A week before my twenty-sixth birthday, I lie morphine-cradled in the recovery wing of Pelham Medical Center. I reek of sweat and surgical tape, blood and unsalted hospital beef, my hospital gown sweet with syrup from several spilled fruit cups. It’s Friday, which means I’ve been stagnant in bed for a week.

Deciding my stench has crossed a line, my father carries me to the gray hospital shower, turns on the hot water, and begins lathering my hair with pink medical shampoo, his hands touching parts of me he hasn’t touched since I was five years old.

With one hand he guides soap down my shoulders, spine, kneecaps, ankles. With the other, he holds me upright, my body still quaking with pain from an emergency surgery for a septic intestine that would have likely killed me had I been born in any other period.

To be bathed as an adult by anyone is a humbling experience, but to be bathed by my father—the man who once told me “boys don’t do that” when I kissed the outfield grass out of boredom in little league; the man who, at the same age as I am now, lost his wife to a drunk driver on an exit ramp outside of Memphis—is an experience that borders on the surreal.

And I can tell that he’s scared. Scared of what could have been. Scared of hurting me further with his touch. Scared of crying in the presence of another man. A month from now, when he’s sitting with JoJo and Rodney in that bar with the two-dollar Wednesday specials, this won’t be part of the story he tells. The Braves will be on TV and the beer will be flowing, and he’ll mention how quickly I bounced back, how proud he is that I walk with that “Martin toughness” bred from the coal mines and fried bologna sandwiches of West Virginia.

“Close your eyes,” he says as the shampoo streams down my face, and in that moment, though I’m still half-dazed from the scalpel that will leave a four-inch scar on my abdomen, I feel, for the first time, my father’s gentleness, how he cleanses me as if washing something dirty and hidden and deep within himself, something he won’t ever speak of, though he’ll see it, years later, when he watches me rinse my baby daughter in a toy-lined tub, standing silent over my shoulder, smiling as the dirty water rises higher, touching us both.

He turns off the water and wraps a towel around my shriveled torso. “Be careful,” he says, leading me like a foal back to my hospital gown. In a few minutes, the nurse will return to reinsert my IV, but for now, it’s just me and my father in a room we won’t ever acknowledge after another week.

“Think the Braves are on TV,” he says, before flipping through the channels. I nod and lie back, listening to someone being rolled down the hall on a gurney. My father finds the game—Braves vs. Mets, bottom of the third—and watches, though I can tell his mind is elsewhere. Still staring at the TV, he drops a towel at his feet, wipes dry the trail of water leading, like a lanky runner off third, from my body to the shower.

___

Josh Martin is an English teacher in Alpharetta, Georgia. The winner of the 2023 Pinch Literary Award in Poetry, as well as the 2024 MacGuffin Poetry Prize, his poetry and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Rattle, The Bitter Southerner, Los Angeles Review, South Carolina Review, The Pinch, Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. His first book, Earth of Inedible Things, won the 2022 Jacar Press Book Award.

Artwork by Michael Todd Cohen