The boy sat amongst the others in the audience, waiting. The brown-haired, freckle-faced girl next to him leaned over and said, “You’re so lucky to have him for your pa. Bet you wanna be just like him.” The son looked up at the mayor, his father, taking the stage, surrounded by applause. He was there to spread his speech amongst their little town. He wore a tie, like he did every day, suspenders, and his dirt-stained, white dress shoes. His father had grown up from the ground, the dirt, to become who he was.
“I worked so hard, I’d collapse next to the chicken coop under the open sky and everything. They’d peck at my hair to wake me, thinking I was one of them,” he’d say as the crowd laughed.
Taking his duties as mayor seriously, he would meet every new baby barely born, deliver food for the unfortunate, fix carburetors, help grandmothers cross the road. You could often spot him walking about the streets at night, illuminated by lantern light, looking at the ground as he walked with a uniform motion, even then he was willing to help.
He once fell down a flight of stairs and the entire town visited him in the hospital, making sure that he was okay, knowing that he was irreplaceable.
When the mayor’s wife died a year ago of breast cancer, all the women pulled together to bring food, lasagna, casseroles, and roasts to him. But when they knocked on the door, only the mayor’s son answered. The mayor was already back in his office, organizing a food drive of his own for the hungry.
The son spoke without looking at the girl, “Never.”
“What are you talking about?” the girl said.
“Just look at his forehead. See how it got no wrinkles?” The son wiped dirt from his nose. “I don’t want to be nothing like him.”
earned his MA in creative writing from CSU Sacramento in 2021. He spends most of his time writing fiction and poetry on top of dealing with the demands of his cat and two guinea pigs. His work has been previously published in Literally Voices.
