Member-only story
FICTION
Quincy Michael (Part I)
All narrative, no action
My father will tell you that he and my mother, who I call Ma, love each other dearly. But watch closely and you’ll see it all comes off as some sort of calamitous arrangement gone wrong.
Nevertheless, when I was twelve, they accused me of disrupting the “entire house.” I remember the day it was said, a Tuesday.
It was the first time I saw my father squeeze my mother’s ass. Wearing only boxers and a V-neck t-shirt with aggressive pit stains, hunched forward as if dragging a wheel barrel of bricks, he jerked his head to the side, spread his legs wide, and thrust his right arm forward in perfect form, like the top scorer in Bob Fernwick’s Amateur Bowling league.
With his hairy-knuckled, pudgy hand, he grabbed more backside than I could bear to stomach. “Ooohh, munaja lou,” he howled. As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t the one disrupting the household.
“Oh, stop it” was always my mother’s reaction. She has this way about her where you’re convinced she could’ve been a suburban Joan of Arc: such emotional depth, idealism, and a concern for the common good if not old-fashioned, relentless intolerance of whatever is morally wrong in the world.
