Belle Saleté

As I find my daughter, clothed in an all-too-expensive yellow Easter dress, covered from head to toe in the mud that was previously filling a filthy ditch outside my mother's house in rural Kentucky, she looks up at me with her bright blue eyes, and says, "Life's a mess, daddy!"

It's 1964 and the street is covered in week-old snow that has been browned significantly from tires, which traipse around the dirt roads that scatter away from the city, between farm plots because the snow looks like earth-colored play-doh and never melts, due to the cold. Instead, it just shifts around, is remolded by force and contorted into the strangest of shapes.

I walk along a sunlit path. It follows the river which winds through town as yellow light reflects off its icy surface, painfully sluicing my optic nerves with radiation. It is then I see my friend walking along the other side of the river, just as young as I, but in the opposite direction. I don't stop to wave, or shout his name over the calm disturbances beneath the ice. I allow him to pass undisturbed.

The girl I have been seeing, not exactly my paramour, is pregnant. She will give birth, endow life upon my child. I am too shocked to know what to think, or feel. I suck down the warmth of a cigarette. It gives life to my despair, allows me to feel my confused contemplation.

Last week a man from my hometown was shot down in the alley behind a local bar, where I find myself behind the condensation of a whiskey glass nearly every time I return there alone and sullen. It's remarkable because I never would have taken him for a drunk, or a degenerate. Yet here I am, and where is he?

I kneel down next to her, wipe the dirt from her face, and say, "Yes it is sweetheart. Don't ever forget that." She looks back at me with more truth behind her conviction than even she knows. With annoyance scrunched across the bridge of her nose, she says, "I know dad. I taught you that."

I smile a painful smile. "Yes you did."