another excerpt

This was back when he still smoked cigarettes, and, calling forth the memory, it seemed such an indispensable prop that he knew he would either never have another moment of such naked sincerity, or, in the event that he did, he would desperately crave a cigarette. It was the distance between them, a cigarette; the smoke he tried in vain to blow away from his father. 

The neat rectangle of their back yard was blue in the moon shadow. A white puff of light streaked back and forth across the lawn. His father clapped his hands absently and called out to the dog.

He smoked casually and tried to hear his father’s words. But to look at your father’s aging face in the dusky light was to expose yourself to pangs of awful sincerity. In this moment, as the sun dipped out of view, and the little white ghost of a dog traced across the backyard, and a neighbor’s disembodied voice called out to his daughter, in this moment they were both too much inside their own heads, which was to say, asleep.