I wanted to make him happy, so I told him I’d barbecue. While he was at school, I went and bought pig meat forced into tubes and a bag of charcoal and I bought four patties of beef flesh ground and patted down into discs. I lit a fire and laid these things on it until the discs of beef flesh darkened and contracted, until the entubed pig meat blistered and began to blacken
and then I took all this off the fire and called my son down from where he was holding his eyes on a screen watching videos conceived and directed by a man whose voice pipes in at the end to hammer home his morals, to heavy hand them in case anyone’s missed the message. He says, “So you see…” and you wait for it, it’s in that sentence, the whole point of what you’ve just seen. The universal takeaway. They run one after the next, these videos, and my son sits and watches them, docile and mostly accepting of the reel, whatever comes next, whatever the message the voice at the end will ask him to accept.
We ate everything: he did, and I did, too. I was hungry, and the bread was soft, and I remembered times I’ve eaten those things, looked forward to eating things like those. We finished quickly. He ate fast, in huge, uncomfortable looking bites, he’d been hungry, and while we ate I ignored my phone pinging texts at me I knew was text thread of our neighbors’ grievances about how the playground on our corner is out of control now, preteens unsupervised and cursing, with nowhere to go now that school’s out. I’ve heard
that when a pig is afraid it screams like a human. I’ve heard cows have distinct adolescences, moody and prone to actions which might seem rash, nonsensical. My son sat and chewed, his back facing me, looking out into our yard, up into the trees beyond it. He was quiet and I was quiet, too. I wanted to make him happy.
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