Free Dispatch by Bentley Little

red, the way it used to be when he was drinking, and there was an ugly belligerence in his expression that usually came out only after a hearty consumption of alcohol. But the table was empty of both bottles and cans, and the only thing in front of him was an open Bible.
    I shook my head, hoping that would be answer enough to his question, and tried to slip peacefully by, heading toward my bedroom.
    "Where do you think you're going?"
    "I'm tired," I said.
    "Then what were you smiling at?"
    "Nothing. I was just thinking of a joke."
    "What joke?"
    If he'd been drunk, I would have been out of there by now. He would not have been able to sustain this line of questioning. As it was, I might be there for hours. "Where's Mom?" I asked, trying to change the subject.
    "Who cares?" he said.
    She walked in from the living room at precisely that second, and though she couldn't have heard my question, she heard his answer and deduced backward with that almost supernatural sense of familial logic that mothers possessed. "Get out of my kitchen," she said flatly. Her words were directed at him, but I used the opportunity to escape and hurried down the hallway to my bedroom.
    I locked the door behind me, something I'd been doing more and more often. I looked over at my typewriter. I could get my old man fired, I thought. The idea was tempting. My dad had been a ruthless bastard to me for as long as I could remember, and if he hadn't been the family's sole support, if I hadn't needed his money to survive, I would have sat down at that second, written and sent out a letter to Automated Interface and gotten his ass terminated.
    Just the thought of squealing on him for some imaginary transgression, getting him hauled before his boss and humiliated, made me feel happy, made me feel good.
    My parents went out for dinner that night, a rare occurrence that Tom immediately took advantage of by escaping to hang with his white-trash friends. In his hands was a bong. "You better not say a word!" he warned me as he bailed.
    "I don't care what you do," I told him. Tom was a loser. He'd graduated from high school last year but still lived at home because all he had was a part-time job at Builder's Emporium. I think he took one or two classes at Acacia Community College, but he wasn't serious about school, wasn't serious about work and was going nowhere fast. Excellent athlete or not, he hadn't amounted to much, and it did my heart good to hear my parents start in on him with their weekly diatribe, telling him that he'd better shape up or ship out, and as long as he lived under their roof he had to abide by their rules.
    On second thought, I decided that I would tell them about Tom and his bong.
    I had the house and the evening to myself. I was still thinking about that letter, and for fun, I opened my notebook and started writing a complaint to my dad's boss, pretending to be an anonymous coworker who caught him drinking in the bathroom on his break, and harassing an unwilling underage girl in the parking lot, and—
    The phone rang.
    I jumped, quickly crumpling up my paper. I tossed it into the trash as the phone rang again. I was the only one home, so I hurried out to the living room and picked it up. "Hello?"
    "Good afternoon, sir. Are you the man of the house?"
    It was someone trying to sell something.
    "My balls are on fire!" I yelled, and then slammed down the phone.
    I started laughing. I felt strangely invigorated by my exchange with the telemarketer. There was about it the same sort of anonymous power that came with letter writing, although I was reacting instead of acting. I was suddenly in the mood to really write that complaint about my dad, and I sat down and wrote a five-page, hugely detailed letter, filled with every criticism and accusation I could come up with, given my imprecise knowledge of his job. I seriously considered sending it off, but then I saw the movement of headlights through the drapes, and I tore up the pages and flushed them