Flash Frog

Mama sings along with Aretha on the car radio—R-E-S-P-E-C-T—while my little brother, J.T., and I sit in the backseat, a pile of suitcases and J.T.’s fish tank stacked between us. We drive past the Piggly Wiggly, the laundromat, an abandoned playground where invisible ghosts…

After the right kind of storm, we would load up and drive down to the cat streets: Lion, Puma, Ocelot Avenue. Aunt Hyacinth would buy my cousins and I cherry limeades, our orders gliding across damp cement by shaken teens on roller skates. Then…

It’s our first day together since the divorce, my daughter and me, and I’m picking her up for a visit. A new kind of dad now. I don’t wake up with her in the other room. I don’t make her eggs with toast buttered…