A snowflake interrupts my memory. My face is pressed against the glass, between the blinds that come down like bars on the back door of me and my mom’s house. I sigh, exhale onto the glass, watch it get foggy, and draw a melancholy face on it. Its mouth is flat and closed; the eyes look downward. I don’t know what to do.

       I think how I’d like to believe my dad is just hiding from me, like Bigfoot, somewhere on a mountain or something. I’d like to think that Bigfoots are just a bunch of hairy-armed dads who ran away from home. I’d jump right out the door without a coat or boots or anything if I got the slightest indication that he’d gone to live as a Bigfoot in the woods of Washington, eating coyotes and living in caves and hiding from the public, because there was a group meeting of Bigfoots and they decided democratically that if substantial proof of their existence ever got out, the whole world would tumble out of its gravitational comfort zone and be forced to look way harder at all the things they thought they knew.

       No one could afford to be truly honest

       My thoughts were so loud I failed to notice my mother boom through the front door, throw off her shoes, and topple like a pile of my dad’s clothes onto the couch.

       I say no words and walk into the kitchen, put water and salt in a pan and cut up some potatoes. The energy my mom relies on is from some source unknown, some hole in the ground somewhere, the most secret of secrets, and tonight it fails her. Brushing my hair behind my ears I decide to focus on smaller things.

       I want to make potatoes right

      Whatever ‘right’ means. Tonight I would give special attention to that and forget I had ever done anything else before this or that I should have anything to do that matters even a little bit after this.


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