Free The Front of the Freeway by Logan Noblin

comfortable living. And Tony’s going to take me there.
    “If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”
    —Charles Darwin
    Even as militia from the thirteen colonies prepared to resist the British offensive, the colonists sensed the weight of colonial oppression leaving their shoulders…
    The Harvard meth-head is at it again. I can hear him from the porch, hypnotizing my father from across a dark living room, filling my house in monotonous rhetoric with the dreary ghosts of the most important things that will never affect my life. There, there, he says, sit down and hold tight. The world is going by much too fast. He should be in there, my father, comfortably soaking up every mundane image, his life ending in tidy, 45-minute chunks, plus commercials, one episode at a time.
    But not today.
    The TV’s on, of course, the only light in the dark room, glowing like a mechanical sun in the shadows, painting the walls white, blue, red, white with every frantic flash of color. But my father’s not in front of it like usual—no beer, no pasta, no self-pitying monologues or dry fatherly lectures. Tonight he’s pressed to the wall in the back of the room, one hand balled to a fist at his side, the other gripping a phone against his ear, all of him demonically flashing white, blue, red, white perfectly in time with the flickering walls.
    “Twenty-four years, Andrew, and all you have to say to me is you’re sorry?” He’s shouting now, beating the back of his fist against the hard plaster wall. I can see a wide patch of blood glistening on his knuckles, swollen and deformed in the meager pulsing light, three perfectly round holes punched out of the wall next to him. “What the hell am I supposed to do? I’m going to die on this fucking beat!”
    White, blue, red, white.
    I’ve heard my father yell before, but there’s blood in his voice now, bursting with something sinister and sad and enormous. The Jack Daniels stands tall on the counter behind him, an empty glass ghost looming in the black of the kitchen, and me in the middle of it all, frozen in the tense and boiling darkness.
    “I think you know exactly what you can do with my badge, you son of a bitch!” The phone goes first, ricocheting off the refrigerator, bursting into a cloud of plastic and batteries. Then he grabs the Jack, hurling it across the room with the full force of his body. The bottle shatters against the rigid living room wall, exploding into a million crystal shards, gleaming and glinting over the slick tile floor. He paces for a second, desperately pulling his palms across his tired, sagging forehead, a groan dying in the back of his throat, and finally slumps to the floor, burying his face in his warped and bloodied hands. I hurry across the room and kneel beside him, gripping his shoulders and staring into the shadowed hollow of his covered face.
    “‘You’re right where you belong,’” he spits from behind his long, trembling fingers, still shaking with frustration. “That’s what they told me, Julian. The Lieutenant finally retired, and when I told them I deserved the job, that’s what they told me. ‘You’re right where you belong.’” I can smell the whiskey stinking from his skin, choking my nostrils and biting at my eyes. He drops his hands to his lap, tensely slapping one curled fist against the other hand, his glossy, bloodshot eyes fixed on the floor. “I followed every order, every procedure. I did everything by the book, and now they’re going to leave me behind like the fucking trash, and there’s not a thing I can do about it.” I want to tell him it’s just a job, but I know that’s a lie. It’s the foundation he built his whole miserable, orderly life on, and he’s starting to feel the cracks beneath him pinching at his feet. I roll to a seat on the floor next to him, wrapping my arms around my knees, staring into the pulsing square light blazing on