My childhood was the art of of a soul annealed in the heat of a father’s cold disdain inside a house surrounded by forsythia and a rotting picket fence. I only tell you this so that you can understand why crabcake make me queasy.

My little brother stood up in his highchair, his mouth frothing with the insanity of his toddlerage.

“Pa, why can’t ya get the little louse to stop, I’m tryin’ to eat my crab cakes. Gawd!” I said.

He glanced at me, and then at the mercury that read something over 90 degrees. He sighed, then I felt the walllop of his rough hand slam against the side of my head.

Hours, days, months working with chisels and sander sand others implements of construction had left him strong. He had smoothed and bevelled and built a multitude of beautiful things for anyone but us. Here, he only put together pain and set up hurt.

At work he was cool and sturdy – a hammer, a screw driver, a tool to make something from lots of bits of almost nothing. At home, he was icepick.

After dinner, almost every night, I dreamt of slamming his head into stone walls. Of dressing as a night and wielding a morningstar. It’s impossible to love a cold bastard breeze, particularly when you know somewhere out there is a zephyr, warming lush. Singing summer into some maybe less deserving family.

“Get to bed, you little prick,” he said into my still-ringing ears.

I don’t remember much of anything else really. Just a doodle of a cat on a napkin. I think he did it. I’m not sure. It was beautiful. Everything else drifted away into the night. It was me in a quixotic search for the connection between his cruelty and this cat.

“G’night Pa,” I said over my screaming brother.

Ma nudged him, “G’night kiddo,” he let out a long sad breath.

I went and brushed my teeth with the thin excuse for paste – store brand Colgate or something like that.

I could hear my mother and father arguing about money, she called him god damned niggardly and a fucking miser. and then I heard his hand across her face.

I started down the stairs, I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I wasn’t thinking. My head was still fuzzy from the impact. I don’t know. I just started down the first step and paused, when the riposte of her words stopped.

He was crying.

It was a sound like drill in a dentist’s office going through me, I wanted to scream. I wanted to run.

Pa got up from the table, walked to the sink and started to wash his face.

My little brother was slathering food all over himself, and no one seemed to notice.

“Jesus, Irene,” and spat out, at my mother like she was a spitoon, “I love that kid, but he don’t know respect. He dont’ appreciate a damned thing.”

“Jesus, Irene,” like a record he skipped, “I love that kid.”

I slipped back up the stair toward my room to fortify myself against another bleak tomorrow.

Then I laid on my bed as the last rays of sun came rosy through my window. I listened to a mosquito buzz around my head until my mother screamed one last time before the lights went out.