Hopefully Painless

“sconce” by romana klee

TOMASELLI AWARD, Runner-up

FICTION

by Owen Smith  

We had my father killed the other day. It had to be fit in between my appointment with Dr. Huntington, the oral hygienist, and my wife’s luncheon for the neighborhood’s local chapter of the National Society for the Preservation of Fine Sconces, but we managed to get it done which generally made us very happy and alleviated a great deal of stress.  

See, we had been discussing the possibility of having my father killed for close to a year at that point. My wife first brought it up not long after Christmas, when we were waiting in the lobby of the university auditorium before a much-anticipated performance of a Mozart selection which my friend Douglas was involved in as I believe a tenor something or other, which was how we had been able to get tickets to such an early performance, but so my wife brought up that he had recently (over the last few years) really not contributed much to the conversation at all and had instead sort of just been there. The performance was put on by the university’s Mozart society which was founded by a friend of Douglas’s father named Matthew Grant Lewis, whose name I have always found odd because it is made up of three first names.  

After I agreed that my father didn’t really contribute much to the conversation any more and that this had been a problem for several years, we went to see my ethical consultant, whose office is in one of those industrial office parks beside the freeway, and while he was talking about the procedure and using words like experimental and I believe the phrase hopefully painless I watched the cars go by and wondered where the hell it was they could all be going. At the end of the meeting I paid him and thanked him with a warm handshake and said we would have to quote unquote think about it but that it was probably either way going to end up happening, the killing of my father.  

Then there was the rather awkward task of telling my father we were having him killed. I really did not look forward to this, and neither did my wife, and to be honest we spent too much time sitting and debating what the least difficult and awkward way to approach the whole situation was, during which time we were just letting him suffer, what with him not contributing to the conversation all that much anymore over the past few years and rather just sort of being there. He lives in a nursing home and I wrote a passionate E-Mail message to its proprietor, who is a woman named Doris, asking her to please have some sort of spiritual or ethnic person explain to my father that we were having him killed, because that sort of person knows much more about how to explain things like that to somebody than my wife or myself.  

So the date was set, a Tuesday at noon and fifteen, which left enough time for me to drive across town from Dr. Huntington’s office and would leave enough time afterwards for my wife and I to arrive home to prepare for the National Society for the Preservation of Fine Sconces luncheon. I was a little annoyed, I must admit, when I asked my ethical consultant what our role in the killing would be and he told me it was really just a formal thing, that there would be a notary and my wife and I would just have to co-sign that we were having my father killed, that the actual killing took place in another room and we didn’t really have to be present for it at all if we didn’t want to. My ethical consultant told me some people like to be present when their fathers are killed, which he does not personally understand at all, and I said that I agree, I mean for God’s sake we have a luncheon to get to and who knows what people would say if we were late. Who knows.