I chew the collars of my shirts until they’re ragged as my fingernails. This drives my mother crazier than when I used to chew my hair, which tasted like peppermint despite the fact that I did not use peppermint shampoo.
It begins in the dark of day. It begins with the turn of a key, a familiar road. The commute, the commute of years, begins without fanfare, without manifesto.
“Bobby, it’s me. We hear that you… ran into some difficulty yesterday.” A bit of an understatement, considering he collapsed on the trail and was carried out by a rescue team, but it’s what comes from my mouth.
We’re in the forest looking for acorn shells, because they make good bathtubs for the fairies. I have only one daughter, and she thinks a pinecone would be a good hiding place – fairies like to play hide-and-seek.
I know as well as anyone the ridiculous, bread and circuses fascination America has with sports but sometimes I just get sucked into its narrative, just like people do with afternoon soaps, teenage vampires, or reality “talent” shows.
I wake up sweating and lie there as the adrenaline ebbs, running through what I would take, if I had to leave. The mental cataloging starts: what I have lost already; what I have yet to lose; an inventory of what matters.
The first sound is the foot sound, the break sound, the cracking crunch that hikers know… It is a stubborn, short sound, underneath your boots. Ka-krack, krunch, it says. It says little else.
The bat is so itty-bitty-teeny-tiny her body embraces only half my thumb, to which she clings during our first moments. Clings to with eyes shut: either because she naturally re-immersed herself in torpor, or from exhaustion.
I never knew what to say when people asked me what my father did for a living. Sometimes I joked, “He’s involved with high-risk investments.” — “Stocks? Bonds?” — “More like ponies and dice.”
He held it up and out, away from his body and along his arm. He used it to point at us sitting there in front of him. Over the curved edge, he gathered us in his sights.