Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall by Ken Sparling Page A

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 AM having 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.

T HEY GAVE her 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 HATE these 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,”