Trigger Warning (spoiler alert): LGBT – transphobia across generations, parental responsibilities and obligations, ditto those of a child, ruralism, change etc.

My dad wanted a girl and a boy, a straight then no a gay for some reason he never would explain, a mouse and a lion that man and all his mixed demands frustrating, wanting a kid who wore thin dress size 8 no 6 at first the child to be crowned ultimately the perennial stilted and bulbous queen every autumn of her high school years, and another child (me) all belted up in starched jeans from the husky department from age 4 on, arms like legs and ass built for a back field to bring home statewide honors four years in a row, to make a man proud make a man proud– Make the man a man? AT HOME:He had his ways, opinions grounded in some outdated or esoteric line of thought, someone else’s somethin’ wanton, wanting way of thoughtless thinking all of it, trope they might call his stuff these days. I stopped trying to figure out the man long before he drove me for my own driver’s permit test--—so very long ago, it felt unreal, the ol’-man’s touch upon my eager and li’l-boy’s life./“Enough, Dad, jeez,” my own fine boy said back to me, now the father, on the same route many, many years later./“Small talk the whole way there, no cell phones back then you see, no CDs or even much roadside litter, yeast-fresh cans, true-glass bottles standing in for made-up advertising, what with us living so far out from the county seat where the Highway Department was back then.”/I kept playing over I thought only in my mind, “Me? Oh, my parents wanted a high-arched shooter on the courts, a thick-chested catcher kneeling behind home plate with plenty of cushion after the knees gave out, no interest in soccer, knowledge of lacrosse nowheres around so long ago in this section. Sis? She gone, she had enough, too much this--”/         “Dude,”         my child shouted. /We were on the way for the kid’s driving permit./“You mean Dad,” I corrected, even from my outdated fog of history’s dream reliving generational desires for another perfected form, offspring ideal and hoped./“Whatevs, you lived a long dang time ago if y’all didn’t have soccer...or the internet....”/“Unlike my trip back then, ours today to the big-dollar renamed Department of Transportation lots different, just look: Old highway now two lanes each direction still not enough space for all the damn traffic and more and more and on and on all the changes in every sense, pollution, smug even here?

/“Smog, Dad. It’s smog, Dad.”/I couldn’t be the favorite or find them one in my own next generation of what the kid was wanting: she, he, or ze. I loved and I love, but I quit asking last week, that kinda quiet love of silence, which I’d learned from parents and grands-, all I could muster right then, and I still said my prayers for whatever be best for the kid and all us, Thy will..../Let the Highway Department person be the one, they prolly got better and updated training than me, no parenting manual issued to me, us, we are, I’m trying I’m trying, had my own issues, depending on year, called short fatty butch-femme heavy-handed limp-wristed girly manly ginger biddy baldy furball flatfoot or big- tiny ogre club cub bear lipless no-neck 1-eye or 4-. No pleasing any of them. Then or now, I reckoned./         “Passed.”          /My question had irritated my child./As if, as if. Who don’t pass such a silly test? The look on the child’s face, the second closing of the door, a slam to answer me. All said it all. Each action shouted. Which was fine. I had lost my real words whole days prior. Inability to communicate, to parent, to father. That lost long ago, so it came to feel, I wanted a passing grade myself.         For trying. /I knew that look of a teen. The precocious permit holder, always on to the next, wanted an ice cream as reward. New driver knew I was watching my weight, fearful of having that diabetes gene just like the kid’s Mom. With hard-earned summer funds, the child had gifted us genetic testing last Christmas. Future scientist and kind, that holiday with proof of truth long suspected, to better protect us in old age, from ourselves./“Sweet treat for me,” he said. “One won’t break ya. For Pops, an extra-small yogurt, free of sugar and absent of fat--”/“And gone with all flavor,” I interjected./“For you, yes, if you are nice, sir, a little perhaps, three sprinkles on top. Tiniest intention makes the tastiest difference, you know.”         I smiled at the wit and pointed to go at the wheel. First time official and on the busy road, floorin’ my rusty truck soon thought to be the new driver’s (the kid already had unofficially inherited the hand-me-down due to my own dealer upgrade last week), and the whole way home from the only creamery in town all I could taste? was ice cream, not yogurt of course, and my head ached in the mental sugars and from contemplating my genes and every choice of my own years. I felt sick later considering the cruel comparison and wanted to scratch at more than absent insulin underneath my skin, hoping some Truth in there could set me Free – free me from any other – Need? – at that moment or all the others.#

A RURAL NATIVE OF THE southeastern United States, R. P. Singletary writes fiction, poetry, drama, and hybrid, and also dabbles in other arts, including visual and moving image. My short monologue “MONO fe in gratitude” appeared Off-Broadway this past autumn as part of the Apron Strings project at AMT Theater in Hell’s Kitchen (NYC). Literary works in LITRO, Feign Lit, The Wave - Kelp Journal, Worktown Works (U.K.), en*gendered, The Collidescope, Rathalla Review, and elsewhere. Affiliations include Authors Guild, Atlanta Dramatists, and Dramatists Guild.