stepfather raze i killed him again. i was back in that house. my body was grown, but my mind was small and frightened. it looked like it was early in the morning. it felt like it was late at night. i never know what time it is when the light gets that way in a dream. his smile was so smug it made him supernatural. i told him i was going to call child protective services. "that doesn't scare me," he said. "i know what to say to them." i knew what he would do. he would play the long-suffering parent. he would lie and make it look like i was acting out to get attention, and whoever they sent to investigate would believe him. "then i'll hire someone to kill you," i said. "a hit man. for the right amount of money you can have anyone rubbed out." he laughed. then i was in the kitchen making myself lunch. i had the start of a sandwich on a small white plate. there were two pieces of bread on top of each other, with a thin layer of lunchmeat between them. my mother stood beside me. i cut the sandwich in half, but it wasn't a sandwich yet. it still needed cheese and mustard. i should have waited to make the cut. my stepfather walked over. he was still smiling. he squirted mustard all over the top of the incomplete sandwich. he ruined it. "that's supposed to go inside," i said. "not on top." he didn't say anything. he walked away. i walked over to the fridge and opened the door. i found two different kinds of packaged cheese in a blue crisper drawer. it was already sliced. one bag was cheddar. the other bag was swiss. i grabbed the swiss. my mother looked worried. "that's been in there for a few weeks," she said. "the taste is going to be pretty strong by now." "that's what i'm hoping for," i said. "i like it strong." i smiled at her. i carried the cheese to the kitchen counter. i could almost taste it. and then my hands were empty and i forgot all about eating. i stood with my back to the sink. i looked over my right shoulder. the counter and window_sill were improvised bookshelves covered with thick leather-bound composition books. they stood together and held themselves up. my whole life was in those books. i was terrified of my stepfather leafing through them and reading what i'd written about him. i didn't know which books were the dangerous ones. i grabbed one to see what was inside. high_school math homework. nothing personal. my stepfather came back into the kitchen. maybe he knew. maybe he could read my mind. i found a story i couldn't remember writing. it was a stack of stapled computer-printed pages. it looked like something i turned in for a high_school assignment. it was called "you can't ride a pigeon to the moon". the story was about a boy and a giant pigeon who was his best friend. on the front cover there was a drawing of the boy riding the pigeon like a horse. they were standing on the moon. they looked happy. my stepfather ripped the story out of my hands and read a bit of it out loud, mocking me. then he read something he wrote himself. he used the word "childs" twice. "it's children," i told him. "not childs." his smile curdled. he crumpled my story into a ball. he started tearing pages out of my books without reading them and throwing them on the floor, mutilating all the pieces of my life i'd saved. he was killing me. i found a hammer behind the sink. i hit him in the face as hard as i could. he fell on his back. i crouched down and hit him again. he wasn't a person anymore. his face wasn't a face. it was a brain, flattened out and unmoored. it looked like pieces of pink foam rubber stuck together, or soft styrofoam peanuts. i knew he was still alive. i kept smashing his brain until it broke apart. i felt the hard ceramic tiles of the kitchen floor punch my hand through the head of the hammer. my mother watched. part of the brain bounced to the left and became a frozen jumbo shrimp still in its shell. i thought if i kept pounding long enough maybe we'd have something good to eat for dinner later. 211107 ... raze he came to pick me up for the weekend once. seamus, the neurotic little coton de tulear i was sharing a house with, started barking at him as soon as he pulled into the driveway. when he got to the door he grinned at seamus and barked back. my dad has a great bark. he sounds like a real dog. a big one you'd hop a fence to get away from. my stepfather had a different kind of bark. he didn't try to sound like anything. i don't think he knew how. he just went, "woof! woof! woof!" seamus started whimpering and hid behind my legs. his face told me what he wanted to say. "this big bald dog is crazier than i am." 211113 ... raze when he shows up in my dreams now, he's almost always an ally or a neutral character. i'm not sure what i'm meant to make of that. the other night he gave me his socks to wear, these great thick grey blankets for my feet, and he offered to share his book of word games with me. he rubbed shoulders with politicians, but all he really wanted to do was sit in his basement in a shirt without sleeves, making his pretentious friends uncomfortable while watching his eldest daughter starve to death. 220408 what's it to you? who go blather from