The Last Summer
Peter Markus
That was the summer his father worked the graveyard shift at Great Lakes Steel. Mornings he'd lay in bed, waiting, listening for the sound of his father's steel-toed boots to thud, then scuff in through the back door. His mother'd already be up by then, sitting in the kitchen, alone, sipping coffee sweetened with sugar, lightened by milk. He liked to stay in bed, halfway between waking and sleep, lullaby and silence: as if he was being sung to by this choir of voicesÑthe whispered hush of his mother, his father's gruff and mumbly, slurred with whiskey and heat.
One morning, though, his father did not come home with the rising of the sun; did not come home until after noon. And when he did come home, he was stumbling drunk, his knuckles swollen, his fists crusted with blood. "What happened?" his mother wanted to know. "What in the world?" But his father didn't answer; didn't say a word. And later that night, when it was time for him to go to work, his father went straight to bed. Without a word. And shut the bedroom door.
A short time after midnight though, in the lull-and-hush hour of sleep, he heard the screen door breathe open like a sigh. Or it could've been the sound of someone crying. So he got up out of bed and tiptoed over to his bedroom window. Outside, standing barefoot and shirtless in the streetlamp-lit back-of-the-yard, he saw his father, a gone-to-pots body mocked by its own shadow, head cocked back, staring up at the stars, dots on a dark and distant map: like a man stranded at the side of the road, too stubborn to ask for directions, to reach out and ask for help.
Tables of Content
Seventeen (Fall 2003)
Sixteen (Spring 2003)
Fifteen (Fall 2002) Fourteen (Spring 2002)
Thirteen
(Fall 2001) Twelve (Spring 2001)
Eleven (Fall 2000)
Ten (Spring 2000)
Nine (Fall 1999) Eight (Spring 1999)
Seven, (Fall 1998) Six, (Spring 1998)
Five (Fall 1997) Four (Winter/Spring 1997)