My Daddy by Becca, Age 9
BY COPPER SMITH I OCTOBER 19, 2008
My daddy is nice. He has big shoulders and he lets me crawl on them but not that much now because I'm a little bigger than I was when I was little. Sometimes he gets to go to places different than the place where we live and he brings back things for me like t-shirts and shoes even though the shoes are usually too small. Last week he went somewhere where it was hot and he brought me this big furry scorpion that looks just like a scorpion except that it's furry and big. I love my daddy.
***
James could make a new start in Arizona. He was no longer that man who had held his wife down by the hair and pummeled her into a frightened silence. Gone now was the brute whose angry wail had leaked loudly into the hallway where his children would cower and peek through the cracks of their fingers. That man had been washed anew with the blood of Jesus. He was, in every sense except the corporeal, no more.
It was everywhere, this sweet, welcoming silence. It was in his new bride's smile that glowed beneath her cautiously widened eyes, just escaping the shadow cast by the comically broad brim of her (novelty?) cowboy hat. It was in the way his new neighbors asked him if he'd eaten yet, reminding him of his childhood in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Even the endless stretch of sun-punished earth seemed to lay itself open for him and only him.
He kneeled before it all, ignoring his wife's frenzied cry. Whatever it was could wait.
His blessed bounty lay before him as ample evidence of the Lord's goodness and demanded of James the kind of reverence that he himself once sought from those in his tortured midst. His new home, outlined by the setting sun, danced in spastic waves, like a mirage that mocked him.
And then night fell. Forever.
***
My daddy shoots people. He shoots them in the face and the neck and the shoulders and the arms but mostly in the chest. He shoots them because they didn't pay back money they should have paid back or they hurt somebody or they took something that wasnt there's. But mostly he shoots people because people pay him to. That's what my daddy does. He shoots people but I love him. He's my daddy.
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