the king's madness

i no longer have dreams of my father.

he was a king, alright. he was a wildly mad king, like a stray coyote barking down suburban streets at lunchtime, never quite satisfied with pack life. he was a king of one, and his kingdom waxed and waned with his madness. his reign was confined to the domestic realm in my little princess eyes, confined to the little asphalt paradises we lived in back then. in them, he was king of the kitchen, slicing and dicing with the swiftness of the teenage line cook he once was as a boy. and he was king of the amateur opera house, mastering his falsetto on the imaginary stage he conjured up daily while dancing briskly through the hallways of our houses. he was king of the shirtless barbecue, filling cheap paper plates with royal feasts prepared on saturday afternoons, the canyon waiting quietly below. he was king of the stately nap, his snores rumbling across the cathedral ceilings of the foyer like burros meandering across the desert—with a languid sense of purpose, by instinct. california was his dream, a place he thought he might conquer. californian summers never quite seemed to end then.

when summer gave way to fall and california gave way to massachusetts, he used to haunt my days, a crazy cursed look in his eye, pinned right to his pupils, like some indelible mark jabbed there by a force he had let take him over—some coup d’état that emerged from the inside. "et tu, geno?" it whispered in his ear. a faith had been lost. gone was the great leader of my childhood, replaced with a broken boy-king, unfit for ruling anything.