Free Killing Time in Crystal City by Chris Lynch Page A

can’t leave it on the floor there for three more days or whatever until Syd gets back. Imagine the conversation? “What’s that, Kev? When did it come? Why is it still there? The mail frightened you? Get outta my house.”
    I pick it up carefully, feeling maybe a couple pounds of weight, six by eight by two inches rectangular. I read somewhere how a letter bomb one quarter this size tore the whole second story off an auto body shop.
    I turn it over.
    It’s addressed to me .
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    Letter bomb, indeed.
    So, Dad knows I’m here. He wouldn’t dare come to Syd’s place, though, I know that. Not unless he’s developed some level of bravery or desperation he never had before.
    I tear the package open as I sit on Syd’s coffee table. There are perfectly comfortable furnishings all around me but before I had even realized what I was doing I had backed away from the front door as if it were booby-trapped, and plunked down with my parcel as soon as I felt the table bump the back of my knees. I am thinking I won’t sit on tables when he’s around, but he’s not, and I pull the book out of the cardboard wrapping.
    For crying out loud. He published it.
    It’s a copy of my father’s poetry book. I knew the poems existed, individually, and he was always talking about the collection. God, the poems. He was always threatening to find a publisher, to get the whole mess assembled and between covers and out there in the world where they could embarrass everybody.
    It embarrassed me every time he brought it up, but he hadn’t done that in a very long time. And anyway, it was always just a joke. He was always laughing when he made that threat. Always laughing then.
    The title of the collection is Mind Monkeys .
    I do not open the thing. I look at the cover, which is glossy banana yellow with no artwork. It just has the title, followed by A Cheeky Chapbook, by A. Chastened Chap. Since the spine and back cover list my name as the publisher, we will assume either a monumentally freakish coincidence or self-publishing.
    It’s actually rather nicely done. He invested.
    I drop it there on the coffee table and walk directly to my room in my home and pull on my clothes quickly. Then I go into my bathroom and brush my teeth. Then I march back, passing the living room, and its coffee table and its coffee-table book, without a look, swinging my key around my finger as I head out my door and into my life.
    I know them all, every syllable, the correct meter, the singsong, the stresses, pauses, inflections. If he thinks he can make me cry remotely now, he is misfiguring Kiki Vandeweghe.
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    Circling behind the house, I discover a space in the hedge at the back of the small yard. That space opens up onto a scrubby bit of overgrown wildflower land, which I fight through until I emerge onto the Little League diamond.
    It’s empty of kids, this field. I pause for a few seconds and think this is maybe one of those moments when I would get a little thoughtful and misty in light of all my changes and look back on my Little League days fondly or sadly or whatever.
    I never had any Little League days.
    I step across the field, and reach the chain-linked basketball court where one lone skinny gawky guy is shooting lazy baskets with no enthusiasm at all.
    I never played basketball.
    I move on, beyond the court and past the tennis court. I played some tennis. I liked it, way back then, when things were likeable. I might try it again sometime.
    I walk on through a small thicket of pines and onto the path that runs beside the river that turns out to be a canal and takes me where it is I am meant to go.
    Poetry, for shit’s sake. Where does he think he’s going with that?
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    The girls and I agreed that if I have to be so mysteriously below the radar then I could just try to catch