And this is the way my mind has tangled...

by Drew McNaughton

And this is the way my mind has tangled the memory of my mother.

She arrives two days after Christmas, five years after my birth, their divorce, bearing gifts. She is with a man who I can only remember as small and oily and dark, like a dirty wrench, but quick. He expresses himself in rapid jerking motions and expletives, tells my father that my mother will take his four children from him. My father is dangerously silent.
My mother arrives a week before Christmas with a man like a twitching slick wet rodent and he bops around on his heels reminding my father that he had entered into a verbal agreement allowing this man and our mother to take all four of us to the circus, but it is winter. And my father reminds the man that there is no circus. Turns to us, says, There is no circus.
My father sits alone in the dark living room and does not hear me creeping toward him in my slippered pajamas. It is late, the same night of my mother’s visit. It was the night my father punched the skinny bouncing man who tried to grab us, and sent the man into a catatonic clump at the base of the stairs. And because my father does not hear me, his youngest son, creeping like a secret, I stop and sit quietly to watch him ponder the silver pistol he holds on his lap to protect us from the man who’d threatened his return. But I am tired, and though I try to stay awake until my father falls asleep, to see what this would look like, to sneak closer to the gun, though I fight to keep my eyes open, he was sitting in the chair, frozen, when my memory of the night fades.

Drew McNaughton lives in Missoula, MT. He can eat a soft taco in one bite. His fiction has been described by Kevin Canty, author of A Stranger in This World, Into the Great Wide Open, Nine Below Zero and Honeymoon, as “I don’t know, toss it out there… see what they say.” He keeps a machete in a chunk of wood outside his cinder block home for no reason, really. There’s deer that come and blink at the long blade of the thing, wondering.