What We Never Threw

The funeral home smelled of lavender and stale regret. David stood at the back, watching strangers shake his stepmother's hand. His father hadn't spoken to him in three years—not since David came out, not since the night his father called him "my son who chooses to be difficult."

The backyard, David thought. That's where it started. Summer 1998, the year Dad installed the above-ground pool. David was twelve, desperate for his father's attention. Dad had promised: "Soon as the pool's ready, we'll get goldfish. Real ones, for the garden pond I'm building next to it."

But the pond never materialized. Instead, Dad coached Mark's baseball team—the neighbor's son, the one who called David "faggot" in seventh grade. Every afternoon, David watched through the kitchen window: Dad in his faded Giants cap, tossing perfect pitches to the boy who'd eventually break David's nose in the locker room.

"I'll teach you to catch," Dad told David once, then never followed through. Instead, David practiced alone against the garage wall, the baseball hitting aluminum siding with hollow thuds.

The pool sat unused, its water turning green. No goldfish. No pond. Just chlorine and mosquito larvae.

Now, at the funeral, David approached the casket. His father looked smaller in death. The man who'd loomed so large in David's nightmares, whose silence had cut deeper than any slur, was finally quiet.

"I learned to catch," David whispered. "Not baseball. Something harder."

He placed a small plastic bag on his father's chest. Inside: two goldfish, swimming in funeral home water from the bathroom sink.

"Your pond," he said.

Outside, under a gray sky, David walked to his car. His phone buzzed—Tom, his fiancé, asking if he was okay. David watched a puddle reflect the funeral home's neon sign, the water rippling with something that looked almost like hope. For the first time in three years, he didn't feel like he was drowning.

He got in the car, started the engine, and drove toward a life where someone finally knew how to love him.