KIRK’S NEWSROOM My father sent me twice a day, he’d come home tired from work, melt onto the mattress, flat enough that sometimes I’d climb on the bed to make sure he was really there That it wasn’t just a voice I was imagining, delivering me into the arms of a rat, in the guise of a thin man with bloodshot eyes and greasy matted hair, who’d lean over the deli counter and hand me a pound of American cheese, thinly sliced and a pack of cigarettes. Kirk, proud owner of ‘Kirk’s Newsroom’, whose gift of egg nog for my family lie dead on the sidewalk, stepped on and frozen. Dirty as snow. Finally I started hiding from my father just so I wouldn’t have to go across the street and buy him his hard pack of Kools. In the cubby hole behind my bed, ears pressed against the wall I’d make pretend the sounds I heard were angels, muffled. j. pastiloff |
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