Sick and Tragic Bastard Son by Rowan Massey

A young version of Mom was smiling for real and leaning into his shoulder. It was the smile you put on when somebody shoves a camera in your face and orders you to say cheese. I didn’t look like my mom much either, so how was that possible? The man in the photo was smiling, but didn’t look particularly happy. “I don’t look like him,” I said, surprised. The way I saw it, the only thing in my future was a bunch of endings. Before sitting me down at the table, she’d told me I might need his help to get my “start”. I didn’t have any plans and didn’t want to make them. She seemed to be pretending I’d do college even though my grades weren’t promising. I knew I was in for a talk about my impending adulthood. She’d been muttering for a handful of months about college. We always celebrated both events on Christmas since the dates were only four days apart. But it was Christmas, which also functioned as my eighteenth birthday. We communicated with nods and grunts, yes’s and no’s, notes on the fridge, and-if we felt affectionate-tentative pats on the shoulder. Mom and I weren’t the sit-down-and-talk types. All I could do was keep staring until the slow waves of distortion dissipated. I couldn’t make my brain comprehend that I was looking at my biological father. Sometimes that happens because my brain is wacky, especially when I’m emotional. At first, I was looking at nothing but melted shapes and colors. She nervously arranged it so that it lay perfectly straight, facing me.

The first photo was chosen and placed on the table. Her gray eyes, which matched mine, slid out of eye contact.

We observed each other with awkward anticipation. There was still a wafting cigarette smell around her like a bad aura. In the roughened texture of the wood grain under my fingertips, decades of food had become hairline cracks full of sticky grime. Her stubby fingers held them so that I couldn’t see the images. I imagined her with a hairy mole and a scarf over her head, about to lay them out on our old kitchen table to tell me all about my past. MOM HELD THE photos to her chest like tarot cards. “In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.”

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Sick and Tragic Bastard Son by Rowan Massey