Daddy Said He Didn’t Know I Was Allergic to Cherries

Daddy brought me to Aunt Jenny’s party.

As I was eating a piece of cake, I tasted a cherry between the layers and hurriedly spat it out. Once, I broke out in rashes after eating a cherry and nearly died, so I was deeply traumatized by that flavor even as a young child.

However, Aunt Jenny looked heartbroken. “I hid a cherry in the cake as a little surprise, just like it’s good luck to get a bay leaf in a pie. How could you be so rude, Kenny?”

Daddy did not even let me explain. He chased me out in the yard and made me stand there as punishment.

Mommy said it had been more than a hundred degrees out lately, so she told me to stay home and not go out to play.

Now I knew just how hot 104 degrees could be!

My body was all itchy, too. I was finding it hard to breathe.

I wanted to ask Daddy to forgive me, but he refused to open the door no matter how hard I knocked.

He glanced at me coldly through the floor-to-ceiling window. He was not going to let me back in.

When Mommy found me using the GPS on my smartwatch, I was sprawled on the floor, my exposed skin covered in red rashes.

Daddy was still ranting incessantly. “You spoiled the boy! He has no manners to speak of. How could he spit all over the table? Couldn’t he have at least gone to the trashcan? He was so ungrateful, too. That part of him is just like you…”

Mommy broke down, slapped Daddy across the face, and then picked me up in a mad dash to the hospital.

I watched everything unfold from my vantage point in mid-air.

I hated Daddy! He never cared about Mommy and me.

Yes. I was dead.

So this was what death felt like. Did our neighbor Old Man Cox hover like this in the air when he passed away last year?

I had not seen him last year. Did that mean my parents could not see me now?

I could see them, though.

I saw Mommy crying her heart out, waiting for the ambulance by the roadside anxiously.

I saw her beg the doctor to save me.

The doctor stared at the three flat lines on the screen and then sighed.

After that, Mommy took care of everything on her own. I saw them push “me” into a hole, and then a man gave Mommy a small box.

Mommy sat by the roadside, hugging the box and watching the cars pass in a daze. She only went home after the sun went down.

Back home, Mommy lay in bed, either weeping into her blankets or staring blankly at the ceiling.

I lay quietly next to her. I wanted to pat her gently, the way she always did when she tucked me into bed.

However… My hand phased through her body.

Mommy did not even hear my scream of shock.

She just lay there without moving. Feeling bored, I walked over to the toy blocks I had been building with her last night. We had not completed the puzzle yet.

I wanted to continue building the blocks, but my hand phased right through them. I could not pick them up at all.

I wanted to turn on the TV to watch my cartoons, but I could not do that either.

In the end, I had no choice but to go back to bed. Lying quietly next to Mommy like this was pretty nice, too.

Still, wasn’t Mommy hungry?

She never got up to cook anything.

I really missed Mommy’s fried chicken wings!

But I was dead now. Did that mean I would never get to eat them again?

On the third day after I died (I counted on my fingers), Mommy finally got out of bed.

She glanced at her phone. There were no notifications.

I was dead, and Mommy was heartbroken…. But Daddy never even called.

Were all fathers like that?

I watched Mommy take a few sheets of paper from her bedside drawers.

I recognized the words at the top. It was the divorce agreement!

Mommy had been keeping them in her drawer for a long, long time now. She always looked at them, then looked at me, and then kept them back in the drawer.

Finally, Daddy came home.

He plopped his butt on the couch angrily and then started barking. “Your son is a spoiled brat! Jenny went to all that effort to prepare such a nice surprise, but he literally spat it in her face! And he even tattled to you after I made him stand outside in time-out for a while!

“You’re not much better! That was Jenny’s house! She asked you why you came, but you completely ignored her and barged in without a word!

“You even shoved her! Can’t you talk like a human for once? Did you know she fell after you pushed her? She even cut her hand open!”

Mommy listened expressionlessly. Perhaps Daddy’s words could not hurt her anymore.

Ever since Aunt Jenny appeared in our lives, Daddy had been treating Mommy worse and worse. He kept saying mean and hurtful words to her.

I wanted to tell him, “I’m dead now, so is that enough to make it up to Aunt Jenny? Can you stop blaming Mommy now?”