Ken Sparling - Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall

When the fat boy got home, he dumped all his popsicle sticks on the table in the living room. He went and got a tube of white glue and started gluing. His parents were upstairs in their bedroom, asleep. When they came down, they found their tubby son asleep on the couch with his pants off. Nearby, a bunch of popsicle sticks were glued together to form what looked like an abandoned shack in the Ozark Mountains.

The tubby boy took the shack in for show-and-tell at school. Nobody liked him anyway. Girls stuck their finger in their throat when they saw him coming. He took his shack up to the front of the class and set it on the teacher’s desk. He stood there at the front of the class, grinning.

I AMhaving these thoughts about what the waitress is maybe thinking about all these crumpled napkins on the table, and all these little ketchup packets torn open with the little corners torn off and sitting in little clusters in various places on the table, leaking. I keep asking the waitress for more of these little packets of ketchup. The waitress keeps bringing me more coffee and I keep opening the little packets of cream, trying to see where I can put these little packets of cream on the table once they are empty. Sammy keeps saying, “I’m Sammy. I’m two.” Every time the waitress comes to our table, she smiles and gives me more coffee. I am holding on to one of these little packets of cream, which is empty now because I have put the cream into my coffee, and I am trying to see some place on the table where I can put the little packet down where the waitress will not come by and look at the table and say to herself, “Oh my god!” Sammy is dipping his sleeve in the ketchup and I am trying to wipe the ketchup off with napkins and pretty soon the napkins are all crumpled up and lying on the table, covered in ketchup, and I am getting napkins off of other tables where no one is sitting and there are so many napkins and they all have ketchup all over them and I am trying to think where to put this empty packet of cream.

~

Whenever Sammy slept, I would go outside quick, before he woke up. I felt that terrible power that flies out of you as soon as it gathers. Sammy liked to get a stick and smash it into the bushes in front of the house. We live in a town house, so we share the front bushes with the people who live next door. He felt love for his children. We would know it, that it was enough for people in this world to feel love for their children and that this would be enough. I would tell Sammy to stop smashing the bushes and he would stop. He would start smashing the tree out front, which we also share, and the bark would come showering off. You didn’t have to do anything. Consequently, I came to believe there wasn’t any such thing as love. I said, “Don’t you want to keep things nice?” Secretly, I was glad he was doing it. I thought that love was a thing that could exist only beyond itself, in the moments that generate it, and that the moments that generate love themselves obliterate it.

~

I was trying to write a poem. It was going to be about everything. Just a simple description of everything in my life. Some of the things I have been watching on TV, for instance.

I have to go to work now.

~

Jane was alone, washing the dishes, and she turned around and looked at me.

“Everyone is gone,” she said. “They left me to do the dishes.”

“I’m going home,” I said.

THEY GAVEher this job where she carried the wooden A-frame up the wheelchair ramp and set it in front of the theater entrance. Then she went back down the ramp and got the sign and carried it up the ramp and put it on the A-frame. There was a guy at the top of the ramp who kept looking at her. He kept looking at her tits. She never said anything to him.

I HATEthese bastards. You know? Can you hear this? Listen. Look at this. You see that space there? That’s the guy’s mouth. The guy in the painting, on the bridge, with the mouth. Do you know that one? I use that same mouth, the “o” mouth, on the ghosts I hang in the front tree for Sammy on Halloween.

~

First, Tutti tells me I should take the eggs out of the pot and put them in a bowl.

Then she tells me I should put the eggs in the fridge.

Then she starts telling me about some fat kid she knows who she says drinks too much pop.

I tell her to quit telling me how to make egg salad sandwiches.

I tell her, “Leave me alone. I can make egg salad sandwiches myself.”

“I don’t want mayonnaise,” Tutti says. “I want Miracle Whip.”

I get the Miracle Whip out of the fridge. I get a fork and stick it in the middle of the Miracle Whip.

~

I decided to go over and see this woman. I wanted to see how she lived. I wanted to see what she ate for breakfast.

I decided to go over right away. I walked.

On the way over I saw signs. I looked in the trees and in the bushes, in the clouds, in my shoelaces. I saw a sign in a section of sidewalk on Walnut Grove Boulevard.

~

In the morning, he comes down the stairs and he wants me to play with him. He says, “Can we play, Daddy?”

I tell him I have to go to work.

He tries to think of ways to make me stay and play with him. He says, “Just a tiny bit.”

I tell him I have to have my breakfast and then I have to go to work.

But I shouldn’t have my breakfast, should I? Why should I have my breakfast? On the day I die, when I look back on this, and I remember choosing breakfast over playing with Sammy, how is this going to make me feel?

~

God was sitting in a movie theater. It was the early show. The guy sitting next to God was eating popcorn.

~

My theory was it was the O-ring which had gone, so I took apart the cartridge. The O-ring looked fine. But you can never tell with an O-ring. Sometimes they will look fine, but then there is a tiny fissure in them which will render them useless. O-rings cost ninety-nine cents for a package of two.

That night I dreamed I was ninety-three years old and the woman at the desk next to mine at work was calling the paramedics.

PETRA, WHOworks with me supervising the part-timers, likes to tell me stories about how she and her husband bought this old house in the country and fixed it up. I like to sit and listen to these stories, because Petra really knows how to tell them. Petra calls them decorating stories, because they are all about how she and her husband are decorating their house.

One day Petra has this idea where the part-timers will sign out their elevator keys in pencil. You have to have an elevator key to get on the elevator here. If the part-timers sign out their elevator keys in pencil, we can erase the slips of paper they sign them out on and then use them again. Petra wants to help the environment.

At the part-timers’ meeting we tell all the part-timers we want them using pencil to sign the little slips of paper they sign to get their keys out, and when they turn their keys back in, they should give the slips of paper back to us and we will erase them. We tell them we are doing this for the environment.

I think this is an idea you could only get from Petra. This is what I like about this idea. I have no desire to erase the little slips of paper.

But then one of the managers says she doesn’t like the idea. She says she wants the kids to sign their keys out in pen because she thinks pen will foster a sense of responsibility in the kids. At the next part-timers’ meeting, we tell the kids to go back to signing the little slips of paper in pen.

~

Tutti gives me a piece of paper which lists all the food groups on it. We are sitting up in bed. Tutti writes down all the food groups and then draws a bunch of little squares beside each of the food groups. She draws the squares fast, and then hands the piece of paper to me.