By Charles Rammelkamp

Your older brother Gary knew it was odd, too, but he pretended that nothing was out of the ordinary.  This was the clue, actually, Gary pretending to be absorbed in the sports page.  Who’d won, who’d lost.

Later, when the man left, you noticed his scuffed shoes and the way his belt was too long, circling around the right side of his waist a second time, the end waving around like a loose antenna.  Standing at the door with your father, sharp in his lawyer duds, he seemed diminished somehow, but you knew that in his own world this guy with the smudged eyeglasses and clip-on tie wielded his authority like a cop his billy club.

“Oh God,” your father sighed when he closed the door, but he only rolled his eyes when you looked the implicit question at him.  “These school administrators,” he muttered, dismissing it all, but knowing some sort of explanation was required.

Later, when your sister Sharon came home, Gary avoided looking at her, and only when you heard her shrill voice in a distant room and the soft, reassuring mutter of your father’s next to it, like two cups together on a shelf in a closed cupboard, did you realize you thought your father was still in the dining room, still talking, maybe to the invisible ghost of the man with the clip-on tie.  There were secrets too big and too adult for you, and that man with the clip-on tie was not somebody you wanted to know, ever.

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Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.