By Fred D. White

Mom executed Dad with scissors after he left us: snip, snip. Sometimes just his head, sometimes his torso as well, leaving only a slash of sinewy leg pressed against her sunscreen-gleaming thigh. Snip. Several of the snapshots leave only his ring-festooned hand clutching her bare shoulder on some beach when I must have been five or six, my memory of those days fading away. Here is one with them together in front of a church; but the snipped pic shows only Mom in a floral dress standing beside a pant leg and strip of blazer-covered arm. I’ve been trying, sixty or so years later, laden with Mom’s personal effects, including this shoebox filled with crinkled and mutilated photos, to recall Dad’s face. I can’t find it anywhere in this mishmash, Mom having been fiercely efficient in her guillotining. Snip. Snip. What compels me to conjure up his face after all these years? Is he even still alive? Only since Mom’s death a few months ago have I begun to bleed out memories of him, faded as they are. He was (is?) stocky, thick necked, with bulging biceps, wavy black hair. I cannot recall his face. It’s as if Mom has snipped it from my memory. But wait—I do recall his mouth, the way it twisted and curled during his many outbursts, exposing fearsome, saber-like teeth.

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Fred White’s fiction has appeared in Drunk Monkeys, Fictive Dream, The Nonconformist, and most recently in The Thieving Magpie. He lives in Folsom CA.