My father sits outside in a rental car, just as he has done for the past week. He's got a near empty bottle of cheap Scotch and a fully loaded gun he swiped from his brother-in-law. He's trying to figure out if he's killed me yet.
He's wanted to since I first emerged from my mother's birth-canal. Some random impulse, a precognitive message from his final moments perhaps, told him to destroy me as if I were the son-of-Satan himself.
But it was him that was the hellspawn, Christ gone wrong, another in a long bloodline of failed messiahs. God-like vision blurred by alcohol induced blackouts, intentional gaps in information collected from space...or the future, the End of Days, rays sent to eradicate his mind.
Guilt. As it drives men mad, so it drove him right up to New York and parked him right outside my door. Paralyzed and dazed, unable to remove neither himself nor the vehicle. He would sometimes circle the block, getting so far as the BQE, but never taking the exit. He kept coming back.
To the gun. In hand, ready to fire. Or had it been fired already? Were those siren wails the oncoming justice system coming to persecute him for...what was the word for killing your own son in cold blood? Surely there was something more intimate than regular old homicide.
Suicide, fratercide, patricide, genocide. All these fancy words for death, murder more accurately. A nice division of various dissections of taking another's life.
You hope your son figures it out, does grander things than you, but when he does, when he makes it look easy, when he gets all the love and attention that I never got, well goddammit he's got to be put in his place, he needs to be taken down. Shit, that show-off deserves a bullet or six.
And so the battle raged down in the street below, my father caught in a quantum state of murderous intent, which would stall him until I could figure out what to do with him. Can a child really kill his father?
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