Dialog: Raising Daughters

photo by ifdefelseif.

“When did you come home last night?” he asked.

“I don’t know exactly. Around midnight, maybe?” she replied.

“Who were you out with?”

“James. We went to the Orpheum and saw a show, and afterward drove down to Willow Grove and parked by the pond.”

“I didn’t want that much detail, but thanks for stopping there.”

“You asked.”

“I asked who you went out with, not where you went, or where you parked, or what you talked about, or anything else, for that matter.”

“We didn’t do much talking.”

“See, there. Don’t tell me that. I don’t want to know.”

“You intimated.”

“I did nothing more than provide an example of what I don’t want to hear.”

“Whatever.”

“Intimated. That’s a good word. When did you learn to use words like that?”

“From James.”

“He sounds like a pretty smart boy.”

“He’s thirty-seven.”

Narrative: Boys Will Be Boys

photo by Haeretik.

Stay here. Don’t move. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I just have to go find the deputy. He’s out back looking for bodies. See his flashlight bobbing on the grass? Why did you do it? You had so much going for you? Don’t answer that. I already know what drives a man to kill. But my own son? My own boy? Didn’t I raise you right? Didn’t I take you fishing? I paid for that pansy summer camp when you were twelve. Lots of good it did. I knew you were going to do something, one day. I knew you were going to go too far. Sit down. Didn’t I tell you to sit down? I’ll go out back. I’ll take care of the deputy. Tired of cleaning up your shit, I can tell you that. I’ve been cleaning up after you all your life and it’s why you continue to make such a mess of things. What are you going to do when I’m not around to clean up your mess? When I get back here I want to see you cleaned up. Get a duffle bag. Pack enough for a week on the road. No more. No less. Now you can get up. Go on. Didn’t I tell you to get up? Don’t start crying now. Did I teach you to cry? You made choices, and now you have to live with them. You’re one thing or another, but not both at once. You have to decide. Are you a man, or are you a baby? Are you my boy? Or are you a little girl? I didn’t raise you to be a girl, so go on now. Boys will be boys. We’ll get this cleaned up in a just a second. Stay in the house. I got to go find that deputy.

Chloe Jean: Siren of the Skies

His family lived on a farm briefly when he was a kid, back when his accountant father and architect mother decided to abandon the New York City bedrock for the more tender bed of soil abundant in the Midwest. It was there that he spotted his first love, Chloe Jean, cutting a swath across the sky over their crops. The young woman crop dusted all of the properties in Jefferson County since her father had developed glaucoma when she was sixteen. Chloe Jean. Her name was on the lips of every man watching her dip and weave over the fields, misting a cloud of insecticide over the waiting plants. She was pretty, that particular kind of wholesome, healthy, white teeth pretty that farm country tends to breed. The town believed the only reason she was still unmarried was that she spent more time in the sky than on the ground, and nobody could catch her.

Chloe Jean. Even years later, just saying her name conjured the image of the young beauty buzzing low overhead, summer dress and scarf trailing in the wind. When he was thirteen, how many nights did he fantasize about sneaking off with her, taking to the skies, a stowaway in the cockpit between her thighs? He rode his bike to the landing strip at her father’s farm and hid away at the side of the hangar to watch her climb in or out of the cockpit, just in hope of catching a glimpse of leg or swelling breast beneath her summer dress. She was always smiling when she climbed in or out of the plane, the same kind of smile when a woman gazed into the eyes of a man she loved, but for Chloe Jean, it was reserved only for her plane.

He was in chemistry class when everyone heard the fire trucks and crowded by the window. A thin trail of black smoke curled into the sky over Peterson’s farm. Chloe Jean, the first love of his life, crashed and burned in a bean field. Investigators later determined that a tree limb at the border of the field had clipped her wing. For years afterward, boys from town kept a shrine in her memory at the trunk of the massive oak. He considered, several times, hanging himself from one of its limbs. He still feels, unreasonably, somehow less a man for not having done it.