalia over your head. The wet fabric catches on your ears and you have to tug it free. It sits in your lap, dripping onto your legs.

"Toss it in the back."

You start to turn around.

"Wait- actually, wait. Hold on."

He flips the turn signal and cuts across a lane. Someone honks. He pulls into a McDonald's parking lot and unbuckles his seatbelt.

"Stay here."

He gets out into the rain without a jacket. Only the vest and the tight blue shirt. He jogs toward the entrance. The left leg moves a half-beat slower than the right and he leans his weight forward to compensate. His tail swings behind him for balance, black fur slicked flat.

He's inside for twelve minutes. The car idles. Rain crawls down the windshield.

He comes back with four bags. He holds them all in his right hand, bunched together by the tops, and pushes the car door open with his left arm. He drops into the seat and dumps everything between you.

"Okay, Big Macs, nuggets, fries, extra fries because fuck it, two McFlurries. I didn't know which one you wanted so I got both. And apple pie things. You still like those?"

Water runs down his face and drips from his jaw onto the paper bags. He's already pulling out of the parking spot.

---

The first time he hit your mother was a long time ago.

You heard it from the bedroom. Then her voice, a short sharp sound that stopped as soon as it started. Then his voice, loud, a wall of noise with no spaces between the words.

He came home smelling of whiskey most nights. You learned to tell from the sound of the front door how the night would go. If the door opened and closed normally, he'd eat whatever was on the stove and pass out in front of the television. If the door banged open or he fumbled with the lock for a long time, you'd hear the voice. Flat and hard and going on about money and respect and whose fault everything was.

He didn't spare you either.

A slap on the back of the head for leaving the light on. A hard grip on your arm that left finger-shaped marks for two days. Once he threw a shoe at you because you dropped a glass. It missed. The glass didn't, it broke on the kitchen tile and he made you pick up every piece with your hands while he stood over you telling you how much glasses cost.

Your mother watched that. She stood in the doorway and held the frame with one hand and didn't move.

You don't know what she saw in him. She never told you about your real father. You asked once, and she said he was an awful man. That was it. She never opened the subject again.

---

He pulls out of the McDonald's lot and takes a left. Two blocks down he pulls over in front of a bakery with a yellow awning.

"Stay. I'll be fast."

He's gone for five minutes. He comes back with two paper bags and sets them in the back seat carefully, laying them flat so they don't tip. The smell fills the car. Butter, sugar, warm bread.

"Ensaymada," he says. "And cheese rolls. And a cake. Small one. Don't look at me like that."

He pulls back onto the road. A block later he stops again.

"One more."

The rain has weakened to a thin drizzle and he walks instead of jogs. You watch him through the store window moving down the drink aisle. His left hand hangs at his side while his right picks up bottles and reads labels. He grabs four bottled juices, the brand with the mango on the front, the ones you started buying during the months when he couldn't eat solid food.

He adds the bottles to the pile on the back seat.

"Okay. Now we go."

---

Your mother left eventually.

You came home from school and her things were gone from the closet. The bag she kept under the bed was gone, her toothbrush, the small box she kept her earrings in. She left the heavy coat and a pair of sandals.

No explanation.

Biran came home that night and stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at the same empty closet. He was sober. You remember that because it was unusual. His face went blank. He didn't say anything for two days.

On the third day he started drinking again and on the third night he looked at you across the kitchen table.

"You're still here."

You didn't say anything.

"Parasite," he said. He wasn't yelling. His voice was low and thick and he was looking at his glass. "She left and the parasite stays."

He said it again the next week. And the week after. It became a word he used the way other people use a name. Parasite, wash the dishes. Parasite, turn the TV down.

But he never told you to leave.

The rent came due and he paid it. The electricity came due and he paid it. He bought groceries and left money on the counter on school days.

One night you had a fever. You woke up at three in the morning shaking and your throat felt full of sand. You heard the television in the living room. He was still up.

You stayed in bed.

An hour later the bedroom door opened. He walked over and put his hand on your forehead. His palm was rough and dry. He left and came back with a wet towel and a glass of water and two white pills.

"Take these."

He put the wet towel on your forehead and sat on the floor next to the bed with his back against the wall. You heard him open a beer. He stayed there until you fell asleep.

In the morning the towel was folded on the nightstand and the glass was washed and back in the cabinet and he was asleep on the couch with his shoes on. He never mentioned it.

---

He's not taking the road that goes home.

The turn for the apartment was three blocks back and he passed it without slowing. You look at him. He's smiling. The right side of his mouth goes higher than the left. His tail thumps against the side of the seat.

The clouds are breaking. There's a strip of orange light near the horizon. The wet road reflects it back.

He turns the radio up one notch and taps his claw on the steering wheel, off-rhythm.

"You'll see," he says, even though you didn't ask.

---

You could have graduated with honors.

Three semesters in, your GPA was high enough. Your adviser told you to keep it up. You had a plan written on an index card tucked inside your textbook. Courses, credit hours, target scores

Then Biran fell.

A Saturday morning. You heard a sound from the kitchen, soft, heavy. You came out of the bedroom and he was on the floor between the counter and the refrigerator. On his side. His right arm reaching for the counter edge. His left arm flat on the tile. His left leg too. His mouth was open and the left side of his face was slack, pulled down.

His eyes found you. You'd never seen him afraid before.

He tried to say something. The sounds came out wrong. He tried again. You couldn't understand it.

You put your arms around his chest and pulled. Half of it just dragged. You pulled him across the kitchen floor and through the living room and his right hand gripped your arm hard enough to bruise.

You got him to the car. You ran two red lights on the way to the public hospital.

The doctors cleared the clot. They said another hour and the damage would have been worse.

He couldn't move his left side. He couldn't speak clearly. He didn't recognize you for the first four days.

The hospital covered the procedure because it was public and it was an emergency. Staying cost money. You brought him home after six days because you couldn't afford a seventh.

You put him in the bed. He looked at you and said something that sounded like "who" and closed his eyes.

The first week was the stroke and something else on top of it. His right hand shook. The left side was the clot. This was different. He sweated through the sheets. You changed them in the morning and he lay on the bare mattress while you fed the wet fabric into the washing machine. On the fourth night he grabbed your arm, looking past you at the corner of the room. There was nothing there. You sat with him until he stopped seeing it. The hospital had managed something in his system during those six days. At home there was nothing. His body stopped on its own.

You dropped two courses that semester. Then the rest.

The days had a rhythm. You woke up at six. You checked if he was breathing. You made food soft enough to swallow, porridge, mashed banana, soup with the pieces strained out. You fed him with a spoon because his right hand shook and his left hand didn't work.

He shit himself on the eighth day. You cleaned it up. He turned his face away from you and kept it turned until you were done.

You bought adult diapers from the pharmacy down the street. The cashier didn't look at you.

Some days he knew who you were. He'd say your name, broken, slurred, but your name. He'd watch you move around the apartment and try to reach for things with his right hand, dropping them, trying again.

Other days he looked at you the way you look at a stranger on the bus. Once he asked where his mother was. She'd been dead for years. You didn't tell him that.

His phone rang a lot the first two weeks. The logistics company. They called four times, then five. Someone left a voicemail, a woman's voice, professional, saying they needed to discuss his employment status.

The calls stopped after a month. His name came off whatever list it was on. Months as a private driver, ended.

You couldn't leave him alone. You tried once, a thirty-minute grocery run. You came back and he was on the floor of the bathroom. He'd tried to get to the toilet by himself. He wasn't hurt. His right hand was gripping the edge of the bathtub and his face was pressed to the tile and when you lifted him his eyes were wet.

So you took him with you. Everywhere. You buckled him into the passenger seat and he sat there while you ran errands, did odd jobs, made deliveries. He sat beside you. Sometimes he slept. Sometimes he stared out the window. Sometimes the words came out jumbled and he'd hit his right hand against his thigh and you'd wait until he was done and drive to the next stop.

Physical therapy at the public clinic. Twice a week. Forty minutes each way. A therapist who didn't let him quit. She made him squeeze a rubber ball with his left hand, two hundred times, every session. She made him walk between parallel bars while she counted his steps. He cursed at her constantly. She ignored it.

The left hand started closing again. The left leg started bearing weight. The words came back, enough to say hungry, bathroom, and stop fussing.

You took whatever was there. A neighbor paid you to move his mother's furniture into storage. The store on the corner let you run deliveries for a cut. Government disability took three months to process and covered less than half the rent. The landlord gave you sixty days before the notices started. You paid her in pieces. Some weeks you chose between diapers and electricity. You kept the electricity. The fan kept him cool and the dark made him panic. You washed the cloth alternatives by hand in the sink while he slept.

Four months into recovery. He was sitting on the edge of the bed while you tied his shoes because he couldn't bend that far yet. His right hand came up and rested on top of your head for a moment. Then he pulled it away and looked at the wall.

Seven months after the stroke he could walk without help. The limp stayed, would always stay, the doctors said. His left arm came back to about seventy percent. Good enough to hold things.

He stood in the doorway one morning and looked at the apartment. The dishes piled in the sink. The stain on the ceiling from the leak upstairs. Takeout containers on the counter. The overflowing laundry basket.

He got a trash bag from under the sink and started cleaning. Slowly, one-handed mostly, leaning against the counter when his leg got tired. He didn't ask you to help.

He didn't drink. The bottles in the cabinet stayed where they were. After two weeks you noticed he'd poured them out. Three empty bottles standing in a row, rinsed, caps back on. He never said anything about it.

He got the Uber job five months later. His right side was fine and his left hand could hold the wheel steady enough. He failed the first assessment because his reaction time on the left was too slow. He practiced in the parking lot behind the apartment complex for a week. He passed the second time.

Some days he'd drive for ten hours and come home with barely enough for groceries. He kept a small notebook in the glove compartment where he wrote down his daily earnings in cramped handwriting. He drove every day. He'd put the money on the counter and eat whatever you'd made and fall asleep on the couch with the television on.

You re-enrolled. He drove you to the registrar's office and double-parked and told you to go, he'd circle the block. The registrar looked at your file, the gap, the dropped courses, the incompletes, and asked if you wanted to start where you left off. The honors was gone. Too many missed semesters.

Biran put a portion of every Uber fare into an envelope in the glove compartment. You worked weekends at a warehouse near the port unloading crates, then went to class. Some semesters you could only afford half the units. One semester the enrollment fee went to a plumbing emergency. It took two years longer than it should have. Neither of you talked about the timeline.

You graduated with a GPA that was fine.

He didn't say anything about the honors. You don't know if he understood what it was, what it would have meant. You don't know if he ever counted the months you spent on the bathroom floor cleaning him, feeding him, squeezing that rubber ball two hundred times, and subtracted them from a number on a transcript.

He never brought it up.

---

The city lights shrink in the side mirror.

The buildings thin out. Strip malls give way to empty lots, then to nothing. The streetlights stop and the road narrows to two lanes with no divider. The headlights catch dirt shoulders and dry grass and rocks jutting out of the ground.

He drives with one hand. The radio loses its signal. He switches it off.

He slows down and turns off the road. The car bumps over uneven ground, tires crunching gravel. The headlights sweep across a flat clearing, bare earth, scattered rocks, scrub brush at the edges. He kills the engine.

The headlights go off. Your eyes adjust.

He unbuckles and reaches into the back seat, gathering bags. McDonald's in his right hand. Bakery bags hooked on his left forearm. Juice bottles clamped between his left arm and his ribs. He shoulders the door open.

"Come on."

You get out. The ground is dry under your shoes. The air is cool, the rain didn't reach out here. You can hear insects in the scrub.

He walks to the front of the car and sits on the hood.

The metal buckles under him with a low pop. His eyes go wide. He freezes, bags still in his hands.

He looks down at the dent forming under his weight.

"...I'll fix it later."

He sets the bags beside him and taps the space on his other side.

You sit. The hood flexes but holds. The engine is warm underneath.

No city light. The stars are out, all of them, more than you ever see from the apartment. The Milky Way cuts a pale streak across the middle.

Biran looks up. His brown eyes move across the sky. He's quiet for a while.

He opens a soda can. The crack is loud out here. He takes a long drink and holds the can on his knee.

"Used to take your mom here." He's looking up. "Back when you were with the neighbor lady."

He takes another drink.

"She called me corny." He snorts. "Drove forty minutes to look at the sky and she said, 'Biran, this is corny as shit.'"

He picks at the tab on the can with his claw.

"I think she liked it though. Stayed out here for hours the first time. Didn't want to leave." He pauses. "She'd point at stuff and ask me what the constellations were. I didn't know a single one. Made shit up. She never checked."

He finishes the can and crushes it in his right hand.

He reaches for a McFlurry and peels the lid off. He eats a few bites, then holds the spoon out toward you. You take the other McFlurry from the bag.

"Grab me one of those pie things too."

You hand him an apple pie. He tears the box open with his teeth and bites half of it in one go. Crumbs fall on the vest.

He chews and looks up.

"I guess I was too fucked up for her."

He swallows.

"I guess we're both fucked up." He chuckles. It comes from his chest a low rumble you can feel through the hood. His right arm comes up and wraps around your shoulder. His hand grips the outside of your arm once, then relaxes. "You're my fuck-up."

He keeps eating the McFlurry with his left hand. The grip is clumsy and he scrapes the sides of the cup more than he scoops. Ice cream gets on his claws.

You eat. He eats.

He finishes and opens a juice bottle. Drinks half. Opens the bakery bag and pulls out an ensaymada, the butter already soaking through the paper. He takes a bite and grunts.

"Shit, that's good. Have one."

You have one. Still warm.

His arm is still around your shoulder. His tail hangs off the edge of the hood and sways once, twice.

"Hey."

His voice drops. The roughness is still there but he's working around something.

"Thanks for not giving up on your old man."

He doesn't look at you. He looks straight ahead at the dark where the clearing meets the scrub. His hand tightens on your arm for a second. Then he reaches for another ensaymada.

"Piece of shit body gives out and there you are dragging my fat ass to the car." He shakes his head. "Feeding me. Wiping my-" He stops. Bites into the pastry. "You know what I mean."

He chews. Swallows. Drinks.

"I know I wasn't good. Before. Don't need you to tell me."

A car passes on the road behind you. The headlights sweep across the clearing and fade.

"Your mom was right to go."

He balls up the empty bakery bag and drops it beside the crushed can.

"You didn't though." He picks a crumb off the vest and flicks it. "Stupid kid."

He opens the cake box. Small round cake, white frosting, "Congratulations" piped on top in crooked blue letters. He pulls a plastic knife from the bag and cuts a rough slice and holds it out to you on a napkin.

He cuts himself a piece twice the size.

"What are you going to do now?" Frosting on his bottom lip. He gestures with the plastic knife at the sky, the dark, the road behind you. "No more chasing professors around. No more bullshit paperwork."

He licks the frosting off his lip.

"You're free."