Thu, 19 May 2005

braeth
His father’s cabin was not really a cabin at all, it was a shack built from scrapwood and furniture he pulled off curbsides at five am. The spaces between the two by fours were filled with crumpled copies of Look Magazine and garbage sacks, no windows, a door pulled off a grocery store someone torched for insurance money. His father would drive up there twice a year, when the attacks got bad, and wait out his jitters on weeks of campfire popcorn and five o’clock vodka. One winter he quit his job, cancelled all his utilities, told his neighbors he was moving to the shack, they had never seen it, they figured it was some kinda fishing bungalow off the Mississippi. By the time Jack, the youngest son, the one the old man still talked to, by the time he got word it had been a month, and so Jack and the rest of the boys went up expecting to find his emaciated corpse frozen to the ground. Instead they found that the old man had taken a bride of some ratty looking checkout clerk and moved into her parents basement after burning the shack to the ground. Last he heard his father was still there, spending what he always assumed would be his inheritance paying rent to his parents, three and five years younger, just happy their daughter finally settled down with a good man.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #