Amp'd by Ken Pisani

sure it doesn’t. Now, are you going to rack those or not?”
    No one calls bullshit like Mom. It’s completely without judgment, like an attorney summarizing inarguable statements of fact in her closing argument and leaving the opposing counsel to squirm, knowing he has nothing to counter with but transparent glibness.
    â€œLook what you just did,” I grin, scooping the balls into a perfect diamond. “You turned me from a guy just standing here to one who racked your balls. That makes you wrong about not being able to change someone’s behavior.”
    â€œIf only there was a future in bullshit, Aaron,” she says, “you’d be unstoppable.”
    She leans in and breaks, sinking the two and the eight. She circles the table, surveying her next shot and as she passes, I lean in, yearning for a pat on the head that’s not forthcoming.
    â€œChildren are inherently disappointing. As parents, we watch you disappear and be replaced all the time. That squishy pink baby who gurgled and smiled at me, her eyes trying to focus?”
    She lines up the one ball and the distant seven against the rail, and drops them both into the far corner.
    â€œGone,” she continues without judgment, “replaced by a preschooler with a lisp, and then a ten-year-old with ballerina aspirations. And both of those vanished into a teenager who alternated between aloof in front of her friends and clingy when they weren’t around.”
    She eyes the five-six-nine balls in a cluster and slams the three into them, dropping the five and leaving the nine dangling over a corner pocket like a damsel in distress.
    â€œI’ve watched every version of you and your sister disappear into adulthood, and however wonderful as human beings you might continue to become, all those other versions of you are as gone as a dead child. I won’t see them anymore.”
    I ponder the dead children Jackie and I used to be, but all Mom sees is the vulnerability of the nine ball hanging on a precipice. But the three ball, which needs to be struck first, hides behind the six. Mom has to play a deep carom off the far rail to make it work, a difficult shot even at the height of her game.
    â€œI watched you become a man with one less arm … and today he’s gone, replaced by a man with a tattoo where that arm used to be. More bullshit. And there’s some version of you in the offing that’s bound to disappoint anyone who lets him. But it’s not going to be me.”
    Instead of targeting the far rail she raises her cue stick vertically, taking careful aim straight down on the cue ball. She strikes it, squeezing it with a whirling backspin that draws it around the others and back to the three ball, kissing it into the nine, which drops into the pocket.
    â€œI thought trick shots were bullshit.”
    â€œIt seemed appropriate,” Mom replies, laying her cue stick across the table and giving me a gentle pat on my head as she passes on her way upstairs.

 
    RAMIFICATIONS
    Things remain tense over dinner, the silence so thick you could stab it with a fork—which, as is apparent from her demeanor, is exactly what Jackie would like to do to her husband. For his part, Steve is surprisingly docile, a dog who knows he did something bad even if he cannot understand why, only that at the first sign of trouble there’s a rolled-up newspaper waiting for him. Or a fork.
    â€œThey say proportionately, dinosaurs had the smallest brains of any creature,” Mom speaks up. “Imagine that. Those majestic beasts, lumbering around the jungle, enormous in stature and the most powerful beings on Earth, but barely able to think. Colossal in size and ignorance.”
    Steve sighs deeply and I swear, Jackie’s fork is poised to deliver a deathblow.
    â€œLet’s call it what it is,” Dad offers by way of clarification. “Stupid.”
    â€œHe could get gangrene, and there’s