Dread comes in as my daddy slinks out the door. He sits at the table with me and my mom eating up all the long labored over resentments that have been stewing all day. With his belly full he settles in daddy’s beige and orange flowery lounge rocking chair. He lights up a fat cigar and knocks it on the side of the ashtray stand, ashes floating to the shag carpet. He turns on the tension pole floor lamps like he’ll be reading the TV Guide, but my mom yelling at me and pacing the livingroom-hall-diningroom-kitchen is a better show. He turns her tongue into a rasp and it grates and grates and he laughs and laughs, and in my mind I am going someplace else.

I am in my mom’s closet with her pretty skirts and dresses swaying above me and I am playing Barbie. We are dancing to Queen because we are the champions and I’m gonna make Ken do what we want. Ken’s gonna stay home on a Saturday night and dress in his best striped shirt, shave and comb his Beach Boys hair. He’ll grill up a nice steak for us, even cleaning up afterwards all the time staring lovingly at her with that vapid grin. Ken is shit in my hands, easily molded, smelly like all the boys and just as easily flushed if he’s not careful. If it doesn’t work out the way Barbie and I think it should, she’ll lash out while she goes all Taekwondo on him looking great in a pristine white dobok with her jet black belt. We’ll teach him a lesson, smarten him up, because she owns the camper bus and lives in her dream house.

Mary Anne Griffiths is a poet and fiction writer living in Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada. She shares space with a spouse, a tortie and tuxie and is presently working towards her debut collection of poetry and microfiction. Her work can be found in Dark Winter Lit Mag, Bright Flash Literary Review, Macrame Literary Journal, The Lothlorien and Your Sudden Flash.